Re: Danger Will Robinson! Danger!
Alright, here's the warning so I don't see to be 'boasting' or
something similar: I work for TurboLinux as the lead distribution
engineer. Before most of debian-devel's technical skills, I am but a
neophyte. However, I would like to offer my point of view as
someone working in the "industry".
You have been warned. :)
* Jacob Kuntz (jake@megabite.net) [000311 17:30]:
> Marcus Brinkmann (Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de) wrote:
> > On Sat, Mar 11, 2000 at 04:06:01PM -0500, Jacob Kuntz wrote:
> > > our biggest handicap is that we're always a year behind everyone else. being
> > > a year behind is suicide in any industry.
> >
> > The simple fact you are missing is that Debian is not an industry.
> > Don't make the same mistakes as the industry. Making last minute changes and
> > rushing in x.0 versions of critical software is just Plain Wrong.
> > Especially the Linux kernels are often very unstable 'til x.12 or 14.
>
> i'm fully cogniscient of the fact that debian is not an industry. but it is
> used in the industry. i use it in the industry. i reccomend debian to all my
> clients and friends. debian is also representational of linux and free
> software. we have a responsibility to our ideals.
So, our marketing guys *love* having version 10 when everyone else
has 9, but this is balanced (usually sanely) by our product managers
who want to keep version 9 around as long as possible for our server
product. Of course, developers bounce between wanting the latest
greatest and staying with the tried and true versions.
We aren't through working out a long term stratagy for this, but I
suspect that our workstation will be more bleeding edge (with bells
and whistles) and server will plod along and occassionally hop
forward to catch up.
After all, if a server product has everything you need, do you
really want the newest version?
The problem, as I see it, is that there is no easy way to using new
stuff (from unstable) in the stable tree easily.
One idea I and a friend/co-worker was that for older systems, we
could package the source, so it could be compiled via a tool like
turbopkg or dselect. What put a damper on that is that virtually
none of our rpm 3.x rpms would compile on our older rpm 2.5 systems.
I believe that the debian dpkg/debhelper, etc. tools are more
flexible and less prone to this breakage, so maybe Debian can run
with this idea. You'd need to make sure you had complete dependency
checking for source, though.
Well, I'm out of ideas and comments.
Ciao!
--
"No matter where you go, there you are."
--Buckaroo Banzai (Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai)
The Doctor What: A really hip dude http://docwhat.gerf.org/
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