Re: How would I get debian unstable?
On June 4, 2008 09:53:33 pm Christopher Browne wrote:
> The crucial differences between Debian and other distributions are
> two-fold:
>
> 1. It has a public, democratic governance system, whereas other
> distributions tend to be under the control of some non-public
> organization.
>
> To some extent, the various Red Hat derivatives are controlled by Red
> Hat Software, irrespective of public participation. Likewise for
> Ubuntu and Canonical.
>
> Various Linux distributions have gone away due to changes in direction
> of the "owners" (Caldera being a most obvious example); there is
> little risk of that taking place with Debian due to its governance
> model.
>
> 2. As a result of the wide-spread participation, there needs to be a
> great deal of policy, which indeed extends to tooling for managing all
> sorts of aspects of software packaging and the interaction of packages
> with one another and with the distribution.
>
> Traditionally, the "engineering" of Red Hat-sourced distributions took
> place entirely internally to Red Hat Software, and packaging was a
> "pre-cooked" thing where you could only be fairly certain that things
> would work if the packages had RHAT people working on them. The RPM
> tool could build packages and manage a local installation repository;
> in contrast, Debian has long had a VASTLY more extensive set of
> package tooling addressing *way* more high level issues, and helping
> to enable a much more diverse set of contributors to contribute
> well-integrated packages.
>
> The consistency of having the huge set of diverse, yet well-integrated
> packages is what has enabled the creation of "private labelled" things
> like Ubuntu and Knoppix that derive the huge set of software by virtue
> of harnessing Debian's work at relatively little cost.
Well said, Christopher!
Chris W.
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