On Sunday 09 May 2004 17:40, Rory Gleeson wrote:
I have three words for Red Hat:
"Embrace and Extend"
But seriously, the company that gets the Package Manager right will get
the customers. Mandrake has tried but hasn't quite made it, although
they've done a decent job. Their manager is just split in to too many
different drakes now. They need to go back, simplify and bring them all
together, as posters here are suggesting needs to be done with a Yum
front-end that accomplishes all tasks.
YAST works but Fedora appears to have many other strengths in hardware
and network recognition, easy kernel upgrades (MDK has missed the boat
on that one) and that sweet little up2date panel icon. So, I prefer
Fedora. It's also more open than SuSE, which is important.
While it may take a bit of humility for Red Hat to consider the idea of
adopting YAST, there's nothing wrong with incorporating YAST in to Red
Hat products, or **at least experimenting with the idea by incorporating
it in to Fedora Core 3**. Now that YAST is GPL, a lot of start-up
distros will quickly embrace it and I think it could easily and quickly
become a standard.
There's are nothing wrong with open source standards. Beats forking.
And vendors would love it. The community needs to get behind vanilla
kernels (as Fedora is doing), standard RPM's and stop forcing developers
to modify their software for different distros. Silly and
short-sighted. Make it easy for software manufacturers to build one
program with one installation method that works on all flavours of Linux
and Billy Gates problems continue to mount. YAST may be that solution.
If nothing else, Fedora would shock the bloody hell out of the Linux
community and Novell with that little announcment. ;)
My guess is RH is already working on a YAST type system management solution.
Currently, RH and Fedora are a "system management" nightmare. SUSE already
has a head start on RH with YAST. Actually, Novell has all the pieces for a
complete Server to Desktop (with maintanance) solution. Novell's only work
left is integration and marketing. Plus you have IBM and HP behind
Novell/SUSE. Red Hat suddenly realized that the Desktop cannot be thrown
out, it must be a bullet item on the sales document, even on server side
sales (I guess Workstation wasn't a desktop?). Even though RH has announced
a Corporate Desktop, its still far from a real, seamless, manageable desktop
as compared to SUSE.
P.S.
YUM does not qualify as management. Yum is just a software update similar to
"Windows Update" button in Internet Explorer.
Byte