Social Contract Amendment May Bump Sarge To 2005

An anonymous reader submits "Debian's Release Manager Anthony Towns announced that after the Grand Resolution to amend the Social Contract has been successful (it does not only apply to software any more), vital parts to modern Linux systems, such as important documentation, firmware needed for proper hardware support will have to be removed from the distribution before the next release. Moreover, the upcoming installer will need to be changed. He goes on to say that he does not expect this to happen by the end of this year which means that Sarge will not be released in 2004."

Comments

Why can't they

[Anonymous Coward]

Release one version with the new contract next year, and one without it sooner? Call it sarge- and sarge+.

Re:Why can't they

[Wyzard]

Nobody's saying that your proprietary hardware will cease to work in Debian. The packages will still exist; they'll just be in the "non-free" section, separated out so that people who don't want any non-free software can omit that section from their sources.list file. Non-free packages are technically not part of Debian, but if you have a non-free line in your sources.list, there's no difference whatsoever in how you use them.

Re:Why can't they

[Wyzard]

Standard location? In my mind, the "standard" location for a file is where Debian puts it, and I get confused when it's located somewhere else in another distribution. :-)

I get the sense that you're used to installing things via "configure; make; make install". It's good to have a simple method like that available, but when I talk about maintainability of a system, installing non-packaged software is one of the biggest ways to hurt that maintainability. Files created by a "make install" usually don't have any way to cleanly remove or upgrade them; you can upgrade by installing a new version over the old, but if the old version included any files that were removed in the new version, you still have that cruft sitting around. You get the idea.

I like the fact that Debian has lots of infrastructure. I like to know that when I install a package, it will cleanly integrate with other related packages, and when I remove it, it will cleanly go away. I like the fact that when I'm looking for a package that performs a certain function, I can often guess its name, thanks to fairly consistent naming patterns, and that when I'm looking for a file, I can usually guess where it's located due to a consistent and sensible filesystem hierarchy.

I hang out in #debian on IRC, and I read some of the mailing lists, and I see a lot more discussion on practical matters than on philosophy, and philosophical rants are pretty rare. The system works quite well for those who use it; your comment about "fixing their distribution" just doesn't apply. Remember that Debian is run democratically: if you don't like the way something's being done, you can always register as a Debian Developer and vote to do things your way. If you don't want to do that, or if you get outvoted by people who like things the way they are, you can use another distribution and nobody will hold it against you.

Re:Debian is fading into irrelevence?

[Rura Penthe]

Who the hell uses the 2.6 kernel in a production setting? I know I don't. In fact, I vastly prefer to admin servers on debian because finding updated packages is typically EASIER than on Redhat without a support contract. Some server admins prefer the slower moving target of debian releases and the ease of backports.org for packages they NEED upgraded.

Great. Just great.

[JessLeah]

As more and more pieces of hardware will be protected by the ever-intensifying "intellectual property" laws, Debian will get more and more worthless. It's quite simple: In the distant past, manufacturers made specs available to those who asked. Then they stopped doing it, but you could reverse-engineer them. Then a few of them succumbed to commercial pressure (and the desire to look like "nice guys" to geeks who might influence corporate purchasing decisions) and released binary-only, proprietary drivers for the most popular Linux distro(s) (read: Red Hat and, if you're lucky, Mandrake and/or SuSE). Now most companies don't even bother doing that, and there is a growing trend towards the use of wrappers and such around Windows (!!!) DLL-based drivers. Linux's future is one of proprietary drivers and payware wrappers around proprietary Windows drivers.

And the Debian people are rejecting this sort of thing because of their morals. That's really great. It's also, unfortunately, a wonderful way to ensure that Debian only has primitive, reverse-engineered, DMCA-illegal, flaky support for newer hardware.

Let's see. nVidia and ATI both have proprietary binary-only drivers for Linux (which of course ONLY work on Linux/x86, not Linux/PPC or Linux/ARM or Linux/SPARC or whateverthehell), right? DriverLoader is required to use a bunch of WiFi chipsets under Linux, using Windows .DLLs. Mplayer (that favourite of rebellious geeks) uses Windows .DLLs. Am I forgetting any similar projects? And the kernel is full of various drivers (think sound drivers) which ask for proprietary pieces of firmware, right? I suppose the Debian folks are going to rip out support for all of these devices?

I LIKE the Debian project's inherent sense of morality. I DON'T like their ridiculous lack of pragmatism. This sort of antic is only going to drive off more moderate users towards the likes of Fedora (bloatbloatbloat), Lindows^WLinspire (Windows wannabe, bloat), and ... well, and Windows itself. Way to go, guys.

A good push-back

[Animats]

This is a good thing. Debian is pushing back against increasingly proprietary hardware.

Now we need a logo for open-source hardware, so people know what to buy. Preferably one designed by a competent icon designer, like Susan Kare.

Re:Debian has shot itself in the foot

[Phleg]

My company could never have put up with such a slow and unreliable release schedule.

I'd say the release schedule is quite reliable. "Never" is about as reliable as you can get. Joking aside, I don't see what the big problem is. Does your company actually *need* bleeding edge features provided by many packages? The truth is usually no, and that the unmatched stability and reliability of having older packages with fewer features is a better investment. If the answer is yes, it's very rarely for anything but a few packages, which can be upgraded easily through apt pinning.

The only updates that are absolutely critical are security patches. And thankfully, unlike some Operating Systems and distributions, Debian only provides the security fix for its stable branch, and doesn't require you to update the package to a newer version. This means that less bugs have a chance of being introduced in a security patch, which in turn allows companies to install patches with less worrying about whether or not it will break a current installation. It's still possible, but massively less likely.

In fact, when you get down to it, Sarge is pretty much completely usable as it is. The servers I administer which *do* happen to need those newer features are all running Sarge problem-free.

Really, for all the complaining about Debian, almost none of it is founded on anything rational. Think it's outdated? Run sarge or sid--you lose nothing. Think they're being too pedantic about code and documentation released under non-free licenses? Point apt at the contrib and non-free branches. They're even included into the Debian architecture, including bug reports, mailing lists, and apt entries, so you don't have to go out of your way to do anything special. It's literally no more than changing one word in a configuration file to fix both of these "problems".

For fuck's sake...

[theantix]

That's it... I'm giving up on Debian. I know they mean well but some users just want a stable system that has had application updates since 1994. I agree with the ideology of their actions, I think the unfree documenation should be removed from the project. But that should be a project goal for the next release, because we were nearly ready for one in the coming months.

It's sad, because the idea of a community driven project is noble, and I hate to see it fail. But this is failure -- they have abandoned their release goals and further postponed an already rediculously overdue rlease. They just aren't serious about maintaining a stable release, and thus I'm not going to take them seriously.

Not that they owe me anything -- I appreciate all the hard work that the Debian Developers do. But this is just the last straw...