____/ larry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx on Saturday 30 June 2007 17:19 : \____
> Having used distros a lot in the past few years I know what Debian had
> going for it at the time ubuntu adopted it that others didn't and that
> was it's package management system. Prior to debian the most popular
> system was RPM (Redhat Package Manager) which at the time was great at
> determining that the proper dependencies were in the system before
> installation, but did nothing to resolve the issues except reporting
> about it (and thus came the phrase 'dependency hell' as you had to do
> install after install of sometimes a never ending path of
> interdependent modules).
>
> Debian's system has a more robust package manager which identified the
> dependencies and then searched out and selected the required packages
> so they could satisfy the installation.
>
> Now there are advancements to the RPM which solve those issues, but
> Debian got it right early.
>
> The other factor is that Red Hat and SuSe were commercial distros
> (which include some proprietary bits) and I believe Ubuntu was
> intended to always be free (as the initial development of Ubuntu was
> for South African schools).
>
> Gentoo - Isn't that the one that compiles all the modules from source
> on installation? If so that makes it a bit more cumbersome to install.
Gentoo has some nice front ends that handle all of this. Provided this gets
tested properly, it can be just as reliable as repos, just slower. Sabayon
introduced a new front end to Portage, IIRC. It was called Entropy or
something, but it might be prone to quirks because the distro is maintained by
a very small team.
--
~~ Best of wishes
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