Back in 2001 I wrote this rant while having major problems installing stuff on a RedHat system. It was incredibly frustrating. I don't know if these things have been fixed. I haven't had reason to use RedHat since then, so I wouldn't know. This rant is kept for historical reasons.
This article says it much more effectively than me.
RedHat seems to be the most popular Linux distribution available. The reason for this is mostly historical and due to inertia: it was the first distribution available that made installing Linux easy. Unfortunately it suffers from some major structural flaws that impede its progress and mean it is easily surpassed in quality by other distributions such as Debian. The only explanation I can see for its continued dominance is the fact that many many people know how it works and understand its quirks and limitations.
My first distribution was Slackware, though I must say I never had much to do with installation and maintenance. The first distribution I got much experience on was RedHat 4.2. At the time it seemed very easy and quite a good thing.
I upgraded to Debian a couple of years ago and, after a while of having to ask lots of questions, I'm hooked. It just works right! I've written before about the differences and why Debian is better. Now I want to give some practical demonstrations of what's wrong with RedHat as I'm being forced to use it at the moment by an employer.
Installing a RH machine here to do DHCP, amongst other things. I install the dhcp package and try to run the rc script. Nothing happens -- not even when running it without any arguments do I get a nice handy message telling me anything.
Poking around I discover that neither a sample dhcpd.conf nor a /var/lib/dhcpd.leases file have been added. Looking into RH's bugzilla (which, incidentally, isn't linked directly to from the package page on their site) I find this isn't a bug but is in fact a feature. It was first reported in September 1999. DHCP is purposfully broken so that admins have to configure it first. Course it doesn't do anything helpful like _tell_ you why it's broken, no that would make it too easy.
Now the thing that really gets me is that there's a bunch of bug reports about this and it hasn't been fixed since Sept 1999. Now I would hazard to guess that DHCPd is a pretty central package for a server, wouldn't you think? As for the 7.1 release that just came out, nope not fixed there either.
The relevant bug:
http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=5405
Installing some server with RedHat 7 I wanted an editor that wasn't vi-ish so I tried to install Emacs. There's three main packages: emacs, emacs-nox and emacs-X11. Of course, being servers they don't have X installed so I installed the base emacs and the emacs-nox package. Sadly, the emacs-nox package requires some of the X libraries for locales and fails without them.
And do you think they've fixed the bug? As if!
http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=18548
I'm always getting weird shit when I exit man such as the following. It's not critical but it's kinda lame.
Error executing formatting or display command. System command /bin/gunzip -c /var/catman/cat5/dhcp-options.5.gz | /usr/bin/less -is exited with status 127.
Under non-RPM systems you can install packages incredibly easily. For example I want to install the Bugzilla package which depends on a number of other packages. With RedHat I need to go and find each of the packages the bugzilla package depends on, download them and only THEN can I install bugzilla. Systems like Debian allow you to do a command like this:
apt-get install bugzilla
That will work out the dependencies and tell you what it needs to download. If you say yes it'll go off, download bugzilla and the dependent packages and install the lot. All in one command and you don't have to poke around trying to find the dependent packages. Ahhhh.
Apparently rpmfind (rpmfind.net) has similar behaviour but it segfaults on the machine I'm trying to use it on. Useful that!
The standard install of RedHat installs gpm. Fair enough but when I try to remove it, I find that links relies on libgpm so removing it would break that dependency. Why does links, a text-mode web browser, rely on a mouse? It works just fine on my Debian machines without a mouse.
I guess using a mouse with links would be nice though, but surely that can be accomodated ie, if gpm installed use mouse, else don't.
Looking at the RedHat 7.0 installation manual I spot Chapter 6: Text Mode Installations at a Glance. Sounds good. Unfortunately then I spot 6.21: Configuring the X Window System. Sigh. Enough said.
The only two tools available for configuring ppp are kppp (a KDE X application) and RP3 (a GNOME X application). In older versions of RedHat you could do it through Linuxconf. I'm not a big fan of Linuxconf but at least it has a text mode interface. However Linuxconf is only useful if all your configuration is done through it. This piecemeal approach (routing etc can still be done through it) means there are zillions of seperate, conflicting places where you can configure stuff. Confusing. Annoying. Impossible to do without X.
Well, yes, I could write my own little pppd script and do it myself, but then I could write my own distribution too. This is the last straw. I'm installing Debian! Boss be damned.