This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
Date: Wed, 25 Oct 2000 12:21:27 -0700 (PDT) From: Rafael <raffi@linwin.com> To: Karen Shaeffer <shaeffer@best.com> Subject: Re: [svlug] gui lilo..? On Tue, 24 Oct 2000, Karen Shaeffer wrote: > On Mon, Oct 23, 2000 at 11:41:07PM -0700, Rafael wrote: > > On Sat, 21 Oct 2000, Alex Feinberg wrote: > > them. When You can prove me that you can install "server" under RH6.2 I'll > > change my mind but till then I can demonstrate otherwise. When I select > > "server" under Solaris the system becomes a server, and not a bunch of > > broken dependencies which crash under RedHat installation itself in most > > cases. As a matter of fact RH crashes with blue screen if you select wrong > > combination of individual packages. Happened 3 minutes ago on a new 800 > > MHz machine. > > Hahaha. I have come to the conclusion that the best approach to Red Hat is > to just let it install all it's *dependencies* during an initial install-- > then it is easy to remove all the junk. You really can't do a sane install > with the Red Hat installer... Hahaha. > At least I can't... Yes, that's so annoying. You need to get all the junk in there, spend hours to figure out what you really need, and dump the rest not being sure what will show up as broken later. I never managed to install their 'server'. It always bombed or something was missing like network info. You install 'server' and the script doesn't ask for network info! Another huge RedHat annoyance is their /etc/sysconfig including scripts that use it. I know I mentioned this before but it's such a crappy f*** mess it's hard to believe and I hate it! Scripts calling each other, sourcing other files, some variables use quotes others don't, poor or no comments, naming makes little or no sense, directory structure is a mess. Simply, they don't follow FHS guidelines. Why don't they use a similar structure for /networking as it is in /etc/rc.d? Why is /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit (the mama script) sourcing /etc/sysconfig/network to set /etc/HOSTNAME file??? There are other crazy things like that. It's hard to follow all the scripts when functions are in one place, vars in many places, and scripts are cryptic. They could easily break it down into functionality units so that commenting out a single line (reference to a specific script) would dissable a particular computer function or process. For example, I don't need Raid stuff and many other things on my laptop, yet the rc script looks for files related to it. Another one, setup the system clock. It's asking for DEC Alpha specific flags, i.e. platform specific test. Wasn't there a recent argument about bloated systems/OS? We are dealing with bloated boot process/scripts here. I don't expect the simplicity of CONFIG.SYS but a bit cleaner setup that newbie can understand and follow. Yes, I can change it for myself I know. The trouble is going out to work on other machines and deal with it. IS Debian any better in this respect? I know Solaris is (comment to annoy those who hate it :-) Other Unix comes to mind with more order in this department. RH seem to became a bit arrogant with their products and I'll be shifting to other more sysadmin friendly distributions anywhere I can regardless of corporate bias. Got tired of buying the same "old stuff" with little improvements. ===