Interview w/Slackware Developer David Cantrell

keskoy writes: "David Cantrell is a core team member for the Slackware ^[?] Linux Project. In this interview you will learn how David got his start working on Slackware linux, what his role as a Slackware developer is, he will explain to us about his two new applications protopkg and autoslack, plus other various topics of interest are touched on."

Comments

What would the "combination" be?

[Christopher B. Brown]

• Perhaps the "best feature" of Red Hat is their tendancy to aggressively pursue the most bleeding edge experimental stuff out there, whether that be ELF, GLIBC2.0, GNOME, or GCC 2.96...
• SuSE's "best feature" is that they have built vast quantities of RPM packages for all sorts of stuff, with considerable numbers of "engineering hours" tweaking the packages.

  Note that these tweaks are to make the packages work with the SuSE "layout," and may not work with other distributions...

• Debian's "best" features are three, namely that they have built vast quantities of DEB packages, with a huge group of package managers (that are people) that tweak those packages, that they have built tools to validate those DEB package to ensure conformance with their standards, and, thirdly, that they have a sophisticated package dependancy manager, APT, which will automatically install the dependancies called for by what you want to install.

  The stable release, as typically released on CDs, takes the conservative approach of only releasing what they know already works well.

• Slackware takes the approach of requiring that packages be managed as "tarballs," with somewhat more limited dependancy checking, and with the expectation that you, the sysadmin, will be installing and configuring the services that you want, as opposed to GUIing it all.

Note that none of this has anything to do with licenses, only with the respective design choices. And some of those choices are downright incompatible.

I would argue that the notion of the "best uberdistribution" is a contradiction in terms and thus an inherent impossibility.

As for the "licensing thing," one part of constructing a distribution is indeed in assessing the respective licenses of the components and how that fits with what you plan to release. If you can't cope with the legalities there, you're probably not legally prepared to release any kind of collection of this sort of thing...

Slackware packages

[Jeppe Salvesen]

If you are a control-freak, Slackware is definitely the way to go. The administration tools are kept to a minimum. If you want to make things fancy, you need to set that up yourself. The result is that you slowly move towards gurudom.

However, if you are making money, slackware packages are fairly primitive. To the best of my knowledge, they don't support dependencies. You don't have a neat dselect type app. But you have the direct power. And that is the price of power - efficiency. I used to compile all my stuff on slackware. However, I must admit that I love apt-get and dselect. It has cut my workload severely.

That being said, I still use slackware on my production server. But my workstation is a debian woody.

Doppelganger

[babbage]

Every time I see this name, I assume people are talking about British Perl Monger David Cantrell, instead of American Linux Hacker David Cantrell. Obviously the open source world needs better naming conventions... :)