Text 9109, 77 rader
Skriven 2007-01-24 16:52:34 av David Calafrancesco (1:2624/306.0)
   Kommentar till text 9108 av Maurice Kinal (1:140/13.1)
Ärende: Fun find from the past
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Maurice Kinal wrote in a message to David Calafrancesco:

 MK> Jan 24 13:28 07, David Calafrancesco wrote to Maurice Kinal: 

 DC> includes Mips, Mips Alpha, Dec Alpha, Motorola 68k, x86, Itanium 
 DC> (IA-64), PowerPC, Sparc, IBM S/390, ARM, HP PA-Risc. 

 MK> That is quite a few.  How many of them are you safe in saying are
 MK> at least as good as the x86 version(s) of Debian?  Also how close
 MK> to the same source are the other versions to the x86 version?  For
 MK> instance, I believe the PowerPC requires some special treatment not
 MK> required by the others, but those aside, will something like a bash
 MK> script be directly portable from x86 to PowerPC without any special
 MK> treatment?

Are you asking how the various versions of Debian compare between the hardware
platforms? They are identical in effect. The only difference is that they are
compiled using the indicated hardware platform. The sources may be modified in
order to accomodate specific differences in platform, but more likely the
underlying compilers are handling the specifics. As for a bash shell, you can
pick up a bash shell and move it from hardware to hardware. It's like an old
DOS shell script. As long as the underlying shell is the same, the only
potential differences are in locations of specific paths that may be hard
referenced. In that respect, Debian has a standard set of paths that ALL
flavors of their distribution *must* adhere to so that isn't a worry either. 

 DC> I'd be interested in learning of any other non Debian based distro 
 DC> that is also available for as many hardware platforms.

 MK> To be honest I don't know and don't really care.  I think Cray had
 MK> the right idea ensuring Linux would work specifically with their
 MK> hardware and hopefully consider compatibilty to other platforms as
 MK> far as exported data is concerned.  Looking around all I see is x86
 MK> here and I am inclined to want what is best for these.

What is best is a matter of what you are comfortable with and what your
preferences are. I can relate why I prefer a Debian system over Red Hat or
Fedora or Centos, however others who are more familiar with those platforms are
likely to prefer them over Debian. Ultimately it has more to do with how we use
our systems and what we want to get from them. 

One aspect that I believe Debian excells at is upgradeability. I couldn't
easily migrate a Red Hat enterprise server 2.1 to RHEL 3 and then on to RHEL 4.
Instead, I'd need to build new editions and migrate my application data over to
the new platforms. Debian systems are renowned for their upgrade capabilities.
I've had no problems upgrading any of the systems I've used whether
professionally or personal. 

 DC> I think we can 
 DC> all agree that there are very few computer systems that have been 
 DC> ever produced that don't fall under the above list somewhere. From 
 DC> what I recall, Gentoo might be the next best for support of multiple 
 DC> hardware platforms, given that it is a compile on demand based system 
 DC> it would be easiest for them to support hardware. 

 MK> Possibly.  Not that this has anything to do with Gentoo
 MK> specifically, I noticed the other day some serious issues with
 MK> nforce/nvidia based motherboards and their supplied drivers wrt
 MK> Linux.  Sure am glad I decided to get rid of that hardware from the
 MK> mix here.  Also wondered how that will influence distro's such as
 MK> Gentoo and others who took it upon themselves to make those drivers
 MK> available to their users.  I knew I didn't like the idea when I
 MK> first encountered it and now I see I was justified in my dislike
 MK> and mistrust in such schemes. 

Debian won't include proprietary matter. Ever. Period. However, others may well
package proprietary matter in a Debian format. Some other distributions are
based upon Debian and are further expanded to include proprietary matter. The
Debian project aims to remain absolutely pure. Rabidly free is one way to
describe their ethic. 

Dave Calafrancesco, Team OS/2
dave@drakkar.org

... They got the library at Alexandria, they're not getting mine! 
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