Subject: Re: market research--what would be "cheap enough"? From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 11:29:58 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3209369398081482@naggum.net> * Friedrich Dominicus <frido@q-software-solutions.com> > Now I do not know other distributions, but Debian plays in the first > league if one wants an updateable Linux distribution. My experience is also with Debian on my development system, but an installed system "needed" something that only RedHat does, and it got an early version of RedHat 7.0 installed, which I thought risky, but it worked, so it was probably OK. Recently they upgraded to a new version that apparently uses an otherwise unpublished version of GCC that does weird things with C++ libraries and something really weird with calling sequences or something -- I am not quite sure what it was, but it has caused a serious problem in compatibility between Linux distributions. This is RedHat's fault, not Linux or the library/comiler developers'. I think basing your decision to support Linux on RedHat is much too risky to be worth it. Choose a particular kernel/library configuration and depend on versions of each the way Debian does it. It has turned out to be the only really _working_ way of surviving updates cleanly. It is important for people who have RedHat scars that they were not scarred by Linux as such and not by any other distribution than RedHat. ///