Re: Debian concordance
Scott James Remnant <scott@netsplit.com> writes:
> On Sat, 2005-06-18 at 11:35 -0500, Ian Murdock wrote:
>> "Debian packages just work" has been a truism for *years*, and it's
>> been one of our key technical selling points. I don't want to see that
>> fall by the wayside. This thread is a perfect example of what will
>> happen if we don't worry about this stuff *now*. I've seen this movie
>> before.
> Actually, this is a conceit that for some reason Debian Developers (who,
> of course, only run Debian on their systems) still maintain while the
> rest of the world believes the exact opposite.
> Debian has had a long history of being hostile towards any attempt to
> provide .debs that aren't in the archive, both socially and technically.
Er, huh? I got started with Debian packaging by providing an extensive
set of local .debs for Stanford internal use for quite some time before I
started getting them into the base archive. Everything just worked. Not
only did everything just work, but it was *significantly* easier to set
this up and make it work properly with Debian than with Red Hat.
> Walking up to a "man on the street", if anything, you'll find Debian has
> a far worse reputation than RPM and RedHat-derived distributions. The
> general feeling is that third-party RPMs will almost always install on
> any system, while third-party .debs are practically useless.
This is, to me, an utterly bizarre statement. My personal experience
could not possibly be more completely opposite to this.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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