OT: "Best" Linux Distro?

[Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner]

It was thus said that the Great Jules Richardson once stated:
> 
> I just wish the concept of a package was more of a file-level thing, so that 
> you end of with a system just comprising the bits you really need and use - 
> coupled with some sort of common mechanism which can tell you when you're 
> trying to do something from a front-end script / GUI app for which you're 
> missing required modules / libraries / other apps of course. Possibly have the 
> ability for the system to automatically go fetch the needed bits from the 'net 
> too.

  I just wish the concept of a package was more consistent and took into
account what you actually *have* installed.  A month ago I configured a
server at work with MRTG [1].  It was failing form some mysterious reason
[2] and in order to figure out what was going on, I decided to hack the
source to one of the programs to provide more informative logging
information.  I get the source, do the configure dance, and find I'm missing
the GD [3] development package (the GD binaries already installed).

  This being a Fedora Core system, I can use 'yum'.  Only I have to figure
out the magical incantation to get the GD development package installed. 
Turned out to be 'yum install gd-devel'.  So I do that.

  And I ended up installing the X Windows Development system, which I
neither want, nor use, on this headless Linux server buried deep in our data
center.

  WHY Fedora Core thought I needed the X Windows Development system for GD
is beyond me (since X isn't even *installed* on the server.  Oh, and yum
"helpfully" updated a score of packages that have updated since I last ran
yum some twenty minutes before or something silly like that).

  -spc (Oh, and heaven forbid you don't upgrade every hour, since (in my
	opintion) both Fedora Core and Gentoo seem to move their
	repositories whenever the mood strikes them [4])

[1]	Multi Router Traffic Grapher.  Okay program to monitor bandwith
	usage in various routers, but configuration is a bitch.  Cacti
	is a *much* nicer program to use.

[2]	It turned out that when the system was installed, the various MRTG
	scripts were already installed in "/etc/cron.d/mrtg", *even though
	it wasn't configured and did nothing!* Not knowing this, I added an
	MRTG cronjob via "crontab -e" (which uses
	/var/spool/cron/crontab/root in this case).  So now I had two (2)
	MRTGs running, overwriting the log files.

	Sometimes these package managers are "too" helpful.

[3]	Not sure what GD stands for, but it's a library that allows one to
	create GIFs/JPEGs/PNGs programmically (create a canvas, draw to it,
	then write the canvas to a file with the specified format).  It's
	used quite often by CGI programs to draw graphics.  GD itself does
	not use X Windows.

[4]	Me, bitter?  Naaaaaaahhhhh ...