[Tfug] Maintainable free UNIX

[Keith Davey]

Well with Linux comming of age and other free unixes also continuing to
mature I was wonders about system mainatablility between all these
diffrent systems.  Day in and day out we here about this Linux install is
so easy and these system administration tools are so cool, but in the end
we are likly to install a system once and in theory maintain it thur
patches and upgrades for the life of the system.  My question in
particular is one of opinion.  What free unix system do you feel is the
most maintainable and why?  Conversely what free unix systems do you feel
are the hardest to maintain and why?
.
Personaly I find the the most maintanable system I have worked with to be
FreeBSD.  CVSup may not be unique to FreeBSD but it sure is nice when
coupled with the ability to rebuild the system from source on the fly.
Patching individual modules and rebuilding just those modules on the fly
is great as well.  My second selection would be Debian with apt-get.
Least mantainable it seems to me is RedHat.  First off I have never been a
fan of straite RPM.  Dependancy problems aside its just clunky to work
with.  RPM coupled with a upper level dependancy DB like in SUSE works ok,
but the SUSE tools to perform upgrades and patches is to slow (YAST2 sucks
the big one!).
.
Ok opinions welcome but please lets try not to make this into a pissing
contest (Bowie!)
.
Keith Davey