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Is Ubuntu a Compatibility Nightmare for Debian?
An anonymous reader submits "Following Friday's release of Ubuntu Linux 5.04, Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian project, told internetnews.com: 'Ubuntu's popularity is a net negative for Debian.' He explained: 'It's diverged so far from Sarge that packages built for Ubuntu often don't work on Sarge. And given the momentum behind Ubuntu, more and more packages are being built like this. The result is a potential compatibility nightmare.' Ian suggests a method for averting crisis on his blog."
And this proves it, eventually Ubuntu and Debian will be so seperate that very few of the Ubuntu packages will work with Debian, similar to Suse and Red Hat RPMs.. Debian is dying and nobody cares because they haven't released anything since I last used it 4 years ago.
cheese logs keep my wang warm at night.
Ubuntu is a betrayal of Debian.
Canonical has hired a number of critical packagers and maintainers of infrastructure of Debian and paid them to do priority work for Ubuntu instead of work on Debian.
Ubuntu, keeping in mind, depends on masses of packagers and developers who have chosen to package and quality-check for Debian. Canonical, in turn, depends on providing paid support for Ubuntu.
Debian has built up a mountain of goodwill by supporting so many different arches with rocksolid stability, and leveraging that into donations of hardware and bandwidth for a world of mirrors for its pages and packages. A start-up for-profit commercial entity cannot hope to duplicate this success, is unable to do so as so many others have done in a relationship that can be described as mutualism or commensalism, and instead satisfies itself with being a blood-sucking parasite that will end only in its own destruction along with that of the host.
And you wankers who want the latest and best but cannot see past the inconsequential metric of a release date of a "stable" set of packages, are selling your souls and that of the best distro of Linux to ensure it will happen.
</soapbox>
This guy must be on crack. Debian is still the dist of choice for servers by a long shot.
They may not be friendly because "Why is x.org NOT in debian-unstable?" is a stupid question and they've probably been asked that a million times. Try google instead of expecting other people to answer your trivial questions for you.
what exactly is the issue for which the Debian project's choice of packaging technology is a problem?
Look for a thread (not mine) called "Binary Compatibility Is Hard(TM)" for interesting insights. I've elaborated some more in other threads, but they weren't moderated up much.
You have to realize dpkg is very old. It's code is a mess, it's undocumented. Anyone trying to improve that would probably get ignored on religious basis (in fact, Alfredo Kojima of WindowMaker/Conectiva fame did that with apt-rpm). Debian's packaging mechanism involves quite a bit of human handwork. This bogged down the project. I believe it was one of the main factors. Look for an AC thread called "Metcalfe's Law", too.
is the issue for which the manner in which Debian is handled as a social project is a problem?
I believe it's a problem because, in Debian, every "developer" gets to vote and thereby steer the project in this or that direction. I think even "developer" is a misnomer, because a lot of those guys are just maintainers. In FreeBSD land they would be called "commiters." A lot of them are not people who can really hack deep things like protocols and kernel. Compare them with BSD developers and you will see what I mean. Debian is too much of a democracy, instead of a meritocracy.
So in the end, you get this situation where the organization slows to a halt. This happened. For real. Look at it.
Also, let me just remind you that the winner of the DPL title this year also thinks there are problems with Debian's social organization and constitution.
The Debian project team seems committed to having 'stable' mean stable, 'testing' mean not stable
Please, get it over it. Use a BSD for an experience of "stable" and "up-to-date" (I was not always a BSD zealot, I used to be a Debian diehard).
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
I was just saying
You called my questions "stupid" and "trivial".
that the answer is available on google (albeit not in the first link, you have to dig a bit)
Once again, did you actually check your own answer to see if it worked well? A needle in a haystack is not a good answer.
I'm looking for a definitive answer from the Debian leadership-- all I could find ws some email posts from people who, until this morning, were complete strangers. Should I trust "Joe Schmoe" when he says x.org will be included after the Sarge release?
also in the Debian faq as someone pointed out.
Unfortunately, the answer is NOT in the Debian FAQ. It should be.
There is an answer in this other FAQ at 'deadbeast.net'. Until Brandan (and others) responded to my post, I had no idea what Deadbeast.net was, who Brandan was, or why I should trust either source.
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