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Progeny Ports Red Hat's Anaconda To Debian
JoeBuck writes "According to
this message from Ian Murdock on the Debian developer's mailing list, the
Progeny folks
have ported Red Hat's Anaconda installer to Debian.
They have also written a tool that "facilitates the creation of Anaconda-based Debian installation CD sets". They are also engaged in other interesting unification work, and hope to be able to allow collections of managed RPM and .deb packages to coexist side-by-side."
uberkludge points out an article with more details at Ars Technica.
... and hope to be able to allow collections of managed RPM and .deb packages to coexist side-by-side ...
I hope that all other distro creators work towards this too, so many packaging formats just confuse new Linux users, and make it even more difficult for Linux to take part in the desktop world.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
This is certainly a good thing for corporations adopting Debian... especially since Redhat now has it's 1 year End Of Life policy for it's desktop products. I've always found Debian's release policy FAR more stable than almost any other distro out there, and stability is probably the main focus of most companies (far more than the latest wizz-bang features).
Hopefully this will see more corporations adopting Debian, Linux, and will result in a more unified installation process.
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However, I think the main obstacle that prevent Debian from being more widely accepted is the fact that the debian folks are very reluctant to package "wizards" and automatic configuration scripts in the distribution.
Of course, there is debconf, but its invocation is rather tricky for non Debian-savy users.
Debian's had a decent installer for years (through PGI or Knoppix). They're not the official installers (and Anaconda won't be either), but the option has always been there.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Now I'm not usually one to protect users from computers and in particular linux, but when it comes to the computer illiterate (is that spelled right :P ). I usually try and steer them towards one of the safer distros like RedHat or Mandrake, its not because I prefer either of those two for working on, its simply that debian besides being difficult to successfully install (though not as confusing as OpenBSD), features enough different packages to make anyone a little lost.
It has quite frankly always been the "power users" Linux. And some of those whould be repulsed at the thought of changing that. Some of my friends suggested that the reason debian was so good was that it only attracted the real geeks, i.e. those that could contribute and make it stronger.
In the end though what are computer for if not to make the live of both computer literate and illiterate easier. While it may anger some, the masses finally having access to Debian's enormous repository of packages, amoung other benefits, will be a good step forward. And a change that move Linux closer to eroding the market strangle hold that Microsoft Possesses.
If alien truly did work well, this story wouldn't be big news. What they're talking about is potentially allowing rpms and .debs to coexist on the same system. Obviously, given the differences between the two package formats, that is a difficult task.
Right now, it's easy to just convert .debs to .rpms and vice versa, via alien. But you dont see anyone (practically) taking the entire debian/unstable repository and converting them to RPMs, do you? No, because the two package types don't work well together. They have totally different configuration frameworks, and as of now, don't coexist well at all. Hell, you can even install Redhat's package manager onto a debian system and start installing rpms to your heart's content, but that's generally Not a Good Idea.
So for the short term, unless debian's and redhat's project leaders really sit down and discuss what their goals are in this situation, all I see is a very unstable package management system.
And I wouldn't hold my breath, either. It took the debian package maintainers over a month to just put gnome2.4 into sid. Think of how long it would take those same people to encapsulate an entire distrobution's worth of packages (or at least the technology to do so) into their mainline repository.
$ make love
make: don't know how to make love. Stop
It helps to realize that the debian installer has been developed to work with all of Debian's supported architectures (currently 10 - i386, m68k, sparc, alpha, powerpc, arm, mips, hppa, ia64, and s390). Such an installer has to sacrifice some beauty and convenience for flexibility and power, and those of us who only compare debian's i386 installation to that of RedHat's or Suse's need to realize this. That all said, because of the overwhelming majority of debian users who only use i386 machines, it sure makes sense to me that it would be beneficial to develop a fancy i386-only installer to satisfy the masses. There are plenty of other debian-based distros who have done just that (with varying success). Perhaps this anaconda port is the beginning of just such a project.
And exactly WHAT businesses do you recommend operating system software to? The business your dad runs?
What do you consider so wrong with RPM? Dependencies? Use apt-rpm, yum, or even redhat's own up2date. Have you even looked at redhat in the last 2 years?
For most businesses, debian is NOT an option. They want a company pushing the product. They want a solution...not just an operating system. They want tech support. They want to know somewhere there is a boardroom with a bunch of guys making decisions. Like it or not, those are the type of things businesses look for.