On Sun, 13 May 2001, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier wrote:
> On Sun, 13 May 2001, Stuart Krivis wrote:
>
> >
> > On Saturday, May 12, 2001, at 11:25 PM, Ethan Benson wrote:
> >
> > > my personal guess is that anything before late november is not going
> > > to happen. but who knows, if more people help with boot floppies that
> > > would probably help. the main thing is going to be seeing how many
> > > times freezes have to be restarted because RC bugs were not fixed.
> > > thats why potato's freeze took so long.
> > >
> >
> > I've always wondered why Debian has such trouble with releases. The
> > RedHat clones put stuff out regularly. Yeah, I know, Debian actually
> > wants things to _work_. :-) But FreeBSD also does a better job at new
> > releases, and FreeBSD is high quality like Debian IMO.
>
> One consideration, already mentioned, is the number of packages that
> make up a Debian GNU/Linux release.
this is what i was thinking. however, this is one place where debian has
somewhat of a weakness. because of the number of people involved i
imagine that it's difficult to coodinate such a huge amount of packages
over so many differnt people.
however, the upside to this is. whenever there is a security flaw found
in a package, or a new version of an application comes out, it can usually
be had very quickly for exactly the reason above, there are a lot of
people, and they are each managing their own little peice of the puzzle.
>
> Another is, unlike FreeBSD, Debian supports a huge number of architechtures.
> FreeBSD supports x86, DEC-Alpha and PC98 (taken directly from their site)...
>
> The installer project for Debian is much more ambitious than any of the
> *BSD's as well - this isn't a knock at the *BSD'ers, either - but the
> goals are different. The Debian team wants to make it much easier for
> newer folks to install Debian. Whatever graces FreeBSD may have, a
> user-friendly install is NOT one of them.
>
i find freebsd's and debian's installers really really similar
actually. easy to use if you have an idea what you're doing.
> Also - the Debian team works on integrating software into releases that
> is constantly - and rapidly - changing. Often when one thing changes, it
> breaks another thing - and you have to change thing A because it's either
> a crucial bux or security fix, or a vital new feature that everyone wants.
what i do is run unstable on my workstations, and stable on firewalls and
servers, when security is an issue.
just my thoughts on the matter
--
Forrest English
http://truffula.net
"When we have nothing left to give
There will be no reason for us to live
But when we have nothing left to lose
You will have nothing left to use"
-Fugazi