Fwd: Etch

[kristian.hermansen at gmail.com (Kristian Hermansen)]

On 4/9/07, Matthew Gillen <me at mattgillen.net> wrote:
> You still didn't answer my question regarding whether you're talking about a
> default install, or if tweaking the repo list is allowed.  A cursory google
> search lead me to this:
> http://www.elijahlofgren.com/linux/ubuntu/#more-software
> which seems to indicate that you do in fact need to tweak some things in
> Ubuntu before you get access to all those repositories.  This appears to be
> reinforced by the fact that the local Ubuntu box I have can't find the
> acroread package.

Feisty has four hosted repositories, and one commercial repository
(opera, realplayer, etc).  I don't include the commercial repo.  The
four branches are:

main
restricted
universe
multiverse

Canonical does not officially support any packages other than
main/restricted, so if you call them for support on something like
Acroread, you wont get it.  Universe and multiverse are not enabled by
default, but they are hosted by the Ubuntu repositories.  This means
you can trust your source, for the most part.  With Red Hat/FC, I
always needed to add repositories not hosted by the official FC repos,
and that's very dangerous.  You can't always trust those packages
which have been built and offered by third parties.  In any event,
default Ubuntu install still has your FC6 beat hands down on the quite
incorrect "wc -l" test...

# aptitude search ~n | wc -l
6265

> If you allow that, then you can just as easily add a yum repo or two that has
> the Adobe Flash player, mp3 libraries, mplayer with all the codecs,
> proprietary nvidia/ati drivers, etc.  Sun's Java is sort of a pain, but
> hopefully since they GPL'd it there won't be redistribution issues anymore.

Right, but were such packages built by your distributor or a third
party?  In Ubuntu's case, all packages will always be available.
Who's to say that your third-party repo will stick around for the life
of your distro?

> My point is that the differences aren't as stark as you make it look.  I'm
> sure there /are/ differences in ease of use, etc, but if you know the distro,
> they are pretty much in the noise, and which one "wins" is largely a matter of
> personal taste and experience w.r.t. knowing where to look for help when
> things don't work (or for those one liners that enable non-free repositories).

Right.  But I still don't concede my original point :-)  Ie, here's
how to enable all hosted Ubuntu repositories.  No need for the user to
go "searching" for repos on his own, and thereby potentially adding
insecure repositories.  Heh, maybe I should just setup my own Fedora
repository and get tons of it's users to trust me, then one day, once
I have 50,000 users, change the acroread package post install script
to ping -f some servers.  You see, I would be wary of third-party
repositories.  I learned that lesson a long time ago!

# sed -i "s/main restricted$/main restricted universe multiverse/g"
/etc/apt/source.list
-- 
Kristian Hermansen

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