Re: [chat] What Linux can learn from Apple growers

[Del <del@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

invisible ink wrote:

> SLUG is *not* an elitist Debian club.

Yes it is.

It isn't the same club I joined 5+ years ago.  It isn't a bunch of people
helping other people to use Linux any more.  It's a bunch of people who
want to score points against each other.

The question was asked about how to avoid conflicts between a simple GUI
configuration tool and editing the BIND configuration file.

It wasn't a question specific to RedHat and it wasn't a question specific
to any distribution.  The stupid answer given, as has been given so bloody
many times in the past was "don't use redhat".  This was of course going
to be followed up with some pro-debian nonsense.

The user concerned wasn't going to be helped a lot by that.  The user
concerned was going to be made even more frustrated by having to rebuild
their entire machine into a more difficult, more cumbersome, and less
intuitive Debian distribution only to find that (a) the same configuration
tool in question plus several others like it (webmin, linuxconf) happen
to live on Debian and other distributions as well so the same problem
would still exist, and (b) Debian still runs named without a chroot
jail and runs it as root which is completely lame if you want my
opinion (and I have one).

So after asking a question like "how do I stop alchemist rewriting my
named.conf file", the simple answer to which would have been "rpm -e alchemist",
the far more complex and significantly stupider answer "change your
distribution from RedHat to debian" was given.  The answer wasn't
given because it was a good answer, it was given simply because the
person who gave it wants to join in the current distribution bashing
conversation.

Think when you do this.  It scares people away from Linux and it
scares people away from SLUG.

>   Many of the very active, knowledgable members of the list happen to use
>   Debian these days.

This is because the rest of us are sick and tired of the lot of ya.

> Heaps of the stuff that applies to SuSE will apply to Slackware. Red Hat to
> Debian. Conectiva to Mandrake. Firewalling, FreeS/WAN, BIND, Apache, we talk
> about all of these things; they're all Free Software, and they all run on
> Linux.

OK, so why complicate a simple question about named into a distribution
game, when you know darn well the same problems are going to hit a
novice Debian or Slackware or SuSE user just as hard as a novice RedHat
user?

--
Del