Re: bits/news from the users of Debian?
> If you are using Debian on your phone, embedded computer, laptop,
> desktop, server, network, telecommunications equipment or other part of
> your information infrastructure, I'd love to hear from you.
> What are you using Debian for?
I'm presently running sid on two desktops and etch on a small VPS based server
hosting a wiki and messageboard.
> uninteresting to you, but... What cool package(s) are you using? Did you
> buy a beverage for a Debian contributor at DebConf? Are you using
> packages from a general area of Debian (science, games, development,
> servers)? What about Debian do you think needs changing - do you have
> any specific gripes? Is there a specific package that needs to be
> maintained better? Do you have the popularity-contest package installed
> and working? If not, why not?
I've settled in as a KDE user over the past few years. I just finished
checking out the 4.1 beta live CD and I'm NOT impressed. I really hope that
debian decides to ship Lenny with 3.5.x so I can switch to that and keep my
desktop as it is for a few more years.
The situation with rdiff-backup has been annoying but I'm not sure it could
have been avoided.
I have popcon running on all boxes.
> Are you missing certain packages that are
> not available in Debian, were removed from Debian or are not available
> in the last stable release (etch)? Why are you using Debian rather than
> RHEL/Fedora/CentOS, Gentoo, Ubuntu, MacOS or Windows (or the other way
> around)? Are you making a living using or customising or deploying
> Debian? What are your plans for using Debian in the future? Did your
> Debian wishlist for 2007 come true? What is your Debian wishlist for
> 2008? What does Debian mean to you? In what ways do you or do you intend
> to contribute to Debian and free software in general? How can we help
> you to contribute to Debian or free software in general?
I started dual booting slackware on my desktop in the mid 90s and switched
over to debian when slackware dropped gnome. I gave Ubuntu a try somewhere
around Dapper and was not impressed.
I like debain because:
1. It's rock solid and secure
2. The (mostly) uncompromising commitment to software freedom.
I am somewhat bothered by the recent SSL debacle. I can't help but wonder if
the rushed manner in which Etch was pushed out the door is partially to
blame. I really don't care about the speed of releases and would prefer that
as much time as needed be given to a release to get it right the first time.
I run sid on the desktop and 2-3 years is more often than I'd really like to
upgrade a server anyway.
I'd really like to see code audits of critical packages. If OpenBSD can do it
with a fraction of debian's manpower, debian should be able to as well.
I think putting patches on the web for review would be a good idea. Putting
them in a directory of the source package does no good for upstreams and
other interested parties who are not running debian. How is somebody on a
Windows box supposed to get the patches out of a .deb?
Something based on this perhaps?
http://www.review-board.org/
I've noticed that the traffic on debian mailing lists has dramatically
decreased. I'm assuming this is because developer discussions have more or
less moved to irc. There are two fairly minor problems here.
1. This is a disservice to users running sid as mailing list discussions often
provide a heads up to impending breakage.
2. Since there is no record of the irc discussions, this shift seems to go
against the grain of debian's commitment to openness.
Doing as ubuntu has done and putting logs of the main debian irc channels on
the web would solve both of these problems.
http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/
Grepping logs of old discussions is also often easier and faster than hanging
out on irc until you can a question answered.
I'm a huge fan of the rougelike genere and there are some classic ones which
are not in debian. I'll take a crack at packaging a couple sooner or later.
I'm unsure if my extremely limited C skills will be enough to get 10-15 year
old code to compile with a modern gcc on all the architectures debian
supports though.
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