Re: Deficiencies in Debian
On Tuesday 14 September 1999, at 7 h 16, the keyboard of Michael Stone
<mstone@debian.org> wrote:
> Why should the presence of bugs in non-critical packages affect the
> freeze date or raise the possibility of postponing the release?
"rm -rf /" in postinst ? Even for an "extra" package, it would hurt.
More seriously, any package can damage the system:
1) wrong stuff in postinst,
2) wrong dependencies (like the famous dpkg assertion bug which gcj triggered),
3) trying to override files which belongs to someone else.
That's a big difference between Debian and FreeBSD: FreeBSD cares only about the base system. Ports ("source packages") and packages are irrelevant for them, as far as release is concerned. (FreeBSD does not have a unified package database, since the base system is not a package, so item 2 cannot hurt them. Ports are not supposed to write in / or /usr so item 1, in theory, is not a risk for them.)
Debian, on the other hand, ships a system, not just a base + a random collection of ports.
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