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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 =)"

3 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Port ports!!!! by WanderingGhost · · Score: 5, Informative

    Debian is always out of date so why dont they add a bsd like ports system.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.

  2. Re:Port ports!!!! by Vulture_ · · Score: 5, Informative

    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 It's not as stable as 'stable', of course, but it's not horribly outdated, either.

    --

    The only way the typical /.er can pick up a chick is with a forklift. -- AC

  3. Ian Jackson and the Holy Grail... by tlambert · · Score: 5, Funny
    When I first joined the project, dpkg was a very evil shell script that was little more than a placeholder.
    Listen, lad. I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp.
    "I wrote dpkg v2, a Perl script, because it was the thing that needed writing next."
    So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp.
    "The current C dpkg is actually the third dpkg. I think there may have been parts of the Perl one that were done by someone else, but I basically wrote the Perl version, and wrote all of the C version."
    So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp
    "Around the introduction of the C version, the format was changed from the old `two lines of text and two gzipped tarfiles'. I wanted something more extensible, with room for some additional out-of-band metadata. I also wanted something you didn't need Debian-specific tools to unpack."
    but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands.

    -- Terry