ryaxnb
February 4th, 2009, 10:25 PM
Opensuse has a wonderful backports, repo management philoshopy. The idea is that a small repo, similar to Ubuntu's "main", but larger is the base repo. After that come multiple sets of build service or third party repos, that backport and provide more extensive collections of software. Much software that is old or not available in opensuse can be fixed with Build Service. Once you learn to search build service (packages.opensuse-community.org) you understand how powerful it is by looking at how easy it is to build a repo and host it using Build Service. And more are constantly coming. The Build Service is just getting started, and it's taking off. It's really cool :).
Mandriva also has a really nice design with an excellent backports repo that is community-driven and maintained, and contains the key backports.
Ubuntu just doesn't have these, it's backports repo is pathetic, people are building ppa's instead of using it. And PPA's are a lot more work than Build Service stuff to setup, deb's are hard to make, there's no automated Build Service repo-making tool, and launchpad is closed source. Getdeb is flailing. There's just not much there.
And people complain about not being able to get updated software on Linux -- it all varies depending on distro!
On opensuse, almost all software is at the latest version after a build service update.
Not so on ubuntu.
Mandriva also has a really nice design with an excellent backports repo that is community-driven and maintained, and contains the key backports.
Ubuntu just doesn't have these, it's backports repo is pathetic, people are building ppa's instead of using it. And PPA's are a lot more work than Build Service stuff to setup, deb's are hard to make, there's no automated Build Service repo-making tool, and launchpad is closed source. Getdeb is flailing. There's just not much there.
And people complain about not being able to get updated software on Linux -- it all varies depending on distro!
On opensuse, almost all software is at the latest version after a build service update.
Not so on ubuntu.