Stampede (was Re: Suse Disks)

[Jeff Licquia <jeff@luci.org>]

On Wed, 2 Sep 1998, Cloudmaster wrote:

> > That will leave SuSE, Slackware, and the various minor distros left on
> > libc5.
> 
> Well, I gues you could call stampede the glibc slackware... :)
> 
> --Danny, who knows from slashdot how many luci members feel about stampede

Heh.  Rant mode on!

While I've flamed Stampede before (yes, on Slashdot), it really doesn't
piss me off as bad as, say, the LSA mess.  I'm actually surprised that
more people haven't come up with a pgcc-optimized distro, although I was
expecting more of a "Red Hat for Pentiums" and such.

My problems with Stampede arise from a few things:

 - New packaging system.  RPM vs. deb is bad enough.  And SLP's only
"advantage" is that you can (supposedly) work on SLP packages with normal
tools without modification.  Considering how simple it is to change RPM
packages into cpio.gz files (ask Steve for his Perl script to do that),
that's a red herring IMHO.
 - BSD initscripts.  They flame SysV initscripts as being too complicated,
but they don't mention how complicated it is to have packages edit shell
scripts for you to get daemons to run on startup.  Plus, this hurts the
LSB effort; most other distros use SysV, and do it similarly enough that a
package could be built that does "the right thing" on multiple distros.
That won't work with Stampede, though.  Imagine trying to write a package
installer that worked on both Stampede and Slackware!

OTOH, I've defended Stampede on two fronts: the trademark issue (some
clueless group uses a horse logo, and is claiming that all horse logos
infringe), and when LSA stooge Mike McLagan started flaming Gabe Ricard, a
major Stampede developer.  Although I think they're misguided, I wish them
well and all that.  Hey, I might even be wrong!  (nah, probably not :-)

Don't know why I decided to rant, but there ya go.


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