Debian, Past Present & Future

solferino writes "Christoph Lameter, a major guru in the debian project, has put up a very well written talk that he gave earlier this week that addresses debian's past, present and future. He includes a good background history of the project, some interesting sets of figures and projections (30,000 packages by the end of 2004!), a good discussion of the pros/cons of source based distros and his ideas about a new package manager he is developing (uPM). In all a very good read, whether you are just now considering dipping a toe into the debian well-spring or have been drinking from the source for a long time already."

Comments

apt

[Anonymous Coward]

apt-get install first-post

Re:apt

[Anonymous Coward]

E: Errors while processing: Not allowed by moderators.

Re:apt

[Anonymous Coward]

apt-cache search informative-comments

New Slogan for Debian

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's not the size of your package that matters, it's how many you have."

What happens when they run out of Toy Story chars?

[httpamphibio.us]

I imagine this will be similar to the catastrophic Y2K bug. :)

Re:What happens when they run out of Toy Story cha

[NWT]

Oh come on, by then we'll have Toy Story 11 with a whole bunch of new funky character-names ...

Re:30,000 pkgs by 2004?

[dfeist]

640 are plenty for all, I thought...

Re:30,000 pkgs by 2004?

[JollyTX]

Hey, careful with that joke, it's an antique!

Short Fuses

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian developers are known to have strong convictions and it is easy to get into some old argument when the buttons of one group or another are pressed.

heh, I didn't know all /. posters were debian developers as well.

profit

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Grow beard 2. Leave your job at AI labs. 3. Forget your hygiene. 4. Support free software that has a logo of your smelly feet. 5. Rant about the name of software that someone else has created and named. 6. ? 7. Profit 8. Rant about the kernel of Debian and make sure they will switch to The HURD kernel. 9. Wake up one morning, realize that The HURD is a piece of shit and.. 10. Shoot yourself.

Re:30,000 pkgs by 2004?

[spoonist]

Not 640, 640k. The actual quote is as follows:

" 640k should be enough for anybody."

If 640k packages should be enough, then they still have 610,000 packages to go!!

Quit writing about the history of Debian and get to work on those packages!!!

Extrapolation

[arvindn]

Umm.. I'm not sure about this exponential extrapolation thingy. By the same logic, they would be supporting something like 120 architectures by 2006 :-)

They need more spreadsheet debs...

[Anonymous Coward]

...since figures have been done in M$ Excel... ;)

ahhh wrong button

[FrozedSolid]

I meant to say...

He even goes on to call source-based distros "immature". Perhaps in the Linux world, but how long has FreeBSD been around? It's okay to borrow ideas from other groups when those ideas seem to be working.

I'm pretty sure FreeBSD offers a set of binaries alongside the ports tree. Gentoo offers only the binaries required to compile the base system and then proceeds to compile it, and everything else, from scratch. Everything is optimized and whatnot, and it's probably easier to maintain the distro since there's no need for the developers to compile the binaries. The downside is it's slow to install/upgrade pkgs, especially if you've compiled glibc 3 times because it's been updated quickly. Also, occasinally I'll find things that fail to compile in the tree.