Re: SEUL: Debian versus RedHat and DPKG versus RPM

[billt@tor.securecomputing.com (Bill Thanis)]

> 
> 
> The choice of DPKG versus RPM will mostly be dictated by what
> distribution will be our base.  That is because using DPKG if our base
> distrib uses RPM (or vice versa) will neeed a lot of additional work.
> 
> If we choose Debian then it is DPKG, every other distribution except
> Slackware uses RPM.
> 
I believe it is time to put in my two cents worth on the subject.

I believe everyone has lost site of the objectives here. The packaging
of the distribution means very little. Anything that will do dependency tracking
is acceptable. Also remember just because it comes in an RPM, or a DPKG
package, does not mean it will work with SEUL. Most such packages in
my experience have an implied distribution that it should go onto.

Third party packages may come in the format we end up using, and still need
significant work to get running.

<SNIP>

> like that.  Debian's implied assumption is than YOU will customize
> your software.  So IMHO for a beginner Debian 1.0 and 1.2 were,
> despite a few good points like DPKG, still harder to use than
> Slackware.

It sounds like what Debian 1.2 didn't do is provide the tools to customize
your software. Remember we are talking about two totally different processes:
transfering software ont a hard drive; configure software to be useable.

I have installed few packages that has the second part convienent. IMHO,
we really should be asking ourselves what we should do to make configuring
a software package easier. None of our users will care which packaging system
is used, if the software is installed unconfigured.

> 
> Besides they are a lot of good ideas to pick.  So far, nobody has
> bothered to spend an afternoon in writing a review.  Debian users have
> been very vocal to say we will have to use Debian but none wrote a
> review to say why he thinks his brother/sister (the one who has
> problems with W95) will be able to survive to Debian 1.3 better than
> to other distributions.
> 
> 
> Now, remember than the more user hostile is the distribution we will
> base upon the more work we will have to do, the later SEUL will be
> issued and the less features it will have because we will have spent
> our time in fixing easiness problems instead of making progress.

This is a falsy. Making a distribution user friendly has nothing
to do with how it is installed. Consider the simple case of having 
an image of the entire drive on a CD that is dd to a partition that
is big enough. All you need is a boot disk that runs one program that
checks for the size of a hard drive. If big enough, run fdisk script,
a format script, and dd, then reboot into a configure screen, prompting
for input for machine specific stuff. From the point of view of the user, 
this is the simplest install possible. This is also the install used by win95.

What the resultant system used by the user really has nothing to do with
how it is installed. How things are installed concerns people who are creating
upgrades for an existing system. In the windows world the answer to how things
are installed has been to let the software being installed handle the installation. 
Depending on the design of SEUL, this may be an acceptable method.  

I believe that the choice of an installer should be made after some minimal system
is put together. An installation could be rolled together for each of the packagers
and an answer given about which would best be used.

							B.T.

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