RE: tlug: X resolution / color depth

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Scott" == Scott Stone <sstone@example.com> writes:

    >> > Everybody likes consistency.  And of course, I'd like to see
    >> > them all adopt RPM.  Not holding my breath on Slackware :-)

    >> What`s so good about RPM. I hate it.

    Scott> That's like saying that you hate cars and then taking a
    Scott> horse and buggy on the freeway (happens in PA sometimes...)

No, it's completely different; you can use the Debian package manager,
dpkg.

I haven't looked at the internals of an RPM recently, but in cases
where I wanted to alter a package I found it rather difficult as a
casual user, since Red Hat spec files are written in a special
language.  Rather than bone up on it, I hosed my RHL installation by
installing several packages (in particular X11R6.3 on Sparc) over the
RH versions.  ("Hosed" means I have no hope that RH will be able to do 
anything sensible when the Sparc Linux distribution finally gets
upgraded; I'll have to reinstall from scratch.  However it's working
fine, thank you.)

Debian on the other hand uses shell and Perl scripts.  Not that
they're necessarily easier, but the skills are more widespread.

I've also found the quality of Debian contribs to be generally higher
than RPMs, possibly because Debian makes a big deal of the "Debian
Policy," and leaves the documentation in an accessible place
(/usr/doc/debian* - the * can be a pain in the butt, sometimes.)  This
may also be true for Red Hat, I just didn't find it myself.

Finally, my experience with Red Hat is old, but at that time I found
that Debian did package dependencies and installation status better
than Red Hat.

I will say that Glint is slicker than dselect.  Too much so; on the
Sparc it's slow enough that "rpm -i `ls $RedHat/RPMS | fgrep $key`" is 
"user-friendly."  I also found descending through several trees of
package hierarchy to find what I wanted when Red Hat and I disagreed
on the natural section for a package to be a pain in the butt.

---------------------------------------------------------------
Next TLUG Meeting: 11 April Sat, Tokyo Station Yaesu gate 12:30
Featuring Tague Griffith of Netscape i18n talking on source code
---------------------------------------------------------------
a word from the sponsor:
TWICS - Japan's First Public-Access Internet System
www.twics.com  info@example.com  Tel:03-3351-5977  Fax:03-3353-6096