Interview with Ian Jackson

Figuring you can never get too much Ian Jackson, Trevelyan writes: "Debian Planet has an interview with the long time Debian maintainer, and a former DPL, a current member of the technical committee and the author of dpkg. Also announced Debian GNU/Linux 2.2r7 released. In case some of you thought Debian won't be releasing anything this year =)"

Comments

Re:Port ports!!!!

[WanderingGhost]

Debian is always out of date so why dont they add a bsd like ports system.
Just for the record... Last time I tried FreeBSD, I found the ports tree not to be all that stable. Trying to install gdm I found something like 4 or 5 broken dependencies.
You can't get quality in a hurry. (Not that FreeBSD isn't great and stable -- I'm just saying Debian is absolutely more polished)
Anyway -- Debian will have something similar to the ports tree (but better) in Woody+1. (apt-src)
Besides that, Debian has been innovating since ever, and has great features:
- APT (now in Conectiva too)
- update-alternatives (now in Red Hat)
- First to adhere closely to FHS
- Bug reporting tools are the best I've ever seen (try reportbug -- the latest version even warns you about the "usual non-bugs in this package") - Kernel compiling tools are quite sophisticated - Debian has been incorporating more Java packages than any other distribution I know of
- Runs on *lots* of architectures. First to use the Hurd. Will soon work wirh BSD kernels (Free, Net & Open)
- Recently created apt-src program will let you create source trees much better than the BSD ports tree.

That's why it takes time to release a new version of Debian.

Re:Port ports!!!!

[Vulture_]

Ever heard of testing? Replace 'stable', 'slink', or (when it's released) 'woody' with 'testing' in /etc/apt/sources.list and update. Then everything's fairly up-to-date, but since it's already gone through 2 weeks of testing by people who run unstable (like me), it's also fairly stable. It's not as stable as 'stable', of course, but it's not horribly outdated, either.