Oh Boy....

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2005 at 07:41:39PM +0200, Christoph Wegscheider wrote:

> No, if we are talking of the usual desktop user who have no experience
> with Linux and/or programming, but just wants to get work done. This group
> of users (which are one typical target group of ubuntu as I understand)
> just search the net for a deb of a program which is not in the repos. 
> 
> One of the biggest advantage of deb over rpm so far was, that all debs was
> created for debian and worked on it and any derived distribution.  Maybe
> you never experienced the 'rpm hell' on your own so you can't value that
> fact. 
> 
> As it seems now, the deb pool becomes divided into a compatible to debian
> and a compatible to ubuntu part, this is a great danger as it might be the
> beginning of a deb hell. 

The reason why Debian packages don't share the same problem isn't that
they're meant to be universal.  It's that when you run Debian, you can get
high-quality packages for most everything directly from Debian.  Because you
don't need to search out a third-party package, you don't need to worry
about whether it's compatible with Debian.

Likewise for Ubuntu, which also has a vast repository of software which is
compatible with Ubuntu.  By and large, Debian and Ubuntu packages are
compatible (certainly at the source code level, and often binary packages as
well), but why would a user want to expose themselves to unnecessary
headache by mixing Debian and Ubuntu packages, rather than using the
software provided with their distribution?

-- 
 - mdz