Re: Ubuntu and CDDs
El mar, 28-09-2004 a las 14:44 -0400, Benj. Mako Hill escribió:
> On Tue, Sep 28, 2004 at 12:57:23PM +0200, Miguel A. Arévalo wrote:
> > El mar, 28-09-2004 a las 11:50 +0200, Sergio Talens-Oliag escribió:
> > > El Fri, Sep 24, 2004 at 09:35:40AM -0400, Benj. Mako Hill va escriure:
> >
> > I also thought that, as I though with UserLinux and tried to bring
> > them to the CDD camp but, as Ubuntu, they seem to like repeating
> > previous errors.
>
> What are those errors? Just the release cycle thing?
The problems of making a fork (even sending back the patches and working
to integrate them) instead of working out every problem inside of
Debian.
> I think this is close to accurate in my case but not the case for
> everyone. I can't remember when I moved my machines away from testing
> but a year and a half seems right. I hold on as long as I can but when
> a year and half becomes two becomes three becomes more, even most of
> the people you define as stable users feel the need to jump ship at
> some point.
In case of non-stable users (and that includes, for example, most home
users) I think that a working testing (or releasable or whatever name is
put on it) is more than enough.
> > For non-stable users you can use testing, and testing is fast, the
> > problem is that debian freezes "inside" testing. If Sarge wouldn't
> > be freezed GNOME 2.8 would be hitting testing this very week.
>
> I do use Debian testing. Also, I suspect that a chunk of the work that
> helped this happened came from work that was done in Ubuntu. :)
Yes, of course I know it, and this is great, this clearly demonstrate
that testing can be perfectly up to date with the newest developments
and still be more stable than Fedora Core (and much more than Gentoo).
> Clearly, not everyone agrees with you. People like regular time-based
> releases. People (especially companies) like *predictable* release
> cycles. The fact Debian can't say when the next release will be is
> worse than the fact that it might be 3+ years away in the eyes of many
> people.
>
Yes of course I agree, I do really like time-based releases, but I also
like security support. And (like for example in Ubuntu) thinking about
not having security support in a year after a deployment (and that in
the most optimistic case) is a very bad thing. Is Canonical thinking on
a Red Hat Enterprise like product ?
> I don't think Debian-the-blob-with-15k-packages is particularly well
> suited to provide either of these things. Politically independent, and
> independently financed organizations can provide a good answer to both
> of these. Internal projects that bring Debian to a manageable size
> offer another technique.
>
Well, I think that this is not that difficult, the only thing needed is
the ability to say NO. And having a time-based release cycle makes
receaving such NO is not that bad news. In fact Sarge is going to be
released, in the end, as a result of a time-based decision. And Debian
has a great history of saying NO that in the past that had paid-off
(thinking of RPM, KDE, PGI, etc.)
I think that if the developers working for companies on Debian should
push for a time-based release cycle as a GR it would be aproved with
great joy. Of course with a release cycle more in the like of Red Hat
Enterprise than GNOME's or Ubuntu's 6 months.
> Now the fact that not everyone -- or even you and I -- agree about
> what they want in an OS is not a bad thing -- it *can* be great. The
> fact that we want different things out of our OS -- and out Debian --
> is the *reason* we're talking on -custom in the first place!
>
> You may not think that there needs to be a separate project for
> Debian-NP -- why don't we just use Debian-Desktop? You won't be the
> first to voice that opinion. You may not think that UserLinux or
> Ubuntu or Progeny's raison d'etre is a particular solid one and that's
> fine. Obviously, the developers and users of these distros disagree
> with you.
And the number of dead bodies of Debian-Derived distributions (and
companies) maybe agree with me ;-) I know no company (in fact no user)
using Libranet nor Progeny nor Xandros (or Corel) nor Linspire nor even
LinEx (and I'm from Extremadura, asking any of my friends and brothers
working as public servants in the local goverment in Extremadura about
when are they starting to use Linex makes them laugh); from a company's
point of view they are just toys, not much different from Knoppix and
the like.
> I see distro proliferation (and custom distro proliferation for that
> matter) as only problematic insofar as it divides up resources and
> reduces collaboration. I think that in a goal-oriented sort of
> perspective, CDD is an attempt to allow for this sort for of
> proliferation and diversity while providing a framework for those
> groups to channel more developer energy back into Debian than would be
> otherwise and to gain from the developer energy of others in the
> process.
I completely agree with you.
> You don't have to agree with Ubuntu's idea of release-cycles to work
> on ways to collaborate within the CDD infrastructure or otherwise. :)
Yep, of course, and release-cycle discusion is out of the scope of this
list ;-) , I think that in the end Debian will have a good solution on
this.
My point on Ubuntu (and Progeny and any other Debian-forked distros) is
that working inside Debian is much more productive as a whole than
forking the distribution. That's why I'm so interested on CDDs.
Regards,
Miguel A. Arévalo
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