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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
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
Translation: Provide the same horribly outdated packages we do.
And given the momentum behind Ubuntu, more and more packages are being built like this. The result is a potential compatibility nightmare.
Funny how two people can look at the same thing and see something different. My perspective was that; the result is a potential deprecation of Sarge and perhaps Debian itself.
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
Debian just needs to start advertising itself using images of naked people, too. Then popularity will go up for Debian, until they achieve parity with Ubuntu, and more people will release packages that work well with Sarge.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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.
Perhaps an Endangered Distributions Act.
"Oops, there goes our last female".
Debian needs to get with the program and work with Ubuntu. Otherwise... well, we all know what happened to the dodos. It would take a lot of work to replace the Debian infrastructure, but it's not impossible to do.
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.
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.
This reminds me of when Mandrake forked from Redhat. Initially the RPM packages were fairly interchangeable. Eventually I learned to only use actual Mandrake RPMs on Mandrake. Somehow, the world kept turning...
Some settling may occur during posting.
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)
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 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 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-
(k)Ubuntu is the new Debian. Plain and simple. In another 5 years I am sure it will look very similar to what happened with what is now Mandriva and Fedora back in the day.
Sure compatability between the two OS's will go to the way-side. But (k)Ubuntu has an chance here to comply with the LSB and silence any claims of incompatability by saying they are just following the standards more closely than Debian proper.
If nothing else this is just more proof that maybe Debian does need to change their focus to only releasing stable versions for the big three architectures and leave the rest in unstable/testing limbo.
It has been discussed before and I know a lot of people flammed it because they love Debian for it's architecture support, but Linux fanboys need to start realizing this isn't just about us anymore, this is about the market we are trying to convert.
Whatever brings us closer to that end is good. Even supposedly "forking" Debian into (k)Ubuntu.
[/rant]
Disclosure: I run Kubuntu as my desktop as dual boot w/ WinXP.
The preceding message was based on actual events. Only the names, locations and events have been changed.
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
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
Use AutoPackage and all will be well.
Or maybe not.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
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.
You mean like how Mandrake would have died if Redhat died?
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.
Nothing even close to modern runs on Debian stable, and the compatiblity nightmare they call "testing" is just as bad. I've been defending (and using) Debian for a lot of years now, but they need to get their act together, stop complaining, build a decent project, and release it, or just shut up and die. Metaphorically, that is. Ubuntu is a net positive for the users. Whether it's a net positive for Debian is mostly up to Debian.
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.
Like most people I agree its a bit of a "duh" to have moved far away from sarge. It's difficult to remain compatible with something that is so far behind the times it will be obselete on release. Even sid has moved away in some regards; yet even it is obselete in many areas. There is no business sense whatsoever in being chained to the old sloth.
Part of the compatibility problem is on Debian's side: many maintainers are annoyed that Ubuntu exists and choose to not work with them out of pride/arrogance. This attitude is something I hope Branden breaks in his new tenure as DPL.
This is where I think it will be very interesting. Branden has always been a progressive and practical person, with extremely little time for the kind of political rubbish that has prevented sarge from being released. We know that the platforms Ubuntu has chosen are the ones that matter for their market, and the ones that matter for the near future in the desktop and server market (with Sun dropping UltraSPARC for amd64) in general. We know there's already been talk of refocussing Debian such that architectures like arm that usually hold everything up will no longer do so.
So the way I see it, there's a lot of hand-waving going on here that could be completely irrelevent in the future as Debian is architecturally focussed the same as Ubuntu which should foster greater cooperation. Of course Ubuntu is clearly on the desktop side and not the server, so I guess it will have more of the eye-candy and desktop apps while Debian has a far greater range of packages; though it doesn't necessarily need to be that way. It would be fantastic if Ubuntu is simply re-branding the Debian desktop packages in a co-maintenance fashion.
My greatest gripe with Debian over the past 6 years is how they seemed to have wasted time arguing over pathetic things like should this document licensed under the GFDL really be in Debian, and have hence fallen from their position as the #1 distribution on the ball technically, always up-to-date (at least in sid) with what's out there, to being so far behind its becoming very tempting to switch. Come on, the commercial distros used to be the last to get anything new, now they are becoming the first. Okay, so Novell *wrote* Beagle but the source has always been available, why is is still not in sid (even an old version?). Call me out for not packaging it myself, but neither have you so that's hardly an argument. That's just one minor example.
(and fwiw I did try packaging it myself, but the dependencies were also either not packaged or out of date and it became a much bigger and riskier task than I have time for)
I can understand Ian's frustration, he created Debian and then went on to found Progeny and I guess there's some angst/jealousy there over how popular Ubuntu has become in such a short time while Progeny hasn't quite seen that kind of success for however many years (most people forget it even exists unless prompted by some mention somewhere). Get over it. I've seen more cooperation from Ubuntu maintainers with "upstream" Debian than any other Debian fork as witnessed by changelogs of packages I use, I put their success down to this and their good business strategy/vision. Credit where credit is due. I hope this cooperation will increase in the future.
Matt
How could it?-
A. Sarge isn't released
B. Ubuntu is based on Sid.
Murdoch argues that if Ubuntu were truly compatible with Debian, all of the energy going into it could be directed at Sarge and toward getting it released, which is what would really benefit the Debian developer ecosystem as a whole.
Yep. Thats what Userlinux tried to do. Look how that went. Debian is too uncentralized to ever be more than a server distro (where slow is good).
"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. "But what we really need right now as a community is for Sarge to be released.
There. He admits that Ubuntu is now more about helping out Etch (the release after Sarge) then helping out Sarge. But Warty should have helped Sarge a bunch, and Sarge has problems even millionaire Mark can't fix quickly.
"In that respect, Ubuntu's popularity is more harmful than helpful."
How is it harmful that Etch is going to kick ass because of Ubuntu's work?
I'll tell you how- each Ubuntu release is an embaressment to the Debian people. Two Ubuntus have been released before a Sarge. And if they don't watch out, it will be three. Businesses don't like that many upgrades usually, so a slow Sarge is good many say. But from the words of of Debian's founder is obvious that Sarge not being released it is turning into a bit of a joke...not good for Debian's image.
Thats the only way Ubuntu hurts Debian.
Open Source Sushi
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.
There is a reasonably simple and very effective solution here. The Debian project supports, and in fact encourages co-maintainers for packages. This is a great way to get more manpower into the process and improve the quality of packages. The co-maintainer doesn't even have to be an official member of Debian if the maintainer sponsors the combined work.
I am a Debian developer, and one of the packages that I maintain has been patched by Ubuntu. I only found out about it by looking over the Ubuntu patch site. What I would like to see is the Ubuntu developer contact me, ask to be a co-maintainer, and get those changes directly into the Debian package. This is good for Debian - we get additional help in doing a good job. This is good for Ubuntu since they don't have to re-merge patches every six months. It helps the two groups act as a team, feel good about each other, and save on overall work. And, as the article points out, the increased compatibility between Debian, Ubuntu and all other Debian based distributions (including Knoppix) is a win for end users.
Now that Ubuntu is a rising star, and Debian has just finished Project Lead elections, 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. The liason's job is to hassle^H^H^H^H^H^H talk with individual developers to help make sure this actually happens. Branden, don't you think this would be a great first accomplishment as DPL?
Of course, there will still be some places where Debian and Ubuntu want to do something differently, so some packages will always be a little incompatible. But the bulk of the 'heavy lifting' across the thousands of packages is all about stuff developers generally agree on. Updating software, finding and fixing problems, improving quality. Ian Murdock is worried an impending 'nightmare'. I think if we can work together well, the upcoming Ubuntu/Debian relationship is going to be software distribution's finest hour.
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>
Now it hurts me to say this, but a lot of what many other posters are saying about Debian dying off are true. Don't get me wrong, I like (K)Ubuntu - it's going to be the next distro I hop over to - but I love Debian like a brother - After disasterous misadventures with restrictive RedHat and Mandrake installs, Debian gave me just the right level of ease where I wanted it and power where it was needed. To me, RedHat and Mandrake just felt like an equal to Windows, but with Debian I genuinely felt more productive. I learnt my Linux skills on Debian and it still faithfully hauls my two main machines like a loyal pack-horse, but one I know is slowly preparing to lay down and go to sleep for that final time. Kubuntu is the next choice for my main work machine and will be slipped on next time I get around to doing it (which will probably be around August), and the reasons are simple;
- I want up-to-date packages. I want KDE 3.4 out-of-the-box, I want X.org and the full support for my graphics card it brings - I want all the things Debian doesn't have but with Ubuntu are just an apt-get away.
- I want to feel my system is modern. I know, I know, if I want cutting-edge, use Gentoo, but I don't want cutting-edge, I just want modern - with Debian I feel I'm being left behind.
- Better (easier) installation. I'm trying to prise my mother off of Windows, and while Ubuntu's installer still isnt GUI, it's not quite the CLI terror that is the Debian installer - how am I supposed to convert her to Linux when even the installer scares the shit out of her?
- More frequent updates. OK sure, they might have stupid names (Hoary Hedgehog?), but Ubuntu updates are frequent and on-time, and they keep things up to date - Debian updates seem very few and far between, and serve only to make sure the disto stays a good three or four years behind the competiton in the name of stability.
On the final point, granted, Debian is absolutely rock-solid, and for that reason if that reason alone I will be keeping it on my server box (sitting blinking in the corner as I type this), but as for my work box, it's getting Kubuntu as soon as I get round to it.
As I said, I love Debian like a brother, but I'm growing to love Kubuntu like the hot girl down the street (and no, not through a telephoto lens) - you love them both for different reasons, and while all your family loyalty might tell you to sit in with your brother, reality has to step in and tell you to go off with the sleeker, sexier option.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
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 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
How is this modded Insightful?
If Debian dies than it will either be remade in another Debian-influenced distrobution or the developers and users will migrate to other distrobutions... like Ubuntu. Don't be so arrogant, the world is not crashing. Free software doesn't die with its developer, remember.
I had the same issue! I once went to #debian on freenode, foolishly thinking that Debian people might want to help me double-check my CUPS article on Wikipedia. Instead, I got a lot of abuse, and after watching the channel members abuse some other guy (for who knows what), I decided this wasn't the channel for me and to leave.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
You know, I'm as likely to bash microsoft as the next person, but I have to say that all of this focus of the Linux community on Microsoft is long past over done.
Time was, all alot of us wanted was a computing environment that was good, stable, and allowed the kind of tinkering that isn't possible for closed system. I have that, and if other people find this more appealling than MS's offerings, great but that doesn't change my life much. (Yeah, I know, if MS owned everything, that would be bad, but that isn't what keeps me in the OSS community...)
So, I have to say, I don't give a flying f*ck whether there are 2, 10, or 100 different desktops. If there's people to support it, great. If not, it goes away. The reason there are so many different version is because we all have different needs, wants, desires, and hobby horses.
Divided we fall my ass. It ain't a war to alot of us, its a pastime, a hobby, for some of the lucky, a job too. Ubuntu's doing well? Great. Debian not doing so well? So do something like... well... Ubuntu... This embodies so much of what I love about OSS.
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."
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
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.
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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
There are two (or more) really different kinds of users that Debian serves - desktop/SOHO and production/enterprise users. Desktop users run unstable (or testing if they're conservative) and users needing stability and security over features go for stable. Everyone loves being able to apt-get update; apt-get upgrade. Everyone loves having a huge package archive that's accessible without hunting the web. However, the only people happy with the release cycles and maintenance processes are the users who want to run stable. That's why ubuntu has gotten popular - it's filling the desktop niche a bit more. I think though that ubuntu is too specialized for me to like. Eg, their website says that it's GNOME based, but what if I want to run KDE instead? I also don't like installing much out of the box - I want to pick and choose only what I want; Debian lets me do this. I'd love to see:
:)
- The Ubuntu and Debian folks get together to build an awesome base system framework to build around (eg. kernel-package, hotplug, installer, etc)
- Try to make it easier/more popular for developers to package their own stuff and put it in contrib. Make it more like freshmeat but with storage.
- Debian people can maintain stable and follow their current release concepts, but maybe scale back on the number of packages offered. Do stable users really need games and P2P packages, for example?
- Ubuntu project can be to build from and extend Debian Unstable.
I would use Ubuntu if it were Debian with more and more up to date packages. I think it makes sense for Ubuntu to be that, although maybe with a prettier installer (please don't take away my ability to start from clean slate). It makes sense that the Ubuntu project would want to derrive Debian packages as they do now, especially if Debian were to scale a bit back. Debian has, in Unstable, main, contrib, and non-free (repositories" (right word?)). There should be an Ubuntu "repository" as well. Eg, say ubuntu patches xmms to add https mp3 streaming. They would put that new package in the ubuntu repository in Debian unstable. The package would have a higher version number than the package in main and would be tagged as having a derrivation (some unique id number or name - eg "ubuntu-https-stream" [perhaps a convention is needed as for version numbers]). The package versioning mechanism would need to be extended so that once you have installed a package with a derrivation, "apt-get upgrade" will not upgrade to a newer version of the package unless the package includes the derrivation. If you wanted to upgrade any way, there could be a command line switch on apt-get to specify that.
Ubuntu would become a new "repository" in Debian, plus media with a tweaked install process. Upgrading a debian unstable box to ubuntu should be as easy as adding an apt sources line and running apt-get update; apt-get upgrade.
This way ubuntu packages can do what they want, will be compatible with Debian unstable, and Debian people will have an incentive to include changes. Debian can focus on their core and the ubuntu project can pick up the juicy desktop parts of the system. I also really liked the collaborative maintainer idea - that would promote the migration of derrivations from the ubuntu repository into unstable.
Just some ideas... I'm quite happy with Debian and I've never found an out of the box Linux that satisfies me in the flexability domain. Too much or wrong stuff installed by default, too little support for weird configs, etc. I mean, my desktop machine doesn't even have a hard drive in it (boots off of a file server in the basement), and setting that up with Debian was a breeze.
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?
Thanks for the informative post. That clears things up.
I think I have found that page in the past, but back then I was just searching for some help with X.
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?
If there was some link on debian.org's FAQ to the Deadbeast FAQ, then I would be less confused.
Although, I see Branden's page has alot of these links.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
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.
Funny, I got abused on #debian 2 years back, and it was one of the reasons I didn't stick with Deb for too long. I had some noob questions, I didn't understand why I couldn't dnld a sarge iso, and yes, I read the site and tried to understand why before I asked. I got some a*hole responses, finally figured it out myself, but I was very cautious when asking questions. Once I had mixed stable/test/unstable packages and borked my desktop, I drifted towards Gentoo, and the friendly support via forums and IRC was awesome. Thus began my work on the Gentoo project. I would have done the same for Debian, but I don't want to be all high and mighty and not answer any questions from noobs; we were all there at one time.
bo
bad_outlook
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Is this vague enough for you?
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.