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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."
Survival of the fittest.
I'd call it evolution. I'm sure Neanderthals viewed the last evolutionary change in humans as a crisis though.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
This is definetely not what Linux as a whole needs. It's my personal opinion that Linux needs to rally behind 1 distro or at least make sure that everything is compatible. having different distros that won't run others code takes greatly away from the "power of linoox"
FP
For a lot of people, Ubuntu offers a better distro than plain ol' Debian. Now Debian is upset that Ubuntu is going off on it's own. Maybe if Debian released a better product on a faster scale, they wouldn't have their users being stolen by a better company.
"I understand what the Ubuntu folks are trying to do, and they're doing lots of good work that will eventually find its way into Debian," Murdoch said.
The operative word there is eventually.
Sayeth Murdoch; "But what we really need right now as a community is for Sarge to be released."
You needed that at least a year ago. Fix your model so that Debian can keep up with the rest of the Linux world and you won't have to gripe about forks that don't exist.
Debian should be the foundation of a plethora of tailored distributions dominating the Linux market. The one and only thing preventing this is the fact that Stable is perpetually very obsolete. This is not Ubuntu's fault.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Release a friggin distribution or just shut Debian down.
Seriously, they haven't had a stable release in nearly three years. Projects like Ubuntu were created due to the complete lack of leadership on Debian's part.
In the wake of Red Hat's withdrawl of a viable free linux distro, Debian should be thriving right now. Instead its fading away.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Am I the only one who reads this as basically saying that Debian has been left behind because it has become stale?
Sendmail is like emacs: A nice operating system, but missing an editor and a MTA.
Well, no, everybody doesn't win. Providing compatibility with generic Debian would be a pain for Ubuntu, and would take energy away from more worthwhile work that people want to do on Ubuntu. Adding this kind of bag-on-the-side would be a win for generic Debian, and a loss for Ubuntu.
A better option might be for generic Debian to stop trying to support desktop users. The way things are stacking up now, generic Debian-stable is a great server OS, but a lousy dekstop OS. People who want to run the latest bleeding-edge version of Gnome or whatever are switching to Ubuntu. So what's the point of having generic Debian keep trying to support the latest bleeding-edge GUI packages?
I can't help thinking that this sounds like sour grapes on the part of Ian Murdock. The tone of his blog is like, "No fair, I don't want you to play with my ball anymore."
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. If there's a problem maintaining compatibility between Ubuntu and generic Debian, it's probably because some of the desktop GUI libs are changing very rapidly.
Find free books.
Apparently most of Slashdot doesn't realize that if Debian dies... so does Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is a natural response to Debian's slow development and release cycle. Add in a more friendlier face and multiple languages leveraging the Debian model of apt-get everything and you got a n always up to date linux distro that captures the interest of those who want to use linux as a desktop environment and those who want to be bleeding edge. Any Debian users up for some X.org action? (not that it's impossible, but I've seen work arounds that leverage ubuntu's repository for xorg).
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
I've been always trying to convert from Windows from Linux, and had lots of problems when doing so. Mainly, I was unable to find a distro that was easy to maintain and actually usable. You know, practical.
:P), and Debian as well.
I tried everything from Red Hat (from 4.2 and up), Conectiva (2 and up), Mandrake (6 and up), SuSE (6.2 and up) and Gentoo (I was never able to determine the version I was using, because as soon as I finished compiling something, I had to emerge world again
The one I liked *the most* was Debian because it just works... well, at least that was the idea. Since there were no real distributions that worked for me (Debian did, but... hey, look at Woody and Sarge), I kept on using Windows.
Well, what's the point? I'm typing this on Ubuntu, which I've been using since january. It's exactly what I liked on Debian, plus up to date packages. Thanks Canonical.
It's also rather annoying that Murdoch witters on about "avoiding the fate of the RPM world" - uh, hello? Last time I checked we're all Linux users. And Linux ISVs hate the current situation because they already have to produce lots of packages, or more likely simply not bother and produce a Loki Setup or a tarball (tarball! how DOS is that?).
Debians problems seem to be directly tracable to:
The end result is Ubuntu - a fork. Unfortunately Ubuntu doesn't really tackle the packaging problem seriously: it improves on Debian by only stabilising a small base system, but this means you get to choose between (a) an out of date and small but stable repository (main) or (b) a large and up to date but often broken repository (universe). And I still haven't figured out WTF the "metaverse" is yet.
Unfortunately the Ubuntu developers only go so far - they still believe it's possible for Ubuntu to package everything end users will ever need, even though at least in Warty, universe wasn't even enabled by default. I don't see any way for Ubuntu to stabilise universe without getting bogged down in the same mud that Debian did.
I dunno, KDE seemed to be working just fine in Debian testing when I installed it for a friend. I don't need those fancy desktop environments as I just use IceWM, so I don't feel that Ubuntu has anything to offer me. What's wrong with Debian testing?
-insert a witty something-
who cares that it isn't compatible with Sarge? Is Sarge really compatible with Sid?
This is an important question. Ian is complaining that Ubuntu, a released distro, is incompatible with Debian Sarge, an unreleased unstable distro. This is like Bill Gates complaining that Firefox 1.0.2 is incompatible with Windows Longhorn Beta 2. As long as Firefox released first, it is the second-comer who is responsible for playing catch up.
Can Debian Sarge keep up with "standards" created by Ubuntu? I doubt it; Debian is not renowned for its agile development..
cpeterso
Now imagine if Ubuntu had instead been a group of developers who decided to combine their efforts with the Debian group to improve Debian?
Yes imagine what 7 layers of bureaucracy could have done for the Ubuntu team. Warty Warthog would have been released in 2008 and Debian developers could continue to ignore that fact that they suck.
Ubuntu and Debian don't exactly fill the same niche. Compare the number of architectures supported by Debian with the number supported by Ubuntu. Think about the fact that you need a separate project to run KDE under Ubuntu. Since Ubuntu's aims are far narrower, Debian will always have its place. But we'll all be better off if that coexistence is as smooth as possible.
ubuntus desktop focus, and essentially 'floating' above unstable will drive debian to only get better faster. how? like this:
1. it will attract (and is attracting) a huge userbase that will very quickly understand the benefits of apt and the benefits of debian. there is no better example of what a polished linux desktop can be than latest gnome/kde on top of sid (ubuntu), properly patched and configured for the user. this is huge and extremely exciting, it is the best example of 'how a linux desktop is not only workable but superior to the competition and can only attract more talent.
2. ubuntu's goal is not to 'fork' but to 'freeze and polish' every six months based on unstable. some packages must be forked for obvious reasons, not for the sake of forking but because ubuntu serves the desktop and not all 11 architectures - what that means is ubuntu forks packages only so long as they can safely be used on the desktop while being patched on the other architectures.
3. all the interest in ubuntu will eventually trickle down to interest and excitement in debian
4. all the development going into ubuntu will eventually trickle down to debian. the problem right now is simply timing. debian will only start to see the fruits of ubuntus labour after sarge is released, and when unstable become testing. then and only then will debian start to see an accelerated track as a result of this newfound excitement.
5. debian is the easiest and larges distro out there. ubuntu only seems like a negative from the perspective of sarge's release schedule and ubuntu just jumping into the scene. give it time, you will see debian kill suse and redhat to the point that i predict they will drop their individual efforts and simply adopt debian as their core and base their proprietary services around debian.
it is inevitable all shall be assimilated.
The problem is simply that binary compatibility is hard.
Easy enough; it's the implications that are subtle. Like that building a key system library with different options makes it a different package. That changing a key system library thus changes the entire configuration management scenario. That a package that has different subcomponents, each with their own dependencies, is a package that depends on all of them. That auto-built dependencies tend to be even pickier then the real ones. That packages are only as good as their (builder supplied) metadata. And so on and so forth.
There must be something about this that is either hard to comprehend, or hard to accept. It gives a lot of RPM users trouble, it gives Debian users a sense of superiority, it's what makes BSD ports work so well, and it's largely responsible for making Microsoft Windows the unholy mess that it is. Clearly, there's a disconnect here.
Take a look at some common misconceptions in the software world.
It appears a disproportionate number of Debian users carry a false sense of superiority about their package tools, when what really makes Debian win is the size of the distribution package pool. Specifically, that having such a large pool of configured, compiled, and tested packages readily available via "apt-get install foo" leads a lot of Debian people into think APT is somehow magic.
Likewise, RPM properly saying "I don't think you have the pieces you need for this to work" leads so many people into thinking that RPM *causes* "dependency hell". RPM simply reports it. YUM (and things like it) can help you with it. But the nature of binary software itself is what *causes* dependency hell.
And the fact that BSD ports downloads, configures, builds, and installs all specified components *from source* leads BSD bigots into thinking that the BSD ports packagers must be doing a much better job then Red Hat or Debian packagers. Rather, they just bypass the problem of binary compatability.
And, again, this is also largely responsible for why Windoze sucks so much. When everything is a binary which you have no source for, and no two packages share information on what is being installed, and you can only install one version of any given library at once time -- then, yah, it's a minor kind of miracle the thing ever works at all.
Binary compatability is hard.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
What I think both Debian and Ubuntu should do is forget about their huge package repositories, on the grounds that it's an unscalable way to distribute software and focus purely on making a great OS. That means things like UTF8, graphical installers, graphical config tools, SELinux integration.
These are all being worked on. But see how Fedora was ahead of them in all of these areas, and in some still is. That's because the Red Hat team focussed purely on the base distro instead of trying to package everything in the world, which is impossible.
Now, Ubuntu basically has a chance to do this. Strip even more out of main - why is Inkscape there? How many Ubuntu users are also vector graphics artists? It's out of date already, and has been for months, yet you can get up to date packages direct from inkscape.org. Take it to the logical conclusion: make Ubuntu a base operating system that is super easy to extend, with only the basics in main (music player, web browser etc).
Now support 3rd party packaging, so users can go to inkscape.org if they want a graphical editor and install it straight from there. I think they should use autopackage to do that, but I'm biased. There could be any number of ways of doing it. The point is, stop being packagers and become OS developers.
Ubuntu could do this without too much pain. Debian, on the other hand, never could. When you think of Debian, do you think of a slick, modern desktop OS? No? Neither do I. I think of 18,000 packages. But who cares how many packages you have, if the OS sucks. If Debian were to deprecate most of the packages, it would cease to have a purpose on the desktop because it's such a poor desktop OS (as Ubuntu has made clear). It could refocus and with time, catch up, but it would take a lot of effort and dedication and belief in the new way. I don't think Debian can do that. I think it'll fade away rather than change.
Attempting to package everything the user wants is sinking Debian, and it'll sink Ubuntu too unless they change the philosophy instead of just doing minor tweaks. Ubuntu universe includes Coq, a theorem prover whos own authors estimate that it has only 100 regular users, yet does not include gaim-vv, which adds webcam support to Gaim. What is wrong here?
Seriously.
Yes, Ubuntu packages do not work on Sarge -- Ubuntu starts from SID (which is what I am typing this reply on and have been using since 2000 without a reinstall!). I do not expect Knoppix packages to run on Sarge, or Mepis or Ubuntu. Ubuntu, while closely tied to Debian is a different beast. SID packages are already high quality. Ubuntu just polishes they up a bit further, makes TOO MANY things brown, and pushes it out the door every six months. I run it on my work laptop, and it works like a charm (except the infamous Broadcom wireless grrr).
The reason Ubuntu is great for Debian is that they are paying Debian developers who ARE pushing back patches both to the upstream, and to SID. I believe that when X.org hits SID, it will be better because of Ubuntu than it would have been in Ubuntuless world. Ditto for many other packages.
Many distributions use RPMs and they are generally not interchangeable either. No big deal. If you don't know which distro you are running and don't know where to get valid RPMs, then it is just as well.
Those who worte the slash dot and web articles don't know anything about Debian. Debian is really three distributions. Ubuntu is based on SID - the most buggy.
I think this thread is just Ubuntu hype - our logs don't see any trend. Please note there are SEVERAL other dist based Debian. I think Debina has more children than any other distro - says good things about Debian.
1. Debian is not a company.
2. Debian has changed its release architectures after Sarge so that Etch is not slowed down by unknown, exotic and/or obsolete architectures.
3. Sarge is not ready NOW because of the large number of architectures. ARM has only 2 auto-builders now and hasn't even compiled the release of glibc that has to go into Sarge. After it finishes compiling, the archive will be frozen.
Everyone can start their own little distributions here and there, usually leaching off of distributions like Debian. They find a limited niche market and people start talking about "Debian dying". Well, I think we had that discussion before Woody as well.
Debian has a very large number of packeges available for it. As of right now, Sid has over 16600 packages. Distributions like Ubuntu do not maintain these packages. They are just managing the core (base) and a few other packages.
Anyway, release cycles every 3 or 6 months are not necessarly good. People using Debian want stability. Why do people on slashdot bitch about MS dropping support for NT or 98, yet they complain that Debian stable is 3 years old! Huh?
Woody ships with a 2.4.18 kernel. This kernel does not support SATA. Woody does not support 2.6.x kernels with module support out of the box. But you can install kernel 2.6 on woody. You can run woody on a SATA only system (can't install it from CDs though). Can you install NT4 or Windows 98 or Windows 2000 or even XP out of the box on a SATA only system? My latest, greatest XP installation does NOT detect my SATA chipset. I mean, WTF?
Anyway, as soon as Sarge ships, people will start trolling that it does not support PCE-48X or their modem or something.
People wanting RHEL software stability without the pricetag and still want to have security support would be using Woody for the last 3 years. I am using Woody on a number of machines. I don't have to worry about upgrades with unexpected bugs. I don't have to worry about sudden ABI changes or compiler changes or kernel changes or GUI changes or coputeguration changes or
So, why again is Slashdot population (I guess you can it that) complaining about Woody being stable less than 3 years, yet when it comes to MS, well, they release NT when? I think it came with IE 2!! And now that they drop support, people complain left and right about the need to upgrade..
Why are people here so hypocritical? You can run Sid with latest, greatest if you want. You can get latest Sarge installer here: http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ There are many people that will be running Woody months *after* Sarge gets released.
</rant>
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.
Oh my god!!! Canonical had the nerve to PROVIDE A MEANS TO LIVE for Debian developers, and give them an opportunity to make a distro based on Debian and gives bugfixes back to Debian. What assholes.
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.
Actually Ubuntu currently depends on a certain South African that loved Debian and wanted to make a new distro based on it. He has admited to /. that he hopes that the paid support thing work out, but he doesn't mind if Ubuntu turns into charity if it doesn't.
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.
HOW THE F*CK IS UBUNTU A PARASITE!!!!. It gives back bug fixes. It has developed things that Debian will need in the future (Xorg). It has built up a vibrant community, and gets the word Debian and release in the same sentence together (even if it is only "Ubuntu, the debian based distro, released today.") Even if Ubuntu didn't give back bug fixes, Debian's license allows this to happen. Yet the Ubuntu devs do upstream their work. Troll
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.
And all you wankers that can't figure it out- Ubuntu is a good thing for Debian. The progect is hurting bad and it needs a shot in the arm, Ubuntu is that show in the arm...
Open Source Sushi
I would like to see the leadership of the two organizations get together, discuss the idea, and hopefully agree that this is a good way to work together. The leadership can then promote co-maintainership as a 'best practice' within their own organizations, inform the userbase (i.e. get it mentioned on slashdot), PLUS appoint an interoperability liason.
Seriously, don't you think all that is up to Debian? I think Ubuntu may or may not agree, but I don't see them having a problem. You got yourseleves into a quagmire. You must do something about it. Debian used to have a lot of respect, but you lost a lot of it...Stop acting like Ubuntu is the problem. Ubuntu is the solution. For most of ex-Debian users.
I don't mean to be rude, but you gotta develop focus on the issue. The problem is Debian and how it's handled as a social project, and its choice of software packaging technology.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
I know exactly what your problem is. You have added the Marillat, and it has a new version of Mplayer that Hoary doesn't have current enough libs for. What you need to do is either:
A. Disable that Repo. and try again with the multiverse added. For Hoary, a compatible Mplayer was added to the multiverse. Using the marillat repo for anything for than grabbing the w32codecs and the dvd codecs is a sure way to cause problems.
B. Don't use Mplayer. I personally like Gxine a LOT more. Try it, it installs in Ubuntu easily.+
Open Source Sushi
In business schools around the country it is called smart marketing.
Open Source Sushi
Try "If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants." Or is it "In computing, we mostly stand on each other's feet."
-----
One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
Wow, what an asshole.
That's exactly what I was talking about. I ask a question, and you bite my head off. If this is such a trivial question, then why isn't there a simple solution?
Perhaps you should try some of your solutions yourself, instead of blindly assuming they work well. A quick Google search does not show any Definate answers. There is no obvious, definitive answer on debian.org.
I see some mailinglist posts made by people who I don't know. I also see a bunch of sites which have no obvious authority in the Debian project. Where's the offical word from the Debian leaders? Why should I trust what some stranger says on the mailinglist?
This is why people keep asking.
If the Debian devs want people to stop asking this frequently asked question, perhaps they should drop the elitist additide and put it in the Debian FAQ-- that's why we have a FAQ.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Strangely, Windows is outdoing linux on a fairly important point, though it does a lot of work to attain this. As one of the commenters noted, few people run Debian stable. To really use debian you need unstable now, and that's true to a lesser degree for a number of other distros.
Because free software is free as in beer, packagers assume there is no big burden in making their packages depend on the latest versions of dependencies they have around at the time they build. They don't do the hard task of testing and building packages with older dependencies even though they would run fine on them.
On the other hand, developers for the W operating system tend to try to make their package run on as many versions of it as they can, and they test it on as many versions as you can. What that means is that a very large amount of the time, you can install the latest version of some software package on Win98, often even Win95, and almost always the 5 year old Windows 2000.
Try to have a 5 year old version (with security updates of course) of just about any linux distro and try to install the latest version of some hot new package you want. It will rarely work. It may not even be available in your package manager, and if it is, it will want to upgrade vast numbers of packages in your system that you don't actually truly need to upgrade.
And like it or not, even though upgrading is good, upgrades are scary. They are scary for ordinary non-guru users and they are scary even for guru users who are trying to run production systems they depend on. Upgrading should happen regularly, but it should happen on the user's schedule, not at random because I want to run some new software.
Ideally upgrading should not be so scary, but it is. Things break. More than once I have had a major upgrading result in a day of downtime, and I think I know what I'm doing.
It is not satisfactory to tell your senior citizen mother to run unstable and upgrade regularly. It's not going to happen.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Maybe if the Debian guys got off their asses and updated the packages to more recent versions then Ubuntu wouldn't be so popular?
Yes, that must be the reason MS Windows is (for most application) binary compatible FOR ONLY PAST TEN-TO-FIFTEEN YEARS!!
I'm guessing you're trolling, but you do touch on some points in my original post worth expanding upon. As I said, Windows has these issues, too.
Have you ever noticed that the more software gets installed on Windows, the more likely it is to have trouble? There are a number of reasons for that, but the biggest is known colloquially as "DLL Hell". As I said, Windows only allows you to have one version of a shared library installed at a time. So you get all these crazy dependencies where program A requires library version X, but program B requires library version Y, so you can't have them both on the same system at the same time.
My personal favorite example of this is how if you install Microsoft Outlook 2000 (the Exchange client) on your Exchange 2000 server, you will cause the Information Store to stop working until you replace a certain set of DLLs (and thus break Outlook). Fifteen years of binary compatibility? Hell, Microsoft can't get it to work in the same year!
The ability to have the system load and run-time link an executable image does not mean that binary compatability issues don't exist. Linux has had that all along, too. But in Windows, you don't even get the warnings that RPM (or whatever) gives you. You just get screwball behavior.
This is why in Microsoft's ".NET Framework". Microsoft has implemented to so-called "managed code assemblies", which reference the specific libraries they were built against, and call those versions in. Of course, this is a radical departure to how Windows manages shared library and run-time linking. Everything has to be restructured to make use of it. I'm not sure how that qualifies as "compatible", either.
Microsoft isn't exempt from this reality anymore then Linux or BSD is.
I'm not going to bother responding to the Linux flame-bait.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.