Re: next debian stable ?
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You aren't seriously trying to argue all this, are you? I haven't
seen anything this funny since before adequacy.org went under, in
which this kind of subtle, ironic humor ran rampant.
On Tue, Apr 29, 2003 at 08:57:59PM -0500, David Krider wrote:
> 1) How many times have you "seamlessly upgraded" your Debian boxes to a
> new version? Given the historical release schedule of the project, it
> CAN'T have been more than once.
That's not true. unstable, testing and frozen get updates daily.
Plus folks running stable still need to grab the latest security
updates. I've been using Debian since bo and can assure you that
upgrades on stable do go smoothly.
> For all the hassle I've had with
> learning the structure of the Debian system, I could have paid for fresh
> installs or SuSE or Red Hat several times over.
And relearn the quirks on every upgrade reinstallation.
> 2) See my points above on Apache 2. I suspect I'm not alone...
I think you are. apache2's been out for over a year now, IIRC. PHP
and perl still don't work with apache 2 (this isn't a debian bug,
either), and I suspect I can count the number of apache2 sites using
personal apendages, without even having to take off my boots or pants.
> 3) Maybe rpm-based systems don't respect admin changes _as well as_ apt,
> but before major changes, you should have a backup of your config
> anyway.
s/_as well as_ apt/at all, in every manner unlike debconf.
> 4) You can modify and repackage rpm's too.
And you can do that with debs, too. What good is a package manager
you can't create packages with? KDE, XF86, wine, java, and MP3
encoders are all available from many different sites than Debian's, in
Debian format (and in the case of MP3 encoders, thanks to BMI's patent
stupidity, you won't find them in Debian). If you get pine from
Debian, thanks to University of Washington's obtuse Pine license, you
get to make your own pine packages (fortunately, the pine-tracker
package tells you what you need to do, and it's two steps and 5
minutes). There's many ways to get a new kernel on your system. If
you use make-kpkg, the result is a nice debian package for you to
install.
With the stuff in main and contrib, there's nothing technically or
legally standing in your way from making your own packages (non-free
you'll need to check that package's license to see if you're allowed
to).
> I don't trust non-official backports on *any* system, including Windows.
Do you currently use or have you ever used a third-party RPM?
> You're joking, aren't you? There's no way a corporation will come
> anywhere within miles of using Debian for heavy lifting.
So we're just going to go ahead and pretend Pixar isn't a corporation
now, eh? Oh, I guess HP isn't a corporation either huh? I guess OSDN
isn't, either. We can also go ahead and ignore Oregon Health and
Sciences University and Intel as well (those are Oregon's largest and
second largest employer, respectively, both depend on it for labs).
And the only reason there's still security updates for the prior
stable is because some large entity has 20,000 Debian boxes deployed
as desktops and they're trying to update. That's either a huge school
or corporation, your call.
> Support is the big issue here. Unless you go get Progeny to build a
> custom Debian distro and subsequently support it, you're hosed. On
> top of that, most "corporate" type software, like big RDBMS and CAE
> software (both of which we are using) have very specific support
> requirements, and guess what? Debian stable won't fulfill them in
> many cases.
If you're talking commercial RDBMS, I don't see how that could
possibly be the case. The release cycles on those things are huge. I
can imagine you probably need beefy hardware, but I can't imagine
commercial, enterprise-oriented anything depending on today's CVS
version of anything. Generally commercial shops dealing with unix
wait until things stablize a bit, which takes time. If you need
something newer than stable, pull in some testing or frozen; this is
what the next stable will be.
> I never thought anyone on this list would be. In fact, I'm surprised I
> haven't heard, "Don't let the door hit you on the way out" yet. ;-)
Oh, I'm nowhere near that point, but I'm sure others here are probably
getting some humor value out of this thread.
- --
.''`. Baloo Ursidae <baloo@ursine.dyndns.org>
: :' : proud Debian admin and user
`. `'`
`- Debian - when you have better things to do than fix a system
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