[techtalk] *nix comparisons?

[Dan Nguyen]

On Sun, Jul 16, 2000 at 11:53:49PM -0700, curious wrote:
> members of the debian family are "at the core" based on debian... ie the
> libraries and rc scripts will typicaly be the same and in the same
> places.. this typicaly means that packages between distributions
> can be used interchangeably..further debian maintains very strict
> adhearance to the standard FSH, file system heirarchy.. which means ALL
> your system config will be somewhere under etc.. ALL your logs will be
> somewhere under var/log and so forth thus is quite diffrent the redhat
> line which occasionaly vears off to do it's own thing..

Package interchangeability only really exists between the same
Debian version release.  So packages from the Slink based Storm and
Corel distributions will work with Debian Slink.  The biggest thing to
remeber is that the package dependencies are there for a reason.
Installing packages from Debian Potato will most likely give a long
lists of unmet depencencies, and some internal Debian configurations
change severely between Debian releases.  Debian's centralized
distribution of their packages also eliminates the sometimes ad hoc
style of RPMs, and searching for packages.  RPMFind really helps, but
it's still not as eligant as apt-get for Debian.

-- 
     Dan Nguyen     |  It is with true love as it is with ghosts;
  nguyend7 at msu.edu  |  everyone talks of it, but few have seen it.
   dnn at debian.org   |                 -Maxime De La Rochefoucauld