Re: Talk on "Why Linux, Why Debian"
Manoj Srivastava writes:
Hi Manoi,
> With less than a day to go, I have put my talk up on the net
> at http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/talk.html. Comments welcome.
A great piece, here are my comments.
I agree with you when you say:
The differentiating factor is Debian policy, and the stringent
package format QA process
but reading your talk it is easy to miss what policy comprises and why
it is critical for choosing Debian over others. You mention most
important things, but fail to explicitely attribute them to policy.
You can fine-tune the degree of risk you want to take ...
But even the more adventurous choices are solid enough that they
virtually never break. And `stable' just never breaks ;-).
It would be good if you could be more convincing about the fact that
stable really is, and unstable really isn't. In my experience, herein
lies exactly one of the biggest image problems of Debian.
The uninitiated interpret Debian's choice of distributions as: stable
- hopefully as stable as Red Hat, but too out of date to use for
anything but a server that has not too recent hardware; testing - wtf,
a distro without security fixes?; unstable - I don't have the time to
fix my machine all the time.
Upgrades have been said to be the killer advantage for Debian.
They are, but I still don't think that people (Red Hat users, eg),
realise that Debian can almost invariably be upgraded remotely: it
does not need burning and popping in a CD, rebooting and handholding.
Jan.
--
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jantien | http://www.lilypond.org
Reply to: