Re: amd64 into mainstream
On Wednesday 20 April 2005 5:34am, Clive Menzies wrote:
>
> Debian and Ubuntu appear to have a symbiotic relationship, at least
well kinda....
> I regard them as complementary rather than competing offerings. Many of
> the live CDs and desktop distros are debian based and not only expand
> user choice but extend the reach of debian and free software.
> Naturally, there is a fear that widespread adoption of alternative
> distros will be at the expense of debian; on the contrary, all these
> debian derivatives are strengthening rather than weakening it.
Please show us evidence of this. What I suspect is that the alternatives are
moving so far ahead of Debian, because Debian is having a long and painful
childbirth of Sarge so all forward looking work is on hold, that very little
is getting back into Debian. I'm afraid of what happens if Ubuntu gets so
far ahead, and continues to diverge from Debian base while they do, and
meanwhile Debian remains mired in its identity crisis, that eventually Ubuntu
just decides they can't wait for us to catch up any more and they simply fork
Debian.
> After all modifying and distributing your changes is what free software is
> all about - so we should embrace it.
Except when the changes create incompatibility. It isn't so much code that
I'm worried about forking, its the standards Debian is built on. What
happens when Debian can't move fast enough for Ubuntu so Ubuntu starts making
incompatible improvements to dpkg/apt to improve their customer's experience
with updating their system? This wouldn't be much of an issue to me if
Debian were moving forward with a clear vision for the Desktop. However
Debian doesn't have a clear vision for the Desktop, it doesn't even have a
clear vision of what it wants to be 10 years from now. Because of this,
Debian is not moving forward at a decent pace, and that's why I worry about
the derivatives of Debian moving so far ahead that their symbiotic
relationship with Debian simply becomes parasitic, with the derivatives
slowly sucking energy, ideas, developers, and users from Debian itself.
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