On Tue, 2003-02-25 at 10:04, Alfredo Valles wrote: > Subject: Future of Debian uncertain? What's it about these topics now? 'Doom of Debian' or so? Yes, Debian has weaknesses, but everybody can help. > Personally there are a few things I hate about Woody and I would like > someone to tell me why these so easy to solve issues are still around. > For example: If these issues are so easy to solve, feel free to become a developer and sbow us this solution... > 1-The installation process almost always misses to recognize sound cards > and network. But ironically, Debian CDs include Kudzu, which have always > worked fine for me detecting and configuring these devices once you have > manually installed it with dselect. Isn't that dumb? > Now that there is knoppix available I don't see any reason for Debian > not having a real first class installation system with a very good > hardware database. Various reasons. - You only install Debian once. In my experience, RedHat, SuSE and Mandrake need a complete new installation for each release. If you use their so called update mechanism, the system is either fubar or it's really just the new system installed and the old system removed. Debian upgrades preserve basically everything of the old system. You can have a Debian box and use apt-get, you won't ever see the installer again. - As a direct result of the above, there are relatively few people really interested in doing a good installer, whereas for a commercial distribution, the installer is probably the one important thing because it's what everybody comments about. > 2-After you install the desktop environment with tasksel the gnome fonts > are "BIG". Took me a day to figure it out how to change that. This one entirely depends on your environment. If you use a 1920x1280 screen you'd probably complain that the fonts are too small... If you have a specific complaint - file a bug against the package that is guilty. > 3-All the bash limits are set by default to unlimited except the stack > limit, which is set to 8 Mbytes. This make programs which work with big > arrays in memory to die with a laconic "segmentation fault". Took me > almost a week to discover this one, after I stripped out a large > scientific program seeking for an "invisible" bug in the code, not > having a clue it was a system issue. I wonder how many scientists have > tried Debian for extensive computer calculations and having encounter > this same problem have simply switched back to another distro. file a bug if it hasn't been already discussed. > 4-Finally but most important: What happens that you haven't included > kde3 even in unstable until a few days ago? Why so many packages are so > out of date? because Debian has a habit of (i) working out of the box and (ii) being upgradeable smoothly. kde3 integration was delayed because of gcc issues, mainly. > I have heard that a bug problem in libc6 is the cause of this delay, but > I don't see Knoppix or Suse hanging every day, and they do have the last > soft, so they have found a way to circumvent this problem. Why can't > Debian do the same? Because Debian takes care to integrate with installed base (haven't I said that already?). Because Debian is a volounteer organisation and not able to force people to spend all their time for Debian. > I have also been told that Debian supports eleven architectures. That's > really great! But if this prevents from having the last software > available in an official repository for the arch that 95% of people use, > then I think something have to be done. One obvious solution could be to > allow the development for different architectures to diverge temporally. How will you assure that the divergation of the arches is only temporally? How will you handle bugs when the versions are different? (arches do diverge in unstable, btw). > Maybe you need to create another classification scheme a little more > complex than the usual stable, testing and unstable. > I would propose something like: Stable_arch-independent, > Stable_arch-dependent, Testing, Mixed and Unstable. Where > Stable_arch-independent would be what stable is now, same soft for every > arch. Stable_arch-dependent would be the most stable branch with the > latest soft and libraries versions that have proven stable for a > particular architecture. Of course, Testing, Mixed and Unstable [...] You've got a lot to read (2 or 3M of list discussions, I believe). > One would get the impression that Debian is now a bit bureaucratic and > reluctant to changes. Maybe it is not, but that's how it feels like for > a newcomer. I wonder how decision making is conducted in Debian? Is > there a guy (or a closed group) who take decisions like the holding back > of so many new soft, because of the libc6 issue? How can we (the users) > participate in the decisions of really important matters? Is Debian a > democracy? (I hope so) It's all on the website. There is a constitution, there is the policy, and then there's much of discussion on debian-devel and on the bug tracking system. Decisions are mostly made by the package maintainers, there is a release manager who decides what goes into stable, and there are the testing scripts managing the unstable -> testing transition of packages, sometimes with manual help. > I have said all I feel. I hope it's understood I only want Debian to get > better. I also hope that my lack of knowledge in some issues could be > forgiven together with my poor English. The big problem is basically that the issues are known and much discussed, but it takes a bit more to actually solve them than to claim they're easily solvable. (Note: I am not a Debian Developer.) cheers -- vbi -- featured link: http://fortytwo.ch/smtp
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