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Re: amd64 into mainstream



On Mon, Apr 18, 2005 at 06:31:49PM -0400, Christopher Browne wrote:
> On 4/18/05, Ed Cogburn <edcogburn@hotpop.com> wrote:
> > > I full agree here: Ubuntu is more attractive to the average end user.
> > > But I do not understand why everybody is so upset about this. After
> > > all, there is no "one size fits all" distribution.
> > 
> > No, I'm not saying Ubuntu will kill Debian or vice-versa, or anything like,
> > but I am saying that the more energy and momentum for a desktop system Ubuntu
> > takes from Debian, the longer it will be for Debian itself to get its act
> > together on the desktop, because everyone who wants to see Debian on the
> > desktop are now saying "Why not just use Ubuntu?", and are moving to it.
>  
> It seems to me that this misses part of the real problem.
> 
> As far as I can see, the main merit of Ubuntu isn't anything to do
> with "desktop" support, but rather to do with the fact that it is
> several years more up to date than Debian/stable.
> 
> I find it ludicrous that Debian/stable still has PostgreSQL 7.2.1 as
> the "latest official" version of PostgreSQL even though there have
> been a whole ream of security updates and other fairly severe bug
> fixes in the binary compatible 7.2.x series.  And despite the
> PostgreSQL project getting accused of having long release cycles, that
> doesn't even touch the fact that there have been three _MAJOR_ release
> cycles (7.3.x, 7.4.x, and 8.0.x) since then.
> 
> And I usually _am_ something of a curmudgeon on stability of releases;
> at work, we never wound up touching 7.3.x because by the time we were
> ready to consider an upgrade from 7.2, 7.4 had been out for a while. 
> And we're now just starting to _think_ about 8.0 upgrades...
> 
> I am running Debian/unstable on my desktop pretty happily; I just find
> it painful that the "stable" release is so woefully out of date.

woody is a perfectly good samba/nfs/apache/dns server.  Nothing wrong
with the software in it.  A few years ago that software was state of the
art, but now you think it is unusable?  Why?

> It may well be that there is room for two systems:
> 
> 1.  Debian, as the "grand collector of package updates," and

And the releasor of actually well tested systems for many architectures
that will still be supported in 3 years.

> 2.  Ubuntu, as the folks that actually create release candidates on
> some reasonably regular schedule.

Releases that anyone but the server people would be interested in.  I
don't care if my desktop crashes once in a while.  I don't want my
server to do so.

Len Sorensen



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