Debian is _huge_

cmpalmer@ltsp:~/Desktop$ cat allpackages.en.txt |wc -l
17498

...and is much more community-oriented (ie. there are vulnerabilities
in little-used apps that are maintained by a volunteer and not a paid
developer). BTW, you're talking about RHEL, right?

It would make much more sense to compare them apples-to-apples by
narrowing your focus to a minimal install plus certain very common
apps (such as apache).

I'm not saying they're equivalent in terms of security. I'm just
saying that the comparison based on www.securityfocus.com/bid is not a
realistic one.

-CMP

On 27 Nov 2006 17:44:30 -0000, tjanas (at) austin.rr (dot) com [email concealed]
<tjanas (at) austin.rr (dot) com [email concealed]> wrote:
> I am evaluating the overall security of Red Hat linux vs Debian. I've been told that Debian has many more vulnerabilities than Red Hat. I've also been told that Red Hat is quicker to release security patches than Debian is for the "stable" release. Can someone point me to a good overall assessment of the two? Using this tool: www.securityfocus.com/bid I see that Debian has 17 pages worth of issues but Red Hat has surprisingly few. Am I misinterpreting the results from this tool?
>

--
Cristobal M. Palmer
UNC-CH SILS Student -- ils.unc.edu/~cmpalmer
TriLUG Vice Chair
"There are many roads to enlightenment, and thus many roads back to
the One True Debian" --crimsun

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