[techtalk] Re: Linux-Mandrake

[James Sutherland]

On Thu, 24 May 2001 Martin.Caitlyn at epamail.epa.gov wrote:
> Hi, James,
>
> > Yep: I tried Mandrake just over a year ago, and fell in love with it.
> > SOOOO much more "refined" than RedHat, I thought. Then it disabled my
> > system. Oops. How? Well, **EVERY** binary on a Mandrake system is a Perl
> > script (well, almost every one - including vi!) That's fine, until
> > MandrakeUpdate decides to break perl. At which point, you can't log on to
> > X, you can't use vi... Oops. Break out the RedHat CDs...
>
> Kind of a blistering condemnation, don't you think?  IMHO, it's also
> probably unjustified.  No, I am not saying it didn't happen.  What I am
> saying is that I have run Mandrake 7.0, 7.2, and 8.0 problem free for at
> least a year now, and that included running Mandrake update regularly,
> including upgrading Perl.  My question would be:  which version, which
> update?

8.0, updated a few days ago. I'm not blaming Mandrake for breaking Perl in
an update - Debian managed to break sendmail not too long ago, as Michelle
found; every distro breaks things occasionally. What I *AM* ditching
Mandrake for is replacing things like "vi" and "gcc" with stupid Perl
scripts which attempt to colour in the output, and break things in the
process!

> If I condemned a distro for every really bad bug they released, I'd be out
> of distros by now.  Besides, would you like me to detail the bugs in Red
> Hat 6.1 and 7.0?
>
> RH 7.1 is a very nice release with just a few gotchas (which are well
> documented, BTW).  For those who prefer Red Hat you cannot go wrong with
> it.  It's just that Mandrake 8 is soooo much nicer.

Nicer, I'll agree, but I'm not sure I can ever forgive them those stupid
Perl wrappers round everything... When I run "gcc", I want to be running
the GNU C Compiler, not some sort of colouring-in-script wrapped round it!


James.