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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> But if anyone was around then, you'd probably remember that RedHat was one of the worse distros of linux at the time.

There's no better microcosm of the early Linux world than this. "Yeah, that giant market-driving lawsuit was bad, I was there too and suffered along with the rest of you. But that's not the important thing: let me tell you about how bad RPM is compared to DPKG! Did you know the underlying archive format was cpio? CPIO!"

That's not intended to be too much of a barb (I was a Debian nut too, FWIW), but really, all that stuff seems pretty silly in hindsight.

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> Did you know the underlying archive format was cpio? CPIO!

And what's wrong with that? deb's underlying format is ar, which is basically the same class of simple archives that cpio is.

It solves the problem with two nice benefits:

1. You're not reinventing an archive format, the existing ones are perfectly adequate.

2. If your system is borked enough that you don't even have a working package manager, you can manually extract your package manager from a package file with nothing more than the cpio or ar programs.

> me tell you about how bad RPM is compared to DPKG!

I'm pretty sure the person you're replying to was taking about the distro as a whole, not the package file format

Yes, but the arguments of that era always seemed to revolve around minutiae like the package manager, or default filesysem, or choice of default desktop.

Nah, RH was very much it's own little world. Many of us were forced to use it because they offered a package (indemnification, support) that appealed to the bean counters and lawyers. For a few years they patched _everything_ that mattered (compilers, kernel, core libraries) to a massive extent in an attempt to differentiate and to give the appearence of adding value. I don't have fond memories.

You're being dismissive of issues that were far bigger than you make them look.

>like the package manager

It wasn't about, for example, dpkg vs rpm, but apt-get versus.. nothing, because Red Hat had nothing to solve dependencies. Installing software on Red Hat was a truly hellish experience.

>default filesysem

I have never in my life seen people dismiss a distro because of a default filesystem. I question whether you've truly experienced the early days of Red Hat.

They shipped broken development snapshots of GCC that led to serious compatibility issues :

https://linux.slashdot.org/story/00/10/07/0027218/gccs-respo...

They employed one of the most abrasive and divisive personality to helm the development of the libc :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2380062

They were one of the most barebones distro in terms of tooling to configure and manage them. Debian was more fully featured on the terminal tooling front, while Mandrake and SUSE had a lot of GUI wizards for people more used to the Windows ways.

Even much later in the Fedora days, when Kernel developer Alanx Cox questions the sanity of releasing a completely broken distro (version 18 of Fedora) this is what they had to answer :

>So yeah: in case you didn't get the memo, F18 has a new installer and a new upgrade tool. They are both v1.0s. As in the case of all v1.0s, you may want to exercise some frickin' caution. If you want a Fedora release whose installer and upgrade tools were stabilized over a period of several years and 20+ releases, Fedora 17 is right in the torrent list

Uh, like.. okay? but maybe don't release it, until, you know, it's not garbage?

And then there's the whole thing with what Red Had did to take over the whole userland desktop stack with systemd, logind, dbus, pulseaudio, wayland.. all of which caused more issues than they ever solved. You still can't make software like autohotkey on wayland. All those pieces of software are heavily interconnected with each other making it less and less tenable to maintain a distro that doesn't package them.

There are many, many reasons to be soured with what Red Hat contributed to linux.

> You're being dismissive of issues that were far bigger than you make them look.

You whooshed on the humor above, so I should spell it out. The point is exactly the opposite. This focus on tribal distro warfare obscures the objectively much more important threat posed by this lawsuit to the entire ecosystem.

I mean, no, you're simply wrong. SCO was a far, far, far larger threat to the Linux world than the fact that Red Hat inexplicably dragged their feet shipping yum on their enterprise distro.

And it's important, as a matter of history, to remember that period and the players and the resulting and continuing effects on our culture. While on the flip side, no one cares (or rather: no one should care) about the lessons of apt vs. yum, all of which have been recapitulated a thousand times since. Let it go.

> It wasn't about, for example, dpkg vs rpm

No, it totally was. APT vs. nothing was a big deal, but RPM per se had a lot of mistakes. Debian also had massively better standard tooling around conffiles, diversions, alternatives, etc. They also had publicly-published packaging standards so even out-of-distro debs were often pretty good, while third-party RPMs were a garbage fire.

+1 to this. I remember installing software in 1998 on Red Hat and it was absolute hell. It was a hit or miss endeavor and when it failed, it failed badly. All those broken dependencies took ages to resolve.

Then I switched to Debian Potato and never turned back. It was such a clean and sane experience.

Unfortunately, I could not scape rpm hell at work as Fermi Linux, and then CERN Linux, were both based on Red Hat.

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