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Interview with Ian Jackson

Posted by timothy on from the judge-jackson dept.

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 =)"

1 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Desktop or Server by jsse · · Score: 4, Insightful

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    You may say most packages in 'stable' are too out-of-date, but it's really stable, thanks to the efforts of many maintainers.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