Claudio Santambrogio

rPath

Sunday, March 18, 2007 12:03:39 AM

rPath Linux is designed to be a stable, high-quality, relatively "vanilla" distribution that closely tracks upstream stable packages and is easy to make a derivative distribution from

Binary and source packages are available;
Vanilla packages, thus unpatched (did I mention that I hate distros patching their packages?);
rPath is one of the fastest at updating packages in its repository;
Conary (the package management system, or rather the "distributed software management system") promises to be extremely flexible.

That seems to fulfill my primary requirements. So far installation went extremely smoothly on my laptop - will keep you updated on progress.

A short comment to the suggestions:

Ubuntu or Kubuntu (or any other *buntu) as well as any other Debian (based) distro are far too heavily patched, and so is Gentoo - I really am not interested in patched distros.
Slackware might be somewhat better in that respect, but there I miss the bleeding edge.
Arch is a distro I have been having in mind as an option, and for a long time I was undecided between Arch and rPath, until I finally decided for the latter, for now - but Arch is still a distro that looks interesting and its development is worth being followed.
If I'd be to move away from Linux, I'd rather switch to Plan 9 than to other UNIX systems.

dell is listeningpc-bsd chooses opera

Comments

Aux # Sunday, March 18, 2007 10:15:01 AM

Khm, very interesting distro. I think I will try it someday. But personally I don't trust in OS which boots more then 10 seconds...

Øyvind ØstlundNoteMe # Sunday, March 18, 2007 12:56:07 PM

Why don't you like pached distros?

Claudio Santambrogiocsant # Sunday, March 18, 2007 2:24:23 PM

Patched distros cause incompatibilities. You'll never be sure whether something works because the vanilla package works, or whether the distro patch works. It makes you dependant on one specific distro. And we don't want to start assuming that upstream development is producing stuff that doesn't work, do we? Almost all patches are unnecessary. I have gradually replaced most of the very heavily patched SUSE packages on my system with vanilla ones - and stuff still works as nicely as before. And where it doesn't work out-of-the-box it is almost always because it doesn't play nice along with some other patched dependency...