Re: The Direction of Debian
On Fri, 12 Apr 2002, Dimitri Maziuk wrote:
> Basically, Debian project seems to be moving towards
> more feechoorz, more luser-friendly helper apps etc.
> Most software engineers believe that this exactly the
> wrong thing to do: more complexity => unforseen
> interactions between the parts => more bugs, less
> stability.
And people wonder why I think both KDE and Gnome suck. 8:o)
> Besides, there already are newbie-friendly
> distros, why try to muscle in on the niche that's already
> been filled?
It's newbie friendly. Debian won me over on price, but I stayed for
it's features.
> 1. I've nothing against helper apps. as long as they *can
> be turned off*. Dexconf cannot be turned off (don't get
> me started on general idiocy behind dexconf. Or alsaconf).
What is dexconf?
> 2. Current practice of building packages with "commonly
> used options" and adding dependencies to packages that
> provide those options.
I thought it set packages at "recommended" when a particular feature had
the dependancy.
> 2.1. Who decides what's "common"? Which idiot decided
> that analog's libgd should depend on X11 libraries?
I've noticed this a lot. It bugs me when I try to install something on
my older box (that I don't have X on) and it insists on installing xlibs
and whatever other x stuff it can find, when I know perfectly well it's
not an X prog.
> 3. Potato is too old for many real-life uses. Woody
> is unsuitable for many production systems -- not only
> for political (managers have every reason to distrust
> "officially beta" OS), but also for technical (Woody
> doesn't get security updates, Woody breaks) reasons.
> That will change once woody is released, but then the
> cycle will begin again. On top of that, 2.2. makes
> Woody unsuitable for certain class systems, and that
> will not change with Woody's release. The point? --
> Debian is becoming less versatile with every release.
That's always bugged me about stable: It ages quickly.
> Oh sure, RPM format was really inferior back then. Now,
> Woody is still better that Seawolf (RH 7.2, that's the
> one I had in mind). What I'm afraid of is that Woody+1
> will not be any better than Seawolf+1 -- it'll suck as
> much, only in different ways.
RPM *still* puts files in the wrong places, and you *still* have to find
packages and resolve dependancies by hand.
> Murphy must have been asleep, then. As for dist-upgrading a
> 4-yo potato, lots of updated packages will come with impoved
> and slightly incompatible config files (X v.3 => X v.4, for
> obvious example). If you're upgrading a fully-configured box,
> you have every reason to expect it won't come back up after
> the upgrade -- so expect at least 10 hours downtime (just
> like you describe: Friday, Saturday and maybe Sunday, too).
> Obviously, this won't work on a 24x7 e-shop webserver: you
Sure it is. Round robin DNS, upgrade one server at a time.
--
Baloo
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