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Doc Needed: The Debian Way



Hi all,

After playing around with my debian system for a few versions now, and
looking through the mailing list archives lately, I've noticed that
something that Debian really needs to have is a short doc about the
"debian way" of doing things.  What I'm thinking of is a short summary
of the features that make debian different (better?) than the other
dists out there.  

Most of the things that I'm thinking of are admin features, but the
Debian Administrators guide looks like it will be too general for this
stuff. (Maybe an appendix?)

Here's a short list of stuff that admins coming from other dists should
really know about.  Most of them I just stumbled upon (usually a happy
surprise).

(1) The debian menu system.
Man I love this thing.  It is completely under hyped.  

(2) update-rc (also debian runlevel policy -- we are not RH)

(3) start-stop-daemon

(4) Every user has his/her own group
I saw an ISP (running debian) once that changed this and put all users
into one group.  Unfortunately they didn't change the default umask. 
YIKES.  All users could write to each others files (web space).


I'm sure that there are lots of other debian specific things that I
can't remember off the top of my head (or don't know about).  I'm no
professional.  The only box that I admin is my home one.

Mark Small 
(I'm not a developer, just a happy user)


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