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Progeny Ports Red Hat's Anaconda To Debian

Posted by timothy on from the apt-get-wins dept.

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.

2 of 199 comments (clear)

  1. So... by jav1231 · · Score: 0, Troll

    Debian finally overcomes a huge obstacle for mass acceptance: a decent installer!

  2. This is a welcome development by ZuperDee · · Score: 1, Troll

    Well folks, I don't know about you, but I think this is a welcome development. I have been using Red Hat for a LONG time now (>5 years), and at one point, I decided to give Debian a try, after hearing how it was supposed to be the REAL "power users" distro. Well, Debian's installer truly is horrible. Not only is it inflexible and difficult to use from the end-users' standpoint, but I understand that MOST OF ALL, it is even difficult for the Debian developers to work with.

    Personally, I think an Anaconda-based Debian installer could be a *HUGE* boom, for 3 reasons:

    1) It would make Debian easier to install. In my opinion, "ease of use" != "less powerful." Even developers and power users can benefit, in my opinion, by having things be difficult just for the sake of difficulty.

    2) Having a distribution-neutral Anaconda would be a huge boom for the Linux community, and potentially for strengthening the LSB.

    3) I'm not so sure I like the idea of having .debs and .rpms together on all Linux systems, but I think it would be nice to see some of the best features of each packaging system melded together--maybe calling the result "dpm." (lol) Seriously; RPM has some nice features (like its TOTAL automation), and DPKG also has some nice features (like OR'd dependencies. I like the idea of that much better than RPM's file dependencies).

    We all know there are plenty of dependency resolvers like APT and YUM and UP2DATE, etc.; I think these should ultimately be melded together, too. Why do we need 2 different package formats, and 3 different dependency resolvers/updaters?