Re: Debian: abandon ship?
>
> With hindsight, it's clear that trying to
> support too many architectures was a mistake.
> Of course, everybody makes mistakes. It is truly
> said that he who never made a mistake, never
> made anything.
>
> But what separates the doers from the wannabes
> is the ability to admit a mistake, change
> direction, and move on.
>
> If the people in effective control of Debian's
> direction no longer have this ability, then
> perhaps Debian is no longer useful to most
> of us.
>
> To save the Debian Attack Team the effort
> of a search, I'll admit immediately that
> (like most Debian users) I've contributed
> nothing to Debian except good intentions
> and trivial amounts of money. Debian does
> not need me. And I need a stable release
> with the 2.4 kernel.
>
Debian is run by a few hundred programmers who do this for fun. Not profit.
Because we do this for fun we choose where to spend our time. For some people
the mips architecture and the required hacking is fun. Others are constrained
by the hardware available to them (some of our developers had m68k only access).
Debian will never make it to perfect 6 month release cycles. To use Debian you
must acclimate to apt-get and the "we release every day" credo. Although we
call it "unstable" what we really mean is "changing". If you choose to not
update then you have a fairly stable box. I wish there was more we could do,
but there isn't. Especially now that most of us are not being paid for Debian
work anymore. Cutting back to ia32 (x86) would help, but the cost is not worth
it. Besides, Debian is one of the few dists out there supporting anything
other than Sun and ia32. Removing those arches would leave out many of our
users and potential users. The answers are not so cut and dried.
Maybe this means we lose some users to Red Hat (or SuSE or whoever) and their 6
month cd releases. Everyone has to use what works for them.
As for your last comment about contributing a good user contributes two simple
things:
* they use our software, like it, and tell others
Every linux dist is fighting the marketing of Red Hat. This is witnessed by
UnitedLinux and by many other people's work. Voicing the virtues of Debian
helping us work through our problems is a great help. Criticism is good as
long as it is constructive. That some of our people abused the earlier poster
is disappointing. However there are more than 600 of us and we do act with our
own free will.
* bug reports
Without knowing that something is broke for the way you use it we can not fix
it. Debian lives and dies with its bug tracker. This is more important than
money or even hardware.
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