Re: My machine was hacked - possibly via sshd?
On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 17:55 +1000, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 29, 2005 at 05:08:32PM -0500, Noah Meyerhans wrote:
> > On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 07:16:31AM +1000, David Pastern wrote:
> > > And this, in reality, is why Woody is so old. I cannot imagine any
> > > other distro providing such an old kernel.
> >
> > You've got cause and effect mixed up. Debian is not outdated *because*
> > we support ancient versions of software. We support ancient versions of
> > software because we are outdated. No distribution provides support for
> > their development branch before their stable branch.
> >
> It may be noticed that other distributions are switching to a longer
> release cycle for "commercial/enterprise" products. Mandrake is to
> switch to one release a year (and they don't commit to support for old
> releases for more than about a year), Novell/SUSE are moving to an 18
> month release cycle and five year support, Red Hat are moving to 18
> month/two year cycle and seven year support. Given the effort that it
> takes to support something through even two years of hardware change -
> Debian is actually doing "the right thing" for support by releasing on
> its current release cycle and the big distributions will soon start to
> feel the pain of extended support cycles as well. Debian point
> releases when they come fix security and other issues. Potato had seven
> - one a couple of weeks before the new release. Woody has had four and a
> fifth is in preparation.
Yes, and i've long said that the 3 month/6 month releases by
Redhat/Fedora/Suse/Mandrake are just plain silliness. However - there
is a big difference between a one year release cycle, and the fact that
it's been nearly 3 years since the release of Woody. That's a huge
difference, that no amount of debate can hide. For a long while many
Debian developers have ignored this, and people have moved from Debian
to other distros like Mepis, Ubuntu, Libranet, Xandros, Linspire etc.
I'm not saying that these distros are better, but many people seem to
prefer them to the very slow movement of Debian Woody. I guess i'm
looking at it from the point of view that I don't want to see Debian
die. Whilst I use Libranet, and not pure Debian, i've used pure Debian
in the past. An archaic installer, difficult post installation setup of
even basic things, slow kernel support leading to difficulty in running
newer technologies/devices led me to look elsewhere. I remember using
Woody, and trying to grab kde 3. It was a bloody nightmare. I was
lucky that I had a kind soul help me, and spend a fair bit of time
helping me, otherwise i'd have just given up.
> Our main concerns are a.) Our users b.) Free
> software c.) Producing the best distribution we can d.) Across a range
> of hardware in support of a. and b. leading to c.
>
> You want fast moving latest/greatest - switch your apt-get to
> sid/unstable. You want tested software that is reasonably up to date -
> switch to sarge/testing (soon sarge/stable). [Testing changes on a
> fairly regular basis] You want rock solid
> software you don't want to touch for six months - switch to woody/stable.
> It really is that simple.
Yup, my Libranet system is mostly sarge, with the odd woody package here
and there (very few these days), some custom Libranet packages, and some
Sid. It runs pretty stable, with the odd issue here and there. But
hey, it's software, even the most stable piece of software can misbehave
from time to time.
> You can use pinning to pull in some packages from testing to stable or
> whatever if you really must.
Yeah, i'm doing that now :-) Libranet made that easier, i'm still a
touch hesitant with things like pinning etc, although I understand more
now than I did when I first started with woody. Like everything in
life, you learn as you go. I've had this same argument with others, and
I still think, even if you can pin to sarge/sid, that the releases for
Debian are just too slow. Maybe for a server release, it's great, but
for the average person, using it at home, it's not. Yearly releases
would be fine in my eyes, that's not too short, and certainly a
reasonable length. Of course the hard thing is getting the bug count
down, and that takes competent users who can code. Sadly, my coding
ability is about as good as a fly trying to stop a hurricane.
> Just IMHO
>
> Andy
>
>
Dave
Proud Libranet GNU/Linux user
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