Re: I *love* goodbye-microsoft.com
On Sat, Feb 24, 2007 at 05:37:56PM +1100, Russell Coker wrote:
> On Friday 23 February 2007 19:58, paddy@panici.net wrote:
> > perhaps you should consider goodbye-fedora.org too ;-)
>
> Converting from Fedora to Debian is not a challenge, merely run debootstrap
> from a root shell.
>
> Also Fedora isn't the enemy. In fact there's a lot of code sharing between
> Fedora and Debian (more than just shared upstream) and I am not the only
> person to have been both a Fedora and Debian developer at the same time (now
> I am only a DD).
Apologies for any confusion, I had just come from reading the slashdot
headlines :-)
Putting my serious (read: saturday morning waffle) hat on ...
It is many years now since I switched from redhat to debian, and at the
time I did so I regarded debian as more-or-less just another
distribution. Looking back in the other direction now, I see redhat as
a commercial distribution, debian's greatest strength as it's people and
social contract, and fedora (and I came to debian before fedora
and haven't paid that much attention to fedora) as hobbled by it's
client status to redhat, which is a shame because I had hoped when
fedora came about it might have the independence to truly rival debian,
and redhat have some truly excellent people.
One of the things that strikes me as odd in debian is the dynamic
between diversity and hierarchy. debian admits mulitple packages which
do more-or-less the same things, where a smaller distribution might say
"we'll have one MTA, one webserver, ...". This is a huge strength, and
feels very welcoming. At the same time there are any number of areas
where the *tendency* is more towards "there can be only one". An example
might be the way that dpkg handles package names and versions as
compared to rpm (name unique vs name/version unique). I pick this
example precisely because I find it a conundrum, not because I think
there is any easy answer, but I note the tendency of humankind in
general to value their existing choices. Other examples of the tendency
might be "one maintainer per package", "one release", "one repository".
Note that all of these are just tendencies, it's not hard to find the
counter-examples, and on the whole these tendencies exist for entirely
commonsense reasons. Perhaps commonsense is more about how to make
things work (at all) than it is about what happens when they break.
The *users* of windows and the *users* of macosx are not the enemy
either. Making it easier for users to see the full system is certainly
putting the best foot forward, and I admire the work being done.
Strangely, I feel a tiny pang of guilt. I now have an apple box
for the first time in decades. One of the main deciding factors was to
buy unixy goodness :-) but also to get some exposure to OSX. I tried for
a while to live in OSX, but in the end I installed Debian on it. It's
not that I couldn't build everything I wanted, it's just that not having
everything just work is like going back in time ten years. It's not that
there isn't ports or fink, but there isn't debian, short of a full
install, and the alternatives don't measure up. It's not that I
couldn't take debian to osx (in my fevered imagination), it's that I'm
too lazy to even try. But it could be done, it probably wouldn't be
terribly hard. And I can't help wondering if this isn't another area
where debian has a tendency, a tendency to be all or nothing.
(and of course, that's not a one-sided story: this isn't exactly the
most free-software-friendly hardware ever made, and it seems that there's
no such thing as a sun jre binary for linux ppc, although hopefully that
will be changing)
So, why shouldn't the users of Fedora, or even say Ubuntu, be invited
to upgrade to Debian ?!
They are certainly not the enemy and I'm sure they would be made
welcome, even esr ;-)
Regards,
Paddy
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