Re: "Why" Debian Core Consortium ? Why not UserLinux? Why not Debian?
On 7/28/05, Jeff Licquia <licquia@progeny.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-07-28 at 14:54 +0000, Andre Felipe Machado wrote:
> > Please, explain these issues.
>
> The short explanation, I think, is that people often have different
> ideas.
The longer explanation, I think, can be had by looking back in the
debian-devel archives for discussion about the Linux Core Consortium.
Some of the same players were arguing for some of the same tactics
(including the designation of "golden binaries" for ISVs to test
against). I happen to disagree with some of these ideas (more on
likelihood-of-success and law-of-unintended-consequences grounds than
for any philosophical or legalistic reason), but apart from the naming
issue I don't see why they shouldn't be allowed to give it a shot as
long as they don't drag Debian along with them.
> At DebConf, it was announced that there are somewhere around 130
> different distros based on Debian. Do you think that bringing some of
> these closer together, and closer to Debian proper, is a bad thing?
Debian is unique in its balance between caring principally about the
source yet providing trustworthy binaries; encouraging derivatives yet
producing its own, top-tier, supported releases; policing SONAMEs and
ABI compatibility yet discouraging ISVs from relying on exact bits.
To the extent that the "Debian Core Consortium" risks disrupting this
balance, it deserves at least as sharp (but not hostile) an inquiry
as, say, Ubuntu has received.
Cheers,
- Michael
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