Re: [RULE] Reflections on a Debianized RULE (or RULE'ized Debian?)

[James Miller]

Well, maybe all this just got easier?  Maybe miniconda or even slinky can be 
made to work just as well for Debian as it does for RH/Fedora?  News item from
http://arstechnica.com/archive/news/1067056799.html

Ars Technica Newsdesk

Progeny Brings Red Hat and Debian Closer Together

Posted 10/24/2003 @ 11:39 PM, by Matt Woodward

On Friday afternoon, Ian Murdock, the founder of the Debian GNU/Linux project 
and co-founder of Progeny, announced a status update of his company's Debian 
work. Murdock made two very important announcements: the porting of Red Hat's 
Anaconda installer tool to Debian, and a modification of Debian's APT package 
tool which will allow it to use both RedHat and Debian packages. The first 
announcement is most relevant to Debian users, who have long complained about 
Debian's "archaic" installer. Several "easy to install" Debian variants have 
been created over the years; none of them has been commercially successful. 
Progeny Linux was one of these variants. Despite its excellent installer, 
Progeny's distribution suffered the same fate as many of the other commercial 
Debian projects. The company itself lived on, without much visibility, until 
today's announcement:

    We have ported Red Hat's Anaconda installer to Debian; essentially, we 
replaced calls to RPM with calls to APT, and replaced Red Hat-specific 
configuration hooks with calls into the configlets and debconf. We have also 
written a tool called PickAx that facilitates the creation of Anaconda-based 
Debian installation CD sets. We are also working with various parties to 
add/merge RPM support into the mainline APT, to allow Debian- and RPM-based 
distributions to be managed using a single APT codebase, and possibly even to 
allow Debian and RPM packages to coexist side by side.