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Re: Enterprise and Debian Pure Blends



On Wed, Sep 01, 2010 at 06:52:23PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> "Jesús M. Navarro" <jesus.navarro@undominio.net> writes:
> > Again, I wouldn't be so sure.  That's the way *now*, true, but I'd say
> > that's mainly because of lacking of standards and enough maturity, so
> > almost everybody, specially the big ones, needed to invent their own
> > way.
> 
> > Look at the way aviation, electricity, landline communications,
> > etc. evolved and you'll see the future of IT: we are just now going past
> > the era of the pioneers, where almost everything needed to be done
> > taylor-made because of the lack of anything better, and starting the era
> > of standards, best practices, abstractions and modularity just like now
> > almost no company deploys its own electricity central or nobody builds a
> > plane or a building from taylor-made components but from standardized
> > ones.
> 
> I'll believe that once I'm not spending most of my time deploying new
> services that I'd never heard of five years ago.  We seem to still be in
> the destabilizing growth phase as far as I can tell.  Those areas are run
> the way they are because their fundamental product has not changed that
> much in twenty, thirty, forty years.  Nothing involved in running
> enterprise infrastructure higher than the level of a TCP/IP network can
> really say that; even Kerberos is significantly different today than it
> was 15 years ago.  And even with a TCP/IP network, look at wireless.
> 
> I think you'll be right eventually.  I think we're still 20 years away
> from you being right.
> 
> It is, however, always possible that I'm too pessimistic.

I think we need more than "standards, best practices, abstractions and
modularity".  I don't think it is a pessimistic 20 year maturity process
before "the promised land" will be reached.  I think as an industry
we are not yet even aware of the right design issues for integration
(at least I haven't yet found a forum where the issue is addressed at
the scale and scope that is necessary).  And developers are even less
aware of these issues than enterprise admins who are not even as aware
of these issues as students of Debian Policy (which is the only document
that I've ever seen with the scope and vision of "hyper-integration"
of software at the distribution scale so that it will "just work" for
the maximum cross section of users and be workable for the rest of us).

I have argued (in two blog posts[0][1]) that it is a conceptual vision
issue:  we need to take a stand that we require "eternally regenerative
software" and stop accepting that upgrades require "heart-transplant"
surgeries.  A young adult upon entering puberty does not have a new body
prepared on the other side of the server room to which all important
functions are migrated over a long weekend with extra consultants plus
the whole IT staff all working overtime!  Why should enterprise systems
administration work this way?  Because it is a hard problem to anticipate
all of the integration issues and solve them in the upstream software
(and/or Debian packaging) proactively, comprehensively and automatically.
But that is what we must do.

I think Debian Policy[2] is one place where we are already deeply engaged
in doing the appropriate work.  I know of no other comparable place
where the work is being done at the requisite scale of completeness.
One missing component that I recently identified is the need to engage
more effectively with upstreams.  I think this kind of outreach will go
a long way to inspiring upstreams to proactively fix the problems so
that enterprise admins and Debian developers do not need to debug the
integration problems caused by their ignorance of the issues.  That is
why I posted a proposal to Debian Project yesterday about improving our
coordination with upstreams[3].

Anyway that's my current "road map" to the promised land.

0. http://blog.remoteresponder.net/2009/10/16/customization-upgradeability-and-eternally-regenerative-software-administration/
1. http://blog.remoteresponder.net/2009/11/30/seven-observations-on-software-maintenance-and-foss/
2. http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/
3. http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2010/09/msg00005.html

-- 
We are on a spaceship; a beautiful one.  It took billions of years to develop.
We're not going to get another.  Now, how do we make this spaceship work?
  -- Buckminster Fuller

CJ Fearnley                |  Explorer in Universe
cjf@CJFearnley.com         |  "Dare to be Naive" -- Bucky Fuller
http://www.CJFearnley.com  |  http://blog.remoteresponder.net/


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