[TriLUG] redhat-config-network question

[Chris Hedemark]

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Tanner, I agreed with everything you said up to this point:

On Wednesday, February 26, 2003, at 01:17 PM, Tanner Lovelace wrote:

> Kevin, I'm not picking on you, so please don't think that, but I have
> to wonder about why redhat (and mandrake too, for that matter) had
> to go off and write their own tool to resolve dependencies.

Why do we have KDE and Gnome?  Why not just one good desktop?

Choice is a good thing.  Red Hat users have at least two good choices.  
apt-rpm is probably better for some environments, up2date/rhn for 
others.

For example, with up2date/rhn I can set up groupings of servers inside 
of a web interface, and apply errata or install new packages on entire 
groups of servers at once (and even schedule the updates to happen at 
night if I want).  apt-rpm doesn't provide a good way to do this, and 
rhn is actually pretty good at this.

But rhn/up2date are redhat specific.  I can't manage my Solaris boxen, 
Mandrake, OpenBSD, etc.  Even though the client might be GPL'ed, the 
tool itself is in effect proprietary in that it does me no good 
whatsoever on any other flavor of Linux let alone other UNIX OS's.  Of 
course that would threaten RH's business model so I don't expect that 
they will ever fix that (and I don't blame them for doing it that way 
to be honest).  I think ultimately the community needs to solve this 
problem.

Also, something that has been on my mind a lot lately, while I think 
the GPL is an appropriate license for much of Linux, I think a BSD 
licensed package manager would be optimal so that all flavors of UNIX 
and Linux could have the freedom to benefit from such a tool.  Even 
some of the big proprietary OS's like OS X or Solaris would be free to 
pick it up under such a license.  And nothing would prevent Linux 
distros from using BSD licensed package management.

But GPL package management won't be accepted outside of the Linux 
world.  :-(

As someone who manages a multi platform data center, I'd love to be 
able to have an overview of all of my systems (not just Linux), see the 
patches available for all of the servers, etc.

Chris Hedemark
PGP/GnuPG Public Key at http://yonderway.com/chris/hedemark.gpg
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