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Talking With Debian's Branden Robinson
v.ciaglia writes to tell us that TuxJournal has a great interview with Branden Robinson, one of the Debian maintainers. The article has a nice mix of personal and Debian specific questions. From the interview: "My primary focus as Debian Project Leader has been to try to resolve some long-standing infrastructural issues that have been frustrating our developers and users. My emphasis has been on internal processes because, as I said above, I think we need to be prepared for more growth. I am very happy to speak at conferences and with the press about Debian, but fundamentally I think Debian sells itself. Because of that, I want to make sure that we're "ready to ship" -- ready to meet the demands of our users."
We love you, Debian, we do.
1) Hi Branden, thank you for your availability. Can you tell us something about you? How are you? What's your work? What do you do in your life and your sparetime? What are your hobbies?
Well, let's see. I'm 30 years old, married, have no children, and live inIndianapolis, Indiana. I work for Progeny Linux Systems, the company co-founded by Debian founder Ian Murdock. I don't have much spare time, but for hobbies I enjoy playing the electric guitar, reading (overwhelmingly non-fiction), and playing Dungeons & Dragons, a hobby I had neglected for about 9 years.
2) Everybody know that you're the actual Debian GNU/Linux mantainer, one of most famous and used secure operating system nowaday. What's its philosophy?
Well, to correct you a little bit, the Debian Project has *many* maintainers, of which I am only one. We have approximately a thousand fully-fledged developers with voting privileges under our Constitution, and dozens more in the "new maintainer queue". On top of that, we see many contributions from our users and from other developers in the Free Software community. Debian GNU/Linux, like all GNU/Linux distributions, is the product of a massive cooperative effort.
In my view, the essential mission of the Debian Project is to produce the best Free Software operating system that we can. We not only want to produce a high-quality system; we also consider it necessary to preserve, for ourselves and for our users alike, the freedoms that enabled us to achieve that quality in the first place, and which will permit us to improve the system even further.
3) Why a person could move to Debian? What are the advantages? What could he do with Debain? And what he couldn't in place of other GNU/Linux distributions?
I think a person would move to Debian because they want to enjoy power over their computing experience. Every package in the Debian GNU/Linux system has source code available so that a user with adequate knowledge can customize the operation of the computer to suit individual tastes. This power comes not just from the free licensing of the system components, which most other GNU/Linux distributions approximate, but also from the existence of our very large and vibrant user and developer communities. One characteristic that sets us apart is that we are self-organizing and democratic; that means that any person can join up and become a guiding force in our society.
I did so myself, joining the Project in early 1998. I didn't even consider back then that I could or would rise to a leadership position; I simply did the best work I could, engaged with my fellow developers, and learned over time how to contribute in increasingly better ways.
Debian has no so-called "benevolent dictator", nor do we exist merely at the sufferance of a corporate entity. Debian is no longer unique in these respects; over the past couple of years we've seen other GNU/Linux distributions organize themselves along similar principles. I'd like to think this is because Debian has been demonstrating the value of this organizational approach for 12 straight years.
4) In the early June you released Debian 3.1 version, can you tell us what are the main advantages in?
There's a press release announcing Debian 3.1 on our website. I can't do much better than that in singing its praises. I find the culmination of the long-running debian-installer project to be especially satisfying. Our previous installer technology was kind of a hack. D-I (as it's called) has a proper design and is highly modular.
5) What do you think made Debain this successful?
I think Debian's success stems from its dual commitments to userempowerment through free licensing of the works we distribute, and to high quality through careful design and integration decisions. Not everyone is a software freedom fighter, nor is everyone a software perfectionist - but we can accommodate both of those passions pretty well. Debian is an
"seasoned debian users" : no, n00bs : yes.
apt-get sysv-rc-conf
or
apt-get sysvconfig.
You even get the choice between 2 great apps.
Since Ubuntu is based on Debian, its success is contingent upon that of Debian. Ubuntu isn't a fork from Debian; according to one of the other responders, they pull new changes up from Debian every 6 months. According to Netcraft, Debian is the fastest growing distro:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/12/05/stron g_growth_for_debian.html
One can assume that Ubuntu, et al. are included in this statistic.
That statistic is for web servers. I don't know whether or not they lumped the Ubuntu servers in with Debian, but I'd guess that most people who use Ubuntu use it as a desktop system so the numbers are very low anyway.
Ubuntu is not tied to a corporation? http://www.canonical.com/
Liam Healy
update-rc.d, much like the other update-(alternatives|binfmts|inetd|.*) commands, isn't really intended to be a user's frontend. Many people choose to use them for that, but they're intended to be scriptable interfaces for package installation.
Useful frontends for the rc.d scripts exist; sysv-rc-conf and sysvconfig spring to mind, although I believe there's another one.
No comment.
Ahem...
alias service='invoke-rc.d'
No comment.