Slashdot Mirror
Interview with Debian Project Leader
brunotorres writes "I've interviewed Martin Michlmayr, Debian project leader. In this interview we talked about the upcoming Debian release, Sarge. An excerpt: 'We heard for years that Debian is hard to install and the old installer wasn't very easy to maintain or advance, so we we decided to throw the installer away and start from scratch. The new installer is much more modular, which makes it easier to maintain and extend.'" Reader ron_ivi points out that new Debian/Hurd CDs are available. Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSTG.
All the other architectures I tried (Suns, _old_ x86s, _new_ x86s) worked great.
I really reall really like the fact that the minimal install and the installer itself doesn't require the X-windows bloat.
So now, is HURD so unimportant to slashdot that news related to it is just grouped under some other news? The same slashdot that carries a front page story about even release candidates of the Linux kernel?
Well, I wondered the same thing until I tried out Debian and realized you could do interesting things like downgrade packages to previous versions. In general, the install system had features Portage doesn't, until the next version of Portage anyway.
:)
That didn't stop me from happily moving to FreeBSD, however.
Why does each and every distribution need to reinvent the installer and the package management tools and the portage system and the system layout?
Can't we have just one installer, one package management tool and one portage system that is shared by all the linux distributions, the bsd variants, OS X fink, windows cygwin, the comercial vendors, and all the rest?
I mean really, reinventing a new tool to do something that people have been doing for 30 years is the height of arrogance. And even if they do invent their own package management system, does it only have to run with their own custom portage system? Can we have multiple interfaces to just one portage system that works across all posix systems?
Ideally I should be able to pop in a DVD, and have a single installer come up that lets me mix and match my kernel with my package management system and select what packages I want to install and then have it install them in a known location that is the same as everyone elses in the world.
I should be able to deploy a software package one time and just have it compile and install itself on any unix like system. And work.
All you separate distributions and operating systems need to get off your high horses and share the labor for things that are common between all of you. This is why we don't have unix on every desktop right now. The fragmentation is killing adoption of unix on the desktop.
I've always thought there should be two versions of linux: bleeding edge, and ignorant housewife editions.
There's a third: A powerful version that is stable. I need to spend my time using Linux to do things for my job, I don't like to spend time debugging the OS.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Well, Debian and OS X Fink do share an install system - apt-get. "All the Linux distributions"? Would be nice, but there are a fair few .deb-based ones out there now. RedHat and Cygwin share a system I believe (I'm prepared to be corrected here), because Cygwin was originally has ties to RedHat.
Ideally I should be able to pop in a DVD, and have a single installer come up...
Ah, well you've lost me there already you see. A DVD? I run Debian on a old laptop that hasn't got a CD drive, let alone a DVD. I also run it on a Cobalt RaQ - not even a floppy drive there. A single installer? But on my flashy new hardware I like graphical installs, whereas I would spit blood at anything requiring a graphical install if I was trying to put it onto the Cobalt.
All you separate distributions and operating systems need to get off your high horses and share the labor for things that are common between all of you.
OK. So who gets off whose horse first? I know - let's dump RPM, I always hated it. But hold on, it's used with some of the most popular and commercially supported distros right? So I know, let's dump .deb, after all it's only minority. But hang on, some of the most stable distributions there are use .deb so there must be some merit in it. I know, let's dump RPM...and repeat ad nauseam.
Cheers,
Ian
It's nice to read an interview from a distro project member where the problems/limitations of the distro, (such as the long release cycle), are openly admitted. All too often distro maintainers (and users) make excuses for current limitations in their distros and stubbornly refuse to address them in a rational manner.
1) Sarge hasn't been released yet, so upgraded from Woody to Sarge is not guaranteed to work *yet*
2) Gnome 2.8 was just recently moved into Sarge, so some unstability was to be expected.
You just chose a really unfortunate time to do the upgrade (when I went from Woody to Sarge, Sarge had been relatively stable for a couple of weeks, as in no major packages had been moved into Sarge for awhile)
Je ne parle pas francais.
That is what I was going to answer because its true.Anaconda doesn't run on every arch. But why should x86 users, ie 80%+ of Debian users have to suffer without a great installer like Anaconda just so somebody using some obsure arch has the same aweful install experience(yes I know the installer has improved). Cater to your base which is x86. Let the rest get by with a lesser installer. They have till now and won't go away just because x86 as usual gets all of the goodies.
That or continue to watch as all of your users flee to distros like Ubuntu.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
An example:
Here we have the typical video driver selection screen. Can you seriously expect anyone who wasn't weaned with a transistorized soother to understand this screen?
Who but the eternal geek will know that VESA is only used for ancient systems or vmware, or that trident means the old, ancient trident chipset, and probably not the one that could show up in their laptop? - actually I don't even know myself on this one. I'd just have to try a bunch of installs to see, something a user should not have to do.
A little description beside each cryptic 4-5 letter identifier would be EXTREMELY helpful here.
Better yet would be some kind of auto-detection mechanism for the most common modern cards like other distros do.
Debian is not the only offender in this category.
Here's my favorite:
This is priceless.
What the hell is Simple, or Medium, or Advanced? Who's going to know what method will get their windowing environment working properly? (and really, that's all the user wants anyway)
Debian seriously needs a real user-interface designer to do their installer. So long as it's done by geeks, it will continue to be useable only by geeks. The folks at debian are assuming too much arcane knowledge upon their users, and because of that, they will continue to alienate the majority of users right from the outset.