Re: GRAB and APT

On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 11:39:38AM -0800, Greg Kurtzer wrote:
> > more than time-taking.  So it's better handled by coordinated
> > package maintainers.
> Debian is soo cool.
Of course.

> > Well, small but well-managed and to-the-point projects grow into
> > bigger ones.  No-one really gets born that big as Apache ;-)
> Of course no projects start off like Apache (Except maybe OpenOffice.org).
Mozilla and OO are of completely different kind -- suddenly-open
ex-commercial product to hack on...

> I honestly have never used Mandrake, so I am not familiar with urpmi. Can it
> also keep your system current?
Seems that the goal of the scripts (also gtk+ grpmi) was to make
configuration tools capable of installing packages they need and
implementing this in one place they're doing quite logically.

There's something called "MandrakeUpdate" to perform the latter
task; never used it.

> I do have several Mandrake users that have contributed to GRAB.
> I will check with them on their opinions of urpmi, and compare
> to GRAB.
Mdk-specific advantage of urpmi will be that it's integrated with
installer so it "knows" where to seek packages (CDs, FTP, etc).

> > > BTW, what is your position/role with altlinux?
> > Kind of regional co-developer -- I'm situated in Ukraine and work
> > on l10n and do some amount of opensource PR ;-), and ALT Linux Team 
> > is situated in Moscow, Russia.
> How popular is AltLinux? What beneffits does it offer compared to some of the
> other larger distros? (i.e. there are much larger distros out there, why not
> just contribute to one of them :^)? you see where I am going here... right?
Histirically it was beginning as series of addon packages for Mdk
-- fixes and localization; then these got integrated in
Linux-Mandrake Russian Edition (as Mdk people sometimes disagreed
on some topics that were vital).

Almost year ago the team spinned off to form independent firm (as
opposed to being the Linux crew at larger IT company) and
continued development much alike Debian in terms that it's
completely open -- only devel@ list is not available to general
subscription which is (easily when applicable) done on request;
all mail archives are public).

So I tend to characterise ALT as "Mandrake meets Debian" -- as
the basis and significant part of mission objectives are similar
to Mdk's, and development goes much like Debian and borrows quite
a few ideas from there; one of team members (Peter `Nidd`
Novodvorsky) is also [email protected], and other core team members
are participating in or leading quite large and important
projects (Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, Samba, Fandra, and others).

The main precious thing being developed is believed to be exactly
package repository with right _and_ internal-only dependencies
called Sisyphus (it's like Debian unstable and generally more
usable in production than Cooker or Rawhide).

The subproject that could probably be of interest to more people
abroad xUSSR (and thus not demanding advanced i18n/l10n plus
better cyrillization) is ALT Linux Castle, an RSBAC-integrating
server-oriented distribution (http://altlinux.com/?page=castle
IIRC) -- RSBAC is not an easy thing to custom-integrate into each
and every performed install, and done right and working
reasonably out-of-box (giving more time to perform site specific
fine-tuning) is believed to be extremely useful on improving
Linux install base security.

Sorry for long and probably a bit pluggy message ;-)

-- 
 ---- WBR, Michael Shigorin <[email protected]>
  ------ http://visa.chem.univ.kiev.ua/~mike/

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