[vox-tech] YAST equivalent on Debian?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Jonathan Stickel (jjstickel at sbcglobal.net):

> See, that's the beginning of the problem.  What installer to use?

Freedom of choice sucks, doesn't it?  ;->

> Why isn't there a standard one that "just works"?

Notice the pointer icons for "installation options known to be excellent
of their kind"?   How many standard ones that just work do you need?  ;->

> I've tried the woody net-install, the sarge net-install, and libranet.  

There is not one single sarge netinst images but numerous ones, created
and maintained by various individuals.  Most but not all are based on
the new, beta-level d-i (debian-installer) code.  There are also beta 
netinst images of the Official Debian sarge d-i installer, automatically
built periodically on the build-hosts.

There were also numerous unofficial woody netinst images, created and
maintained by private parties.

The current (non-beta) Official Debian installer _isn't_ available, to my
knowledge, as a netinst image.  (I just double-checked.)

> The libranet install broke after I changed the repositories to sarge
> and tried to upgrade.  Yes, probably shouldn't have done that, but the
> "correct way" was certainly not clear.

Changing to use different repositories always creates the risk of some
problems, as you're apparently aware.  However, in my experience,
recent Libranet has always been sarge/sid-compatible.  (Prior releases
such as 1.7 were pretty much completely compatible with the testing
branch of that day, if I recall correctly.)  So, I'm left curious about
what "broke" means, here.

(People really need to be able to deal with minor package-handling faults
before doing something like changing repositories.  E.g., if you can't
figure out how to deal with package foo not installing because it's
trying to overwrite file bar owned by package baz, you should stick with 
more basic setups, until you find your way around.)

> I find Fedora 3 to be very stable and usable "out of the box".

Good!  I like it too.

My point is that Debian-testing has proven significantly more stable
than each and every one of the Fedora releases over time.  In my
experience.

> Yes, I admit I have "epsilon" experience, where epsilon is some small 
> but finite number (bad engineering joke).  I'm mostly going by all the 
> "debian is broke" traffic that I see go by on this list.

Ah, thank you.