[TriLUG] redhat-config-network question

[Chris Hedemark]

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On Wednesday, February 26, 2003, at 02:22 PM, Tanner Lovelace wrote:

> Okay, good point.  I guess I just get a little bothered by the "not
> invented here, so it *must* be crap" attitude that I see in certain
> places (including both redhat and mandrake at times, along with
> many other places too).

Oh, absolutely.

IMHO the vanity of the distros tends to prevent their stuff from being 
more widely used.

For example, the very name RPM is an acronym for REDHAT Package 
Manager.  Might it look tacky for another distro to use something that 
is so prominently Red Hat in nature?  Mandrake has had a hard time 
shaking its reputation for being a modded Red Hat distro and not enough 
props for its own innovations.

Debian's .deb packages are just as bad.  And I expected more from them 
because they don't have to answer to shareholders.

> Hmm... I was not aware of that functionality.  Ok, so that's pretty
> cool.  But there's nothing saying that someone can't write a front
> end to any other package manager to do the same thing...  :-)

Welllll... part of the functionality depends on your system 
configuration being uploaded to a central server, so there is more to 
it than just building the server end (believe me I've thought of that 
already)

And yes, it is very cool.  I will give kudos to Red Hat for that.

> Yep.  I've been thinking about what it would take to put together a
> distribution that's run by a community, similar to Debian, but is
> based on RPM instead of .debs.  Unfortunately, that space is quite
> crowded with for-profit companies, so I think it would be hard to
> get off the ground.  I think the Mandrake Club, however, comes the
> closest to what I've envisioned.

I thought it would be neat to just have a platform-agnostic package 
management system, with channel subscriptions to provide binary 
packages for specific platforms/architectures.  Have platform-moms that 
are volunteers (in the case of the community distros) or company reps 
(in the case of corporate distros), third party channels, the ability 
to have site level proxies, etc.  (and the point that would be debated 
by many of course is how to license it)  If this were a Linux-only or 
Gnu-only tool its usefulness would be severely reduced.

For example, why can't I manage my Red Hat machines from the same 
interface as my Aurora machines?  Red Hat and Aurora are about as close 
as any two distros can be without actually being the same distro.  I 
understand that Red Hat has business motivations, and my motivations 
are more along the lines of homogeneous management capabilities.

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