On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 3:00 PM, nate centos@linuxpowered.net wrote:
R P Herrold wrote:
oh please -- move advocacy to a new thread raher than hijacking. Quantity does not imply quality, and AWOL maintainers who move on is a problem in all of FOSS
Quality is implied by the hefty QA process debian goes through, and the long release cycles. I thought I had communicated that in the previous message. The last two major releases took almost 2 years of work each. Similar to the QA that Red Hat does, which is why their base packages are solid and well tested. This same level of QA of course doesn't apply to 3rd party repos.
and so R-2.9.0 is not available to you, and if your users wanted R-xts, to extend zoo [which extends R], the only place for those packages in Debian packaging are r-forge and CRAN (as they are not in any 'official' Debian archive, and only in the independents).
The users will have to make do with what there is. The same is true for CentOS/RHEL on my systems. I can't remember the last time I went to CPAN. I did maintain a couple dozen ruby on rails packages at my last company for the systems there, everything built by hand, it wasn't easy, or fun.
For what it's worth, I like both CentOS and Debian. (Heck, I even like openSUSE as an OS, but I'm not crazy about Novel's smooching with Microsoft.) I ended up with CentOS on my home computers because 1) I wanted to learn Red Hat (I'm a phone tech who might have to get into VOIP) and CentOS suits me better. (Besides CentOS worked better with my Intel 865 graphics card then did Ubuntu or Debian.) CentOS seems less fluid and more staid and stable. It's more a matter of taste than anything else for me. I just like CentOS better.
That said, if I owned an eeePC (almost bought one but the keyboard was too small) I would run Ubuntu on it -- if the performance really was that much better than with CentOS.