Guess who's right behind Ubuntu at Distrowatch

[Alan Cox]

> There are two very distinct types of Linux Admins:  Those who prefer 
> BSD, and those who prefer SYSV5.

I smell manure

> Those who prefer BSD enjoy working on Debian or Debian based distros 
> (Like Ubuntu) and provide base level tools and administration likely to 
> please the BSD centric crowd.  The problem is that BSD and SYSV5 both 
> had very rudimentary packaging tools, with the SYSV5 pkg tools being 
> best of class for the time.

I smell more manure

> I don't mean to create revisionist history here, just point out that 

Well some real history (puts on old-fart "I was there" hat)

> after Linux became popular, as in usable, the package management issue 
> came front and center, and the two camps remained divided.
> 
> The BSD camps chose deb (for the most part) and the SYSV5 camps went 
> with RedHat's package manager, rpm.

The SYSV packaging was incredibly crude and BSD basically had none except
at source level. BSD today has kept the source packaging religion and
honed the tools and process to modern system management. I guess Gentoo
would thus be the one that fits the old BSD world, but Gentoo is pretty
un-BSD in most respects.

The nearest thing to the SYSV packaging was probably the SLS/Slackware
one, although with some differences. Technologically its quite different,
functionality very similar. Ironically perhaps given this Slackware for a
long time had the more BSD file layout and init style
(eschewing /etc/init.d etc)

The first Linux "serious" packaging came from the BOGUS distribution and
variants of that work led to dpkg in Debian (tools based on Solaris which
is System 5 not BSD !) and rpp in Red Hat, which in turn was replaced by
rpm. Not many people realise rpm and dpkg are effectively forks of the
same original work

Alan