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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."
Yes, this is sometimes annoying. One example is Mozilla; for a very long time, we were stuck with M18 in Potato, while new releases were certainly an improvement.
I understand that there are more variables in Debian with all of its supported architectures, and it wouldn't be as easy to simply release updates of later versions as distributions such as Red Hat do; you can't be sure of the impact it will have everywhere, and backporting security fixes is safer.
Perhaps a "mostly harmless" package repository could be created. No, "testing" doesn't count, because the packages in there will often be built against new libraries, and you probably don't want to go there. But this could contain binaries for packages such as Mozilla, which gets updated a lot (1.1 really is much better than 1.0) and would be unwieldy to build from source). These binaries would be built on a potato system. Those who wanted this sort of thing could simply add another line to their apt sources file, and accept the small risk.
It's possible for someone to do this on their own; Adrian Bunk maintained a repository of several updated packages so that 2.4 series kernels could be used on Potato. But I think it would be nice to have this as an official part of Debian. It doesn't sound so great to say, "Oh, yeah, you can do that; just get the packages from $THIS_GUY".
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
If you got that reference, I'm really sorry.
Anyway, please read this:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2002/debia
Maybe this will clear up a few things. Debian is supporting these architectures because no other Linux distribution does. As the message states, XFree doesn't even support as many architectures as Debian; the Debian project is how users of those architectures get XFree86 at all.
Maybe you feel that they are not important, but I think that the people using them would disagree. Obviously, there are enough people who use each platform to do the work of porting packages to it. What makes you think that they would turn around and do some other, "more important" work instead if support for their architecture was dropped?
[And isn't this why most hardware manufacturers don't release Linux drivers? Because "most people" use Windows?]
Debian exists as it is for many reasons, and there is nothing else like it. It is not going to change into your idea of the perfect distribution. However, there are several distributions which are addressing some of the "problems" _you_ (and others) have with Debian. Most of these amount to pretty graphical installers and a few other things, and are only for x86. Since that seems to be what you want, why don't you try one of them? IOW, don't complain that Mozilla doesn't have an integrated AIM client; use Netscape instead.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
If you look at that nifty chart provided at the beginning of the paper, you can easily see that the release time for stable is stretching out further and further as more packages and architectures are added to the fold. At 9,000 packages and 11 architectures, it took 2 YEARS to ship a stable release. If they are right, and 2004 will bring 30,000 packages (and probably another arch or two), how long is the release cycle going to stretch out to? And will people tolerate that long between stables? Look at the grumbling and outcry about the delay in getting Woody out the door.
I find it very interesting that the article would point out several times how difficult it is to maintain all of those packages and the diffs as they are updated, then point out how using a source-based distribution makes that kind of thing much easier. And yet, the author seems to suggest that source-based distros are somehow not as feasible as binary-based distros. 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 think that the Gentoo project has done a great job in taking the idea of a "ports" system, addressing the shortcomings, and putting a workable source distribution system on the Linux platform.
In my mind, if Debian is going to continue scaling to 5-digit package listings, the project might want to look into the possible benefits of switching to a source-based distribution system. Look at what Gentoo has done, address any shortcomings, and develop a better source distribution system. Doing it the current way with 30,000 packages to maintain, we might not see Debian 4.0 until 2010. And there are probably a lot of people who can't or won't wait that long.
I like how he makes utterly false claims about his data based on his misleading graphs.
Look at his debian growth graph. He conveniently skips the year 2001, making it look like the growth in recent years is something other than linear. He even states "Note that the number of packages seems to be growing exponentially."
The truth is, he's crammed two years of growth into a one year slot on the graph, making it appear to be accellerating. In actuality, if you imagine that growth spread over two years (as it actually is) it looks damn linear.
I guess even volunteers without corporate agendas are subject to fradulent data analysis.
Erik