Debian has turned unusable.
Hello list,
after 3 days of twiddling with a "recent" copy of
debians woody release i need to vent a bit of the
anger and frustration that this distribution has
caused.
I want to start with saying that i was a strong
advocate of debian compared to distributions such as
RedHat and SuSE. Being a UNIX admin professionally
(Solaris mainly), i felt home on a debian system
pretty quick, and the packaging method was unique
among all linux deriatives i have seen. Also i used to
like debians approach of stability before
bleeding-edge stuff.
However as i have to install a small network now (7
WS's and one server), i have to reconsider this
assessment. I downloaded woody (2 failed attempts to
get an installation CD with the new jigdo method).
What i got after installation was
- a 2.2 Kernel without ext3 support
- a KDE 2.0
overall totally outdated and useless versions of
libraries and software.
I then tried to figure out how to update those
packages i need in recent versions. As i know KDE from
Solaris, i trust enough in their own QA procedure to
consider their 3.2.1 stable enough for usage. Why
debian believes KDE 2.0 is more stable, or even usable
at all, is beyond my understanding.
However it turned out that i could not update only
selected packages easily. In fact neither of dselect
or apt-get seemed to have a method to do this in a
sensible way.
Now it MAY well be that i am just an idiot who is not
capable of doing this, however i asked in a few linux
related channels and also at work, noone could tell me
how to set up a half-way decent debian without
compromising the pkg system. Sure many told me to
build it all by hand but then, without the packaging
system what good is debian?
I hope that whoever is responsible for the direction
debian is steering to currently thinks about the
target of the whole distribution, which is to provide
users with a decent linux system that comes stable,
yet with all neccessary parts to be competetive among
other distributions.
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