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

Desktop or Server

[xannik]

I would be interested for slashdot to host and interview with Ian. As a user of gentoo linux I have experienced much of the power of a ports based system with its portage package management system, which has close ties to Debian's very own apt-get and dpkg. Debian seems very focused on a stable kernel, even more so than any other distribution I know of. Would it not serve Debian to focus more on the Server side of things and leave the desktop to the propeller heads, Gentoo that is. :)

Re:Desktop or Server

[reaper20]

Debian seems very focused on a stable kernel, even more so than any other distribution I know of.

I think you mean a stable core of the distro. Debian uses Linus' kernels, they don't keep a seperate distribution specific fork like the commercial distributions.

Re:Desktop or Server

[jsse]

As a Debian and Gentoo user and being used Linux extensively for production environment, I think I could answer some, if not all, of your questions.

Gentoo is great, its portage system rocks. The feeling of optimizing every single piece of packages squeezing last drop of performance out of existing hardware is so cool.

However, portage system cannot beat Debian's package system in production environment. First of all, most production systems have most development system removed, especially for firewalls and edge servers. We are not doing it in order to make life harder, but we must reduce of risk and lost when the boxes are being hacked.

Second, updating of packages in portage system takes too much time. Even you do the update every day 'emerge -u world' still takes you a lot of time. Not to mention when we could only perform the update once per week.

Third and most important, the strength of Debian's package system does not only lie in its technical merit, but also its overall management by maintainers. As we know Debian is divided into three distro - stable, testing and still in development(or unstable). Each branch is carefully managed and maintained. The stable distro is very desirable for most production environment.

You may say most packages in 'stable' are too out-of-date, but it's really stable, thanks to the efforts of many maintainers.

I can say, the status of portage system is very near the sid distro of Debian. However, having unstable version deployed in production environment is very risky, especially on some servers involved expensive transactions where 10% boost in performance cannot cover the lost in single downtime.

Just my two cents.

Re:What annoyes me about Debian folks

[LinuxGeek8]

Are rpms still such a pain in the ass to create? With dpkg, all you need is a "make clean" and "make install" target, and 2 minutes with dpkg-make and you've got a deb of your own software.

In essence, Yes.
You make a specfile which mostly consists of macros; like %configure, %make, %makeinstall. Of course you have to specify other Metadata, like License, Source, Patch1, Patch2, Url. You can make a filelist yourself, where you choose which files end up in the package.

And if you're packaging something that uses libaries, dpkg-buildpackage will automatically figure out what libraries you're using, what packages provided those libraries, and then automatically add them to the package's dependency list.

Yup, rpm uses on mandrake the scripts /usr/lib/rpm/find-requires and find-provides. You can manually add Requires or Provides to the specfile, like Provides: smtpdaemon.
A difference is that rpm uses mostly files from libraries as dependencies, while dpkg uses packages. In the end that should just work the same.

Combine that with the ability to easily make your own sources for apt, and making many workstations is as easy as creating one deb file that depends on all the packages you want to have on a workstation. Just add your local source to /etc/apt/sources.list on a new workstation, apt-get update, and apt-get install ourworkstationload and it downloads the latest version of everything and installs.

Well, if you use apt together with rpm, you can just do the same I suppose.
If you use urpmi with rpm, you can use genhdlist which makes a hdlist.cz file with the rpm-headers. You can then use "urpmi.addmedia name ftp://ftp.bla.org/RPMS with hdlist.cz" and install packages from that repository.
And for the fake package, you can make a specfile without a real tar.gz and filelist, but with your own defined dependencies.

apt and dpkg rock compared to rpm.

There you go again.
You can compare dpkg and rpm.
And you can compare apt+dpkg and apt+rpm or urpmi+rpm.
You cannot compare apt to rpm, in the same sense that you cannot compare apt and dpkg.