What should we do with a drunken salesman?

[Damien Elmes]

Matthew Hawkins <matthew at topic.com.au> writes:

> > The Debian Policy is available at:
> > 
> > http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/
> 
> You've hit your head on the nail.
> 
> Also, packages in debian have a maintainer who is responsible for making
> sure that package a) conforms to policy b) works on all architectures
> supported by Debian and c) contains as few bugs as possible.
> 
> Redhat have no such QA whatsoever.  They have no policy.  They've got
> lots of used car salesmen and a small collection of kernel hackers.
> This is why their distributions are broken, full of security holes, have
> lots of non-interoperable packages and they don't care because you've
> already forked out your money for it (directly or indirectly) and their
> shareholders are happy.

while i realise there was probably an element of jest to what you were
saying, i have to disagree. i've never liked redhat as a distribution
(except back when i started; it had "colour ls" by default, and i
didn't know how to fix it in debian. this was about 5 years ago :-)

i just finished reading about the work redhat have been doing with
ext3. they may make a particularly awful, corporate oriented
distribution (colourful "[ OK ]" buttons took someone's time away from
something more important - but then that's always the case with 
consumer-oriented things). but i'd fall short of painting them as a
shareholder-driven corporation. they do good things for linux as a
whole.

disclaimer: i'm a debian man :-)

cheers!

-- 
Damien Elmes
resolve at repose.cx