Patrick Volkerding Interviewed by The Age

boa13 writes "The Age, a major newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, has published an interview with Patrick Volkerding, The Man behind Slackware. Covered are the early history of Slackware, its business model, its current state, Patrick's plans for the future and his opinion about the commercialisation of Linux. "

Comments

Re:Slack's great, but package management?

[schon]

Red Hat and SuSE have had the excellent RPM system for a decade now, while Debian's apt-rpm system is equally impressive.

And all of them lose, hands down, when compared to Slackware's package management.

Slackware's package management (and yes, it IS package management) conforms to the principles on which Unix is based.

Instead of one (nonstandard, multifunction) tool, Slackware uses standard command line tools, such as grep, ls, and cat. These are commands that every sysadmin already knows. The package database is a list of plain text files, not a binary mishmash (I've seen Redhat people bitch about the Windows registry, and how plain text files in /etc/ are much easier to deal with, but they miss the point that they're married to the exact same concept with the RPM database.)

Ever had the RPM database become corrupt on a Redhat box?

How about if the RPM command itself gets hosed?

If you have, you'll appreciate the simplicity of Slack's system. If not, pray that you never do.