Minor rant and rationale

Why Debian?
I was a dedicated Red Hat / Fedora user for many years, especially since when I attempted to use Debian professionally in late 2000 I couldn't even figure out the ugly nested text-driven installer.

My first Postfix-based mail server used FC3/FC4, and was based on the Postfix-Cyrus-Web-cyradm-HOWTO. However, Fedora did not include MySQL support in Postfix. To update the system required getting the latest Postfix SRPM and building it from scratch.

The Fedora update process is risky in two ways:
 * Updating Fedora versions has always caused me problems. I'm very reluctant ever to change something that works to a new Fedora version.
 * Fedora tends to release bleeding edge versions before the bugs are worked out.

Additionally, packages are split across repositories which are not necessarily compatible. I had a significant problem with one package that I'd originally picked up from Dag, but which was added to the Fedora repositories in an incompatible form.

These problems bit me often enough that I've wanted to give Debian another try for a long time. I postponed it, though, even attempting to build another Postfix etc. mail server under FC6, simply because re-learning configuration file differences and directory layouts was such a chore.

However, my FC6 server failed miserably. In addition to the problem of adding Postfix from source and trying to tweak all of the packages to work together, at least one critical CPAN module was missing. Since it wasn't available in a repository, I had to get it from CPAN - which in itself is a problem, since that would be Yet Another package management on top of yum and an SRPM. But when I tried to use the Perl CPAN module it dropped me straight to a command prompt. One of the RPMs I'd updated had broken either Perl or a module; see "bleeding edge."

At that point I decided that even if I could figure out what was wrong with my FC6 installation, the time taken to fix it would probably surpass the Debian learning curve, and apt-get just had to be better than yum and the above update problems.

This has proven to be the case. Everything I have needed has been available in apt. Somehow, even though Fedora hasn't figured out how to package Postfix with MySQL, Debian has a postfix package and a postfix-mysql extension package. apt-cache update / apt-cache upgrade has worked flawlessly, except for one time where a change to cron left me missing anacron, which had become required, and with a cron syntax error. Which was quite a significant problem, but far easier to fix than any of my Fedora compatibility woes had been.

So, while I'm no Debian evangelist, I won't be likely to be switching from it. It has been efficient, stable and simple.