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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."
Packages made for sid don't even work on sarge all the time without pulling in extra packages from sid. That's the same thing that happens with packages meant for Ubuntu. When you have different sets of software installed on various computers, one single package isn't going to work correctly on all of them unless you're willing to mix packages from different repositories.
I don't think it's really fair to say that Ubuntu is a net negative for Debian. It's definitely a net negative for sarge, since very little, if any, of the work put in to Ubuntu has trickled down to sarge. However, it's good for Debian as a whole because when the ball gets rolling for etch, most of the work will already be done. Ubuntu puts out stable releases for three of the four release arches for etch, so I doubt much extra work will be needed there, although I don't really know that much about what additional work would be necessary.
Sure, Ubuntu's existence has various downsides, such as the proliferation of deb packages provided by developers that only work on Ubuntu, but would those people have made Debian packages in the first place? The packages are merely a byproduct of Ubuntu's popularity, and more people using Debian and Debian derived distributions is definitely a net gain for Debian. I don't see why he would write off all the benefits that Ubuntu provides while focusing on a few issues that are negligible IMO.
The packaging issue is one that's never really going to go away. On his blog, Ian cites software developers and ISVs as reasons for unifying Debian and Ubuntu packages. All free software developers have to do to get their software packaged by Ubuntu is request it. The Ubuntu packagers work fairly close with the Debian developers to make sure that the work trickles down to Ubuntu proper as well. For commercial software it's a bit harder, but that's one of the things to deal with in the Linux ecosystem. Like I said before, packages made for sarge wouldn't even necessarily work on woody. You have to target specific sets of available software, or just distribute binaries that install the software based on various LSB assumptions.
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ubuntu/relationship/doc ument_view
?
"Ubuntu makes a release every six months, and supports those releases for 18 months with daily security fixes and patches to critical bugs.
As Ubuntu prepares for release, we "freeze" a snapshot of debian's development archive ('sid'). We start from 'sid' in order to give ourselves the freedom to make our own decisions with regard to release management, independent of Debian's release-in-preparation. This is necessary because our release criteria are very different from Debian's.
As a simple example, a package might be excluded from Debian 'testing' due to a build failure on any of the 11 architectures supported by Debian 'sarge', but it is still suitable for Ubuntu if it builds and works on only three of them. A package will also be prevented from entering Debian 'testing' if it has release-critical bugs according to Debian criteria, but a bug which is release-critical for Debian may not be as important for Ubuntu.
As a community, we choose places to diverge from Debian in ways that minimize the difference between Debian and Ubuntu. For example, we usually choose to update to the very latest version of Gnome rather than the older version in Debian, and we might do the same for key other pieces of infrastructure such as X or GCC. Those decisions are listed as Feature Goals for that release, and we work as a community to make sure that they are in place before the release happens."
So, who cares that it isn't compatible with Sarge? Is Sarge really compatible with Sid? I think not (if you are sane). Shouldn't Ian be saying that Ubuntu isn't compatible with his "componentized Linux" (http://www.progeny.com/products/components.html)
A Newbie to Linux is not going to have much fun installing the Ubuntu Warty 4.1 release, unless they just let it "do it's own thing" which will more than likely end up destroying all the data they have on thier hard drive, namely, windows.
Perhaps a "newbie to Debian" would be a more accurate description.
I tried it recently and as a slackware 'fancier' I must admit it didn't suit me. In fact, I've never been able to get used to the idiosyncracies of Debain based distributions, even though it's supposedly so easy.
I installed and am giving it the benefit of the dought - who knows, perhaps I'll become a convert and learn to love the Debian way as much as I like Slackware !
But Ubuntu a newbies distro ? - wow, maybe the LiveCD, but the i386 I tried is anything but !
You nearly sounded intelligent, until I got to:
"I don't think his comparison with RPM is completely apropos. RPM was poorly designed from the start, and was probably designed from the start as a tool for vendor lock-in. Apt-get, AFAICT, is well designed."
RPM is not even remotely the same thing as apt-get. It's like saying an apple is inferior to a fruit salad.
AFAIK, RPM is actually ahead of DEB in certain areas. Yum and apt-get are reasonably close in quality, although I would give apt-get the nod for now.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Ubuntu is a derivative of Debian's TESTING core, and if you had ever tried debian in your life you would know that.
It's not exactly all that painful. You could just have gone to a command like and typed:
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get install kubuntu-desktop
Then you'd have Kubuntu-current.
I'm fickle about which distro I use, but at the moment, and for the past month and a half, I've been using on this machine Fedora Core 3, which came as the cover disk for an English Linux magazine. (Why don't more American magazines come with monthly distros?) It's not perfect, but it's certainly "viable," in my case ...
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Use AutoPackage and all will be well.
Or maybe not.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
It would seem that the Ubuntu people are already more or less doing this:
Many Ubuntu developers are also recognized members of the debian community. They continue to stay active in contributing to debian both in the course of their work on Ubuntu and directly in debian. When Ubuntu developers fix bugs that are also present in debian packages -- and since the projects are linked, this happens often -- they send their bugfixes to the Debian developers responsible for that package in debian and record the patch URL in the debian bug system. The long term goal of that work is to ensure that patches made by the full-time Ubuntu team members are immediately also included in debian packages where the debian maintainer likes the work. From Ubuntu's Debian and Ubuntu page.Netcraft confirms it, Red Hat's viable free linux distro is kicking everyone else's ass in growth rate, followed only by Gentoo who is growing 3 times slower but still 2nd place. (Just FYI, the debian category as I understand it includes all direct deriviatives too).
Regards,
Steve
Its not a managable job with the current amount of developers.
You make it sound like theres somewhere around 3 developers working on Debian. Each package has a maintainer. For the most part theres a 1:1 ratio, though some related packages are maintained by the same person, and there are quite a few maintainers who take care of some small packages on the side. Every now and then a maintainer goes AWOL and the package ends up in the small pool of unmaintained packages until someone else picks it up and cares for it.
The problem would be easier to solve if everyone learned to write platform-independent code, but the whole interoperability and platform independence thing seems to elude most OSS authors.
If you are going to make a comparision either compare the RPM *package format* with the DEB *package format* or compare the yum *package management tool* with apt *package management tool* ::sigh::.
Obviously someone that has not touched a rpm based distro in the last two years.
BTW apt does not handle multi-arch systems like x86-64 properly unlike yum. Both yum/rpm and apt/deb have their warts depending on one's situation.
It's a stupid statement. No two ways about it. dpkg and rpm are pretty close to functional equivalents; apt and urpmi and yum (ugh) are more or less functionally equivalent; but comparing rpm to apt is just plain dumb. They work at different layers.
Obviously you don't know about apt4rpm either; since its very existence contradicts your assertion.
Getting a .deb package for MPlayer from any repository anywhere is like playing Russian Roulette with your computer. Compile the .deb locally from MPlayer's source using $ fakeroot debian/rules binary, then install the package generated. Works better, actually, and you get the libraries you need.
Of course, you've got to have the proper dev packages to do that, but it'll tell you if it's missing something. Keep a persistant root terminal open to apt-get anything it'll say you need.
Haec merda tauri est. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
Ubuntu crashes on my system, and generally just breaks. the LiveCD works okay but has some quirks, Sarge installed generally without problem, other than having 6-month old everything. Keep in mind, sarge isn't even the 'stable' branch.
;) Ubuntu might weaken Debian, but it is unlikely to kill Debian in the long run, and even if they did, new distros would take it's place. Also, as good as apt-get is, it still require an obsolete server/mirror model as the primary method to distribute files needed for upgrading/installing the os. Seeded swarming (aka Bittorrent) is the future... why force individuals to connect and try 20 different mirrors, when all mirrors can connect to one central tracker, and everyone connected to the tracker can swarm stream files not only from mirrors, but also from other users downloading files ;) mirrors can set all sorts of bandwith caps/user connection limits etc with a modern torrent client like azureus. Even with most broadband users having an 8:1 ratio on down/upload streams, bittorrent uses donated bandwith more efficiently, instead of 'popular' mirrors footing most of the bill, the tracker helps ensure that all mirrors take on as much bandwith as they planned to dontate. because this can change dynamically the tracker can change who's donating bandwith on an hourly basis easily. that's not something you can do with conventional ftp mirroring.
Ubuntu wants to work with debian, to make a better debian, but the goals of Ubuntu and Debian are different. debian aims at a pure FOSS os, while ubuntu aims at a viable commercial desktop linux distro. A viable commercial Linux require a lot of 'free as in beer' software to run properly (java/nvidia-ati drivers, etc) Even though i have sarge, i installed both of the above, 'free as in beer' because I needed an accelerated X-server to play mpeg-4 streams at certain resolutions without 'skipping' and java's vm was needed to run p2p apps. in my experience p2p apps run about 20% greater efficiency under a default linux config, vs a 'default' xp config, so obviously linux is the os of choice for p2p users.
Debian has always had a problem keeping up to date, I still use it, because it seems like the only viable alternative to it is gentoo, which would take a week to install on my current system
If debian was already using torrent technology, all ubuntu would have to do is set up it's own tracker, and the farther they diverged from debian, the less bandwith of debian's mirrors they'd use.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
It's this additude which has kept many people from using Debian, and is the same reason why many people are now reviewing Ubuntu.
I disagree. Debian and Ubuntu serve different purposes. Ubuntu forks off Debian sid, then tweaks and patches, in order to provide the shiny new stuff everyone wants to play with. Debian stable eschews the bleeding edge in favor of reliability. I use both. Debian goes on my servers. I don't care if my server can automount a USB stick. I don't care if my server runs KDE 4.0. I want my server to consistently, reliably deliver email to a few thousand users 24/7. Or whatever. It so happens that I also have Debian Sarge on my laptop right now. It's not the absolute latest stuff, but for now fresh enough that I'm not annoyed with it. Probably in a year or so I'll start lusting after some whizbang feature, and upgrade my laptop to Kubuntu. Maybe sooner. But my server will still run Debian.
Personally, I think we may witness some symbiosis here. If Ubuntu takes pressure off the Debian project to be all things to all people, then perhaps Debian can refine it's core competency (being the best server distro); which might help it stay a little more polished and up-to-date.
Especially as both projects seem committed to Free software principles, I don't see how anything is lost by Debian letting go a little...
That is most definitely not the case. There was considerable discussion on the debian-devel list following the release team's proposal to limit the etch release to 4 architectures. While the proposal may still be implemented, it also may still undergo significant changes. People have been suggesting all sorts of counter proposals to try and keep all the architectures in sync.
Personally, even though I've run Debian on MIPS, MIPSel, Alpha, and Sparc (all of which would be dropped under the Release Team's proposal) I still support the proposal and would like to see architecture support scaled back a bit. There are those, however, who feel that Debian would be giving up too much if they were to drop some platforms.
noah
And it doesn't have to -- Ubuntu isn't out to beat Debian. At all. They are using different release methodologies, and are essentially forking Debian Policy where they see fit. But in their effort for short-term usability improvements, there's the danger that they'll create a difficult to maintain system -- and Debian's fundamental maintenance abilities are probably its best feature. And probably why Ubuntu is based on Debian.
BT is not very good (ie. kind of useless) for most of the packages in Debian. Most packages are less than 500kB. Very few run more than a few megs.
If you want to use BT to download Sarge (hopefully before Woody turns 3 years old), you'll be able to get them here,
http://www.debian.org/CD/torrent-cd/
Debian will also release on DVDs (I think it will have 1x and 2x density disks) so you don't have to download so many images.
After Sarge releases and the torrent gets on slashdot, that is when BT is best. BT for `apt-get upgrade`, well, not so great.
PS. For apt-get, use your local mirror http://www.debian.org/mirrors/. Please, all of you should not be using the main http.us.debian.org mirrors :) Most secondary mirrors are just an hour or two behind primaries. Many are listed as secondaries just because they only host a limited architecture set (eg. only i386 and powerpc).
The problem is running stable on anything more is a complete waste of time since it's nearly 3 years out of date.
Depends on what you are doing with it. I have been using Debian for various headless servers for years (DHCP, Samba, Mail, home directories, network monitoring, DNS, gateway/firewall etc...). They run great and there is no need to do anything but security updates. If it ain't broke or you do not need the fuctionality of version X+1, there is absolutely NO reason to upgrade.
An extreme example.. I left my last job over 4 years ago and they are still to this day using the RH6.1 (Cartman?) machine I set up with Apache, Samba, and auto ncpmounting of some Novell servers on their local network. Yes, someone on the local network could hack into considering it has not been updated since I left but it is still running along fine.
For my own Linux desktops? I use the distro of the month or pretty much anything but Debian stable.
Lovable and cuddly monkeys?
Today's humans are believed to be decedents of Cro-Magnons which were primitive humans that at some point lived in the same time period as Neanderthals.
-----
One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
the self-styled high priests of #debian are free to abuse whomever they want on irc, and to have contempt for newbie-user-friendliness in their software, but they shouldn't cry when their own actions and attitudes help drive a migration to ubuntu.
that said, i use debian exclusively. the technical arguments outweigh the personalities. but i still lament the loss to the community caused by these arrogant assholes on #debian.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Here's a link that may help, straight into the Subversion repository where Debian's XFree86 packages are developed:
What are Debian's plans with respect to X.Org and XFree86?
The current text of that FAQ entry follows.
Address-collecting spam robots don't know how to crack ROT13. Do you?
Now here's my concern: I have no idea who Deadbeast is (There isn't a top level page -- which is wierd), how do I know it's not just wishful thinking?
Well, I'm Branden Robinson, and deadbeast.net is my vanity domain. If you're easily amused, you may want to look up deadbeast's WHOIS record. :)
I'm glad the pointer to the FAQ helped. I admit I didn't foresee that sarge would take this long to release when advocating that Debian stick with the tried-and-true XFree86 4.3 (even if hacked up and patched to support more hardware than stock 4.3 does), but the trouble is, the longer the sarge release drags on, the more disruptive it would be to try to cut over to X.Org. So I continue to believe that the best solution to this problem, as with many others, is to kick sarge out of the nest so we can focus our full attention on disrupting the hell out of unstable for a few months. :)
Address-collecting spam robots don't know how to crack ROT13. Do you?
Come on people, remove you heads out of your fucking asses and read the links. For those who are too freaking stupid to understand basic English sentences (which appears to be most of you) here's the problem. Debian creates and maintains literally thousands of packages. It has a whole goddamn infrastructure in place to do this well and to make sure it works on a shit load of architectures. A lot of people contribute to debian. Almost all distros based on debian, including ubuntu, actually take packages from the debian project developed by debian contributors. Then they wrap it with their installation system or whatever, and distribute it. If there is any package they make significant improvements/developments on, they give the improvement back to debian, so that it's available for all architectures and other projects. All this works out well. Now ubuntu came along. Mind you, ubuntu just takes snapshots (copies, for idiots) of debian unstable every six months and then distributes it, so ubuntu *needs* debian and the *huge* effort behind debian. Now ubuntu packages are incompatible with debian (sarge, the distro debian is working on now). Not only that, ubuntu is also drawing a lot effort away from debian because of its popularity. This is breaking the fucking system. In the second link (you know, the one which you were supposed to fucking read?) he says "If you want a glimpse of what will happen, take a look at the RPM world, where software developers and ISVs have to build a different RPM for every RPM-based distro (either that, or the ISVs have to choose the one or two most popular RPM-based distros to the exclusion of all others--or perhaps that's what you have in mind?)." Debian and based distros were compatible. Until now. Now ubuntu might break it. All the debian-based distros stick to one standard - debian. The distro which does most of the work for other distros. Even Ubuntu derives so much from debian. So only if ubuntu stuck to the standard too, incompatibilities will be non-existent. Just because you use Ubuntu and someone is saying something not entirely positive about ubuntu doesn't mean that they're disapproving you. They're not saying that you have a small penis. Grow up.
Nothing is stopping you from going to the testing distribution. Unlike most of the other distributions, Debian has an OPEN development cycle which EVERYONE can upgrade to. Sarge at this point is probably as stable as most of the other released distribution versions.
.95 version of a beta is for the most part going to be just as stable for most people as the 1.0 version. sarge is at that point, and even if there are a couple of little things that need to be done on it, there should be NO reason at this point not to be running it. This isn't a Microsoft style release where at release it has lots of bugs and holes. Debian may take a long time between official releases, but even in testing it's pretty stable. Except for the first eight months of a new unstable, the unstable tree tends to be fairly solid though SOME things can break randomly from day to day or week to week.
Something to think about is that people look at BSD and love how stable and secure the different flavors are. Debian tends to be as stable as possible because of the testing that is done.
If you want to go with the latest features, nothing is stopping you from installing them. Production environments are almost never about having EVERY new feature, they are about stability and security.
In addition to this, if you need a specific package, you can generally just get that package and any packages it depends on, compile the application yourself, or upgrade to one of the development releases. You do NOT need to wait for something to be added to the latest released version of the distribution.
If you are a true system administrator for a production environment, then for security reasons, you should be more than able to compile and install any specific requirements for your needs anyway. If you can't, and MUST have things done for you, then your production environments will always be at risk of being broken into due to some configuration setting that doesn't work well with your environment.
Most people don't lock down their systems, they take an easy install method like "web server", without editing the package list before installing. What this does is to allow access to your machine in ways you arn't even aware of.
Which web server do you want to use? Do you really need ftp access to the box, or do you use ONLY ssh/scp to transfer files to the machine for security reasons? How about other little features? Do you NEED a GUI on that machine at all, and why since a command line should be enough? Have you checked the configurations to make sure they point to the right places? How about locking down any remote access methods to make sure that ONLY the machine and perhaps the subnet it is on gets access to the configuration interface(if you have one)?
And last but not least, the kernel is something that EVERY system admin should manually compile for their system. Instead of just using kernel modules, compile in what you need, and don't bother with support for things your system has no use for. Distributions put in as many modules as they can into the kernel for compatability with all the different systems, but once you have the machine up, why not custom compile your kernel for the purpose of the machine? If you don't use NFS for example, why should you bother with NFS support in the kernel unless you may want to use it at some point?
So, sarge is pretty much there. You can upgrade to it, and since you arn't installing from scratch, you don't need to wait for the installer to be tested/upgraded. Going to a
Umm,
1) *Ubuntu* is not a company, Canonical is.
2) Canonical actively encourage companys to provide support for ubuntu.
3) 52% of developers voted in this leadership election. if you peruse http://www.debian.org/vote/ you will see that this is the usual percentage that vote.
Quit the FUD.
Rob