Steve’s Tech Log

I came across this blog:
http://meta.ath0.com/2003/11/04/my-top-ten-reasons-why-redhat-sucks/

While the author of this blog has some very valid points, some or outdated or unproven.

RPM. If you think RPM is a reasonable piece of software design, I can only assume you’ve never used Portage, APT or BSD ports. I still have to keep a “cheat sheet” of the bizarre invocations necessary to make RPM perform basic tasks. Then there’s the fact that you can’t just install an RPM; no, you need to find the right RPM for your specific version of RedHat, assuming one exists. And if that’s a pain for you, imagine what a pain it is for developers.

The author is right. RPMs are simply horrible to work with. There are some real show stopper bugs that RPM developers simply refuse to fix. Additionally, the Red Hat repositiories are far smaller than most free distros.

Shoddy workmanship. RPM was discovered to be broken in 2002; it would regularly corrupt its own databases and lock up in such a way that it couldn’t be killed. In spite of that, RedHat went and made two major releases with a broken RPM.

Here is another example of a MAJOR bug. The comments on the bug report are a real joy to read. As a result of the bug report, a developer was fired.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 10:33 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.