Re: Will 5.0.1 be more than another live-cd?
Le 30 Avril 2006 03:12, Lionel Elie Mamane a écrit :
> On Sat, Apr 29, 2006 at 02:17:16PM -0400, Gilles wrote:
> > Le 28 Avril 2006 17:17, Klaus Knopper a écrit :
> >> On Fri, Apr 28, 2006 at 04:27:35PM -0400, Gilles wrote:
> >>> But then, security updates for testing should be available. Is
> >>> it the case?
> >>
> >> Well, the security updates for testing are rather appearing in
> >> unstable, still.
> >
> > The official Debian position is that neither testing or unstable
> > are security patched. But there seems to be a project for
> > patching testing here:
> >
> > http://secure-testing-master.debian.net/
>
> You'll notice the "debian.net" domain; that's a domain where any
> Debian developer can get any subdomain, and not the domain of
> official infrastructure.
I knew this. But I didn't know that:
> In my (very limited) experience, these guys mainly *track* which
> security issues affect testing. They actually rush an update to
> testing rather rarely.
It seems your very limited experience confirms Debian's official
stance: only stable is stable and secure. Of course, it all depends
on what one means by "secure". In my view, it's this: you go to
OpenBSD's forums and you give then real shit. Then, you see how long
your system stands up :)
As a matter of fact, for the little that I know, it seems Slackware is
the easiest distro to maintain up-to-date, at least for the packages
Slackware supports. You install stable and then you follow Volkerding
in his development of current:
Patches for stable are here:
ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-10.2/patches/packages/
And the development of current is here:
http://slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=i386
I suppose Swaret could easily keep current up-to-date from here:
ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-current/slackware
But the Swaret story us a sad one. The speed at which it was
developing was just amazing. Then Cottyn got upset because new
upgrade tools were popping up all over the place and, though they
didn't work at all (I tried them!) , were receiving rave reviews.
That's when Little Big Man decided to side against Cottyn in the feud
that ensued. Cottyn gave up development and there's not much
happening since LinuxSneaker (Manry?) took over. That's how little it
took to derail a very promising Linux endeavour, Slackware + Swaret.
As for the tools that repalced Swaret, Slapt-get, or whatever, it
seems Vector has still problems getting them to work correctly.
Before Cottyn decided he would check the dependencoes of tgz packages,
it was deemed impossible. But, with the help of ldd and manifest.gz,
he succeeded and, by providing a better tool than Volkerding himself,
proved he had a knowledge of LInux and Slackware at least equal to
the so-called Man's. That's what Little Big Man couldn't stand.
This development was happening exactly as Klaus thunks it should. Do
you remember when Bruce Perens came to this mailing list to invite
Klaus to participate to Debian? Klaus answered that he was
participating to Debian since all the code he wrotes is GPL. That's
how Cottyn started his project. Slackware was there and he thought he
could help.
When Swaret was still in development, Slackware was gaining in
popularity. Eduardo Sanchez was writing articles on OpenForBusiness
on Slackware administration, mainly through KDE graphic tools.
Somebody even had devised a graphic interface for Swaret! It wasn't
much use since Cottyn's documentation was crystal clear, which is
very rare in the Linux world, but still, it meant some people wanted
to make Slackware more popular.
On aols, Slackware's trolls, the very same people that Little Big Man
chats with everyday, apparently, people who send their dues at every
new release but rarely contribute any line of code, were pretending
that those tools weren't in the Slackware spirit. Just as if they had
any obligation to use them : )
Slackware was once the only Linux distro. Now, for whatever it means,
it's not even ranked at:
http://distrowatch.com/awstats/awstats.DistroWatch.com.osdetail.html
and ranks 11th for the number of clicks for the last 6 months and 13th
for the last 7 days:
http://distrowatch.com/index.php?dataspan=1
Idem here:
http://counter.li.org/awstats/
awstats.pl?config=gimel.counter.li.org&output=osdetail
As John Lennon would say, Imagine. Imagine, say, that Volkerding had
been working on upgrading the distro, Klaus on material detection and
Cottyn on upgrade and maintenance tools for the last 3 years. We're
not talking about Debian's thousand of developers here. Only three.
What kind of distro would we have today? And for the real two-piped
real Slackware administrators, it could still be administered by
untarring sources.
But, somehow, things rarely get together with Linux. Ballmer says he
now begins to understand how Linux works...
Gilles
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