[WBEL-users] Switch over to APT

[Benjamin J. Weiss]

offline.2800382@bloglines.com wrote:

>I've been running yum on WBEL for a fair while now, and I've basically given
>up on it -- It's slow, it doesn't permit me to terminate operations reliably
>on SIGINT, etc...  Essentially, for all that I'm sure it has its advantages,
>I don't like it much.
>
>I'd like to move my package management over to apt
>for WBEL (which otherwise I love).  Is this possible?  Are there apt repositories
>that are roughly equivalent to the Yum one?  Can the Yum DB even be migrated
>so that I'm not stuch with a useless collection of unknown rpms?
>  
>
Back when I was running Whitebox, I noticed that there was a wide range 
of responsiveness to the various mirrors.  I had to comment out all of 
the mirrors in the yum.conf file, and then try the mirrors one by one 
until I found one that was acceptable.  A pain, granted, but better than 
the lag that you mentioned and that I, also, suffered.

The other major problem with the mirror system that Whitebox employs:  
as far as I can tell, all other mirrors rsync from NCSU.  When they have 
problems, those problems roll downhill.  Not so long ago they had major 
problems with multiple mirrors that they host, and (again, as far as I 
could tell at the time) all of the other mirrors replicated those 
problems.  It was a mess.  NCSU may have fixed the problem, but it only 
highlighted the single-point-of-failure problem that whitebox has.  Add 
to that the issues experience by a distro that is maintained by two 
people with no desire for outside help, and....well, you get the idea.

Don't get me wrong, I think that they've done a hell of a job.  But 
after all the problems recently, I moved to CentOS.  They have their 
problems also (a bug in the 3.3 release kept Open Office from 
installing), but overall my home server has been happy at the switch.  
And there are a LOT more rsync mirrors available. :)

Just my opinion, for whatever its worth.

Ben

P.S.  For the inevitable "then why are you still here" questions that 
I'm sure are forthcoming, I like the Whitebox community, enjoy learning 
from it, and hope to occasionally be able to give back. :)