[218] in magellan
Linux/Athena Discovery Team notes; 30 June 1999
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)
Thu Jul 1 13:41:45 1999
Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 13:41:40 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <199907011741.NAA13074@opus.mit.edu>
From: tb@MIT.EDU (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)
To: linux-disc@MIT.EDU
Cc: magellan@MIT.EDU, vkumar@MIT.EDU
Linux/Athena Discovery Team
30 June 1999
Present: Bill Cattey, Thomas Bushnell, Abby Fox, Karl Ramm, Heather
Harrison, Greg Hudson, and special guest Ted T'so.
We discussed lots of issues, factual, political, and strategic, about
the choice of distribution question. The two seriously considered
distributions were Debian and Red Hat.
We finally produced the following list of criteria, listing for each
which distribution was superior, and how high the priority of that
criterion is:
Criterion Distribution Priority
Market Share Red Hat Medium
Mind Share at MIT Red Hat Medium
3rd party software Red Hat High
Athena install devel. Debian Medium
Athena update devel. Debian Medium
Rendering secure wash
Ease of use wash
Customizability wash
System Integrity Red Hat Medium
Non-destr update wash Med-High
Supperd layered athena wash
Synergy with demand
for layering Red Hat Medium
Cooperative devel. Debian Low
Start fresh Debian Low
Can buy value from vndr Red Hat Med-Low
Based upon this analysis, we decided to go ahead with Red Hat, but
some factual questions we disagreed about were identified along the
way:
* Does Red Hat do a "double layering" of system configuration
information?
* Does Debian have a package verification feature?
* Does Debian do less hardware probing for configuration?
* Does dpkg have interesting functionality lacked by rpm?
* How difficult or easy is it to install a commercial rpm on Debian?
* Has Red Hat had historical problems associated with libc changes?
Finally we briefly entered the other areas slated for the
conversation:
Can we provide a layered Athena version?
Should we do layered Athena with an rpm-like package?
Should we make such a package work on other distributions?
It was generally agreed that providing a layered Athena version was a
good thing, and that doing so with an rpm is also a good thing, and
that we would probably not be able to test such a package on other
distributions but we would certainly be interesting in incorporating
bug fixes and such so that it would be possible.
