Thanks for Debian (was: Re: thanks)

[Rogério Brito <rbrito@ime.usp.br>]

On Oct 22 2005, John Hasler wrote:
> aciddata writes:
> > i just wanna say that debian is great and the community and all
> > programmers of it too! thanks!
> 
> Thank you for doing something that never seems to occur to most users.

Well, I'm also feeling guilty after your message of not thanking the
developers. I do know how it is pleasing to receive kind words for a
project you maintain to be recognized and useful for some people.

In this, sense, I would like to thank all the Debian Developers for
keeping things portable among 11 architectures (and counting!) and
addressing the issues so well.

The Debian Project is the target of a lot of criticism, but the fact
that it remains live, with many others taking Debian as a foundation
(and some of these dying), while Debian just progresses is an indication
that something good is done by the project.

The improvements made to the project over the time have (now, with
apt/dpkg supporting signed release files and bzip2 compression of
packages, which is amazing) is enough to keep me hooked with Debian.

In fact, I'd say that I don't really care for Linux at all: what I *do*
care about is Debian. If Linux stops working for some reason, or if its
quality drops below what I have in mind, I'd simply love to have a new
kernel (be it BSD or HURD or whatever) with Debian on top of it.

And for those that already had the frustrating experience of using
things like Fink for MacOS X know how spoiled we can be with Debian
proper: the lack of changelogs, the lack of the menu infra-structure
just working right, the instant availability of binary packages compiled
properly etc.

So, in essence, this is a long way to say "thank you" for all the work
that has been done in the past years with Debian. It's really amazing.


Thanks, Rogério Brito.

-- 
Rogério Brito : rbrito@ime.usp.br : http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito
Homepage of the algorithms package : http://algorithms.berlios.de
Homepage on freshmeat:  http://freshmeat.net/projects/algorithms/