Re: apologies and summary. was: Where is Debian going?
<quote who="giuseppe bonacci">
> What scares me is the fact that experienced users around me (academic
> developers as well as sysadmins managing hosts providing services to
> millions of people) after careful thinking and a comparison period
> discard Debian and choose RedHat. I don't think they are all
> short-sighted or lazy. Moreover, despite someone's belief that Debian
> stable is an ideal "server distribution", there are many more RedHat
> linux servers than Debian out there. Perhaps, only perhaps, there is a
> reason.
i don't see why this would scare someone. this is perfectly normal.
people are choosing what they are famillar with. even if they are
only famillar with the name. I don't know many people who are
willing to deploy a new system without a lot of testing first(either
at the job, or at another job, or at home etc). When i came to
my current company, EVERYTHING was redhat. my boss was reluctant
to try out debian. But debian slowly made progress to the point
where he came to visit me(he worked in another city), we were moving
a server room during an office move, he saw our CVS server bootup,
asked me "What is that?" I said "Redhat", he said "screw that!"
that was the best moment ..
anyways, i'm just saying that this is totally common, if someone
came to me and said lets replace all debian systems with freebsd
because its better I would say no. Because I am not famillar with
it.(though i do use it in some areas).
Then there is the issue of trust. I think i was able to deploy
debian here because my boss got to trust me, and depend on me.
so he trusted I knew what was best for the department as far
as the OS goes. And as time went on i made more and more
decisions he just sat back and said 'i want to do X, whats
the best way to do it'.
I would not want to work in an enviornment where I was not
able to gain the trust of the people above me. Wouldn't be
fun. Sofar I haven't worked at a job where I wasn't able
to gain the complete trust of my supervisors and bosses
to the point where i could do what i wanted(maybe I'm
lucky ..?)
> Now the step has become a large gap, because the release interval is
> growing longer and longer. There is nothing evil in this growth, and it
> is not accidental, since the number of packages involved and presumably
> maintainers to coordinate increases rapidly. It can't be helped.
> What is evil is the fact that very long release intervals automatically
> result in Stable distributions that are already obsolete the day before
> they are released.
is it really longer? It feels to me like the time between
2.0 and 2.2 (2.1 was pretty minor ?) was about the same as
2.0 to 3.0. i started using debian about a month after 2.0 came
out. If release intervals are that much of an issue, think about
the people out there that still run Solaris 2.6, or 2.5, or
HPUX 10.2, or IRIX 5 ..while I do like releases available at
maybe 2 year intervals, the potato->woody release doesn't
seem so bad. even though woody is not 'officialy' released
it is still ready for many of the server tasks I had potato
machines doing. So i can deploy it now, where I need it
and it works..I deployed my first production woody system a
little over a year ago to accomidate a web application called
eZ publish. I setup my first woody desktop not long after.
even on the win32 side, the only production win32 servers I
have on my network at work are NT4 based, NT4 came out
around 1996 which would make that OS 6 years old. I will not
upgrade them to win2000 however. just because it's old doesn't
make it bad.
> I think there is nothing wrong with Branden not including XFree 4.2.x in
[..]
> release. This could take literally years.
this may be a problem for some, but to me xfree 4.2 is such
a minor upgrade. I want my X to be solid..and for the most
part it is, 30 virtual desktops, ~45 windows open, runs
24/7 for about a month before i need to reload it. about
on par with Xfree3.
> turning to a more recent (and tested) upstream version for a particular
> package instead of patching the stable obsolete version. But the "stable"
> list does not change. (With the notable recent exception of ssh, but
> again this is a wrong example.)
some of my servers would be perfectly happy runing debian 2.2
for the next 5 years, only reason I upgrade is because at least
from slink->potato the security support stopped about 90 days
after potato came out. other servers need woody now, and some
others have tons of stuff I compiled on it.
>
> Now, what if "stable" were simply a list of packages blessed as
> reasonably stable and reliable and bug-free, in other words the
> continuously
> evolving list of "current packages", being defined current a package that
> has traversed "unstable" and "testing" and is ready to be used by all
> Debian users? Why wait for the next release cycle?
I would not want for example "stable" xfree 3 to all of a sudden
become xfree 4 overnight. same would go for BIND, i would not
like to all of a sudden see my BIND 8 systems be upgraded to
bind9 and all of my custom configuration stuff has to be totally
re written. with a dist-upgrade I KNOW things will break, I want
a minimal amount of fuss when i just to an upgrade on a stable
system. the config files should all be completely compadible,
etc..
>
> Maybe a sysadm prefers to have to update some package on his servers now
> and then, rather than having a sudden catastrophe at every switch between
> stable distributions.
as a "sysadm" of 40-50 systems i can say we have that now, If i want
a newer version I can usually compile it on the current rev. take
for example openldap. i needed openldap2 on potato, so i grabbed
the sources and built the packages. once I built that, I had
to rebuild php4 because of the php4 ldap module would segfault
without being relinked against the new ldap. so i did. at the same
time i know from the steps I am doing this is out of the ordinary
and I may have problems. I do not expect problems when i just
do apt-get upgrade on stable. I was quite suprised/upset when
a SSH fix came out(not the recent one, this one was a while ago)
on about 40% of my systems the install bombed, and because the
install stops the ssh server BEFORE installing it the machines
were unreachable!#@@! luckily i caught this on the local network
before i upgraded remote machines. one reason why i never do
unattended installs.(and yes i reported this SSH problem as
a bug and the maintainer at the time said something like
they weren't going to bother with it since it was so "old"
even though it was the latest version in potato)
> (let me remind you that currently a stable
> distribution becomes obsolete shortly after it is replaced, and is not
> subject to security updates anymore: a sysadm is compelled to switch.)
and for most of my systems thats fine, its usually the desktop
systems running the fancy video cards and fancy desktop enviorments
(i still run afterstep 1.6 compiled from potato on woody) that
are effected.
> Despite the "lack of faith" of some developers, I think dpkg and apt are
> now powerful enough and the ELF system is flexible enough to allow for
> multiple versions of libraries and applications to live in the same list
> and perhaps if not on the same running system.
as long as its as stable as my systems are now. I thought potato
was stable on my desktop...6 months after i booted, I was still in
it..upgraded to woody.. 6 months after i upgraded i still hadn't
had to reboot or shutdown. thats the kind of reliablity I have
come to see(and as a side-effect, expect) from the debian project.
if some want to live on the edge with the latest and greatest thats
fine by me..just please don't let it affect the stability of
the 'stable' version. this is one of the things that sets debian
apart from the rest. One of the reasons I like it.
nate
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