[techtalk] Re: Linux-Mandrake

[Michelle Murrain]

On Thursday 24 May 2001 02:09 pm, James Sutherland wrote:
> 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!

Well, in defense of Debian, I was using "testing" and not stable. I've never 
had an upgrade of stable break anything. Those Debian folks are hard-assed 
about stability, which is a good thing. 

I had NO IDEA that Mandrake replaced binaries with perl wrappers. (I feel 
like hitting myself in the head, I'm a perl coder!) I run Debian on all of my 
servers, but have been working with Mandrake on my laptop for months. It's 
been OK, although I HATE rpms, in general (I'd certainly rather apt-get, but 
even compiling from source is often better than using RPMs). I did have a 
wierd perl problem recently, and all sorts of other things started to go 
wierd - now I know why. 

OK, well I now know it's time to take the plunge and put debian on my laptop. 
I think I'll try Progeny.

Michelle
------------
Michelle Murrain, Ph.D.
President
Norwottuck Technology Resources
mpm at norwottuck.com
http://www.norwottuck.com