“Jean-loup is…important in the sense that work he’s done
(positively) affects almost every Linux or Unix user, but the
chance of Jean-loup ever getting any “mainstream” media attention
is zero. Or possibly less. Without people like Jean-loup there
would be no Open Source movement….”
“My question is this: to what degree will Mandrake continue to
differ from RedHat and will there ever be a “developer” version
(i.e. one that is centered towards those who are a bit more
technically competant)?”
“Gailly: That’s changed more than a bit. Our distribution is now
completely made by us. Believe me, doing everything ourselves
represents a significant amount of work. Few people understand how
much work is involved in making an independent distribution. We
have our own development teams producing things like our graphical
install DrakX, our disk partionner DiskDrake, management of
security levels in msec, hardware detection with Lothar, etc… Our
packages are more recent than those of Red Hat and have more
functionality (such as supermount support in the kernel). Red Hat
is now even copying packages made by MandrakeSoft (e.g. rpmlint). I
hate having to speak like a salesman here, but it is really unfair
to say that Mandrake just repackages RedHat; this is simply not
true anymore.”
“Have you looked at Linux-Mandrake 7.0? It does include a
developer version. At install time, select the option “Custom” then
“Development”. You will get all necessary development tools. We, as
developers, use our own distribution :-)”