Good news!!!

As many of you may know I am a Type 1 diabetic. This was some interesting news that I read on Slashdot(sorry to those have seen it already), it was a link from USA Today. I love the comment in the article "Nor is it clear whether the procedure would be as effective in people, like most of those with type 1 diabetes, whose own immune cells have destroyed their insulin-producing pancreatic cells." My immune system is so good it killed off part of my own body!!! What the.... :)

Linux package management

So I have been reading some of blogs of developers of debian recently and their response to the Ubuntu linux distro. First off Ubuntu is a linux distro "loosely" based on Debian. This was started by a guy in South Africa that started Thwarte(certificate company). The big news, for those of you that may not know the whole story is this, Ubuntu's "loose" roots from Debian are starting to worry some of the Debian developers. The problem is that Ubuntu debian pkgs do not necessarily compile/install on a Debian machine or vice versa. The developers are not anti Ubuntu but instead would like distros to keep pkg compatibility between distros, that is you create a pkg for Ubuntu it should work for all debian based distro's. This is a similar problem that RedHat had and still has. There are quite a few distros that are based on RedHats RPM pkg manager but have deviated for what ever reason. That is why when you go to download an rpm for some piece of software there is a rpm for SUSE, RedHat, etc.

I think this is a big issue. The idea behind linux is to have interoperability among hardware and software. This seems to me a shot against linux, with windows you can(for the most part) install a piece of software that was designed for windows and it just installs(again in general). Just think of the time we could save developers, they now would not have to create 10 different types of installers, but instead one.

The last point I want to make is this, yes there are a couple distros that use different pkg managers(ie. RPM, debian, Gentoo, etc) each has their own strengths and weaknesses. I am kind of of the opinion that either the distro needs to support a common pkg manager(and still have their own) or all distros support one pkg manager. Again the idea is interoperability.