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."

Comments

Debian is great, this article is not

[mr.newt]

This is among the worst interviews I've ever read. First, the interviewer apparently used to work for slashdot (I know he's Italian, but he spelled Debian "Debain" more than once...give me a break). Second, this guy Branden Robinson, while obviously a great maintainer, is not a great interviewee. When he isn't sounding stiff and boring, he's busy sounding like an RMS clone ("we don't exist merely at the sufferance of a corporate entity" *puke*). My advice: don't waste your time with this article. If you manage to actually read the thing, you'll be disappointed (unless you actually give a crap how many hours Branden Robinson codes each day, and how many years it's been since he last played D&D).

-Michael

Re:Debian is great, this article is not

[Anonymous Coward]

When he isn't sounding stiff and boring, he's busy sounding like an RMS clone ("we don't exist merely at the sufferance of a corporate entity" *puke*).

Overrated. Debian actually *is* about Free Software. It's not just RMS-clonage, it's what their charter is.

And Debian actually *is* the only significant distro that isn't tied to a corporation. Which matters.

Hell I use Fedora myself, but you can't use it and not be aware that it's pwned by Red Hat. The community is largely irrelevant astro-turf. If Red Hat turned around tomorrow and said "fly Fedora, be free!" it would sink like a lead weight.

But otherwise, I agree TFA blows.

chkconfig vs update-rc.d

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what debian could really use out of the box? A utility like redhat's chkconfig. Even seasoned debian users get frustrated with the confusing update-rc.d util for starting/stopping services.

If you want to list all the services that are currently running you still have to write a damn shell script yourself to go poking through the /etc/rc*.d! What a pain compared to a simple "chkconfig --list".

Re:chkconfig vs update-rc.d

[jayloden]

Glad to see I'm not the only one interested in this. I actually looked at writing a clone tool for Debian based systems for both chkconfig and the "service" command from RedHat. I got as far as creating the service clone: http://jayloden.com/service_clone.htm but I didnt get to the chkconfig yet. Now that you've reminded me I may have to mess around with this again.

I haven't played with the tools the other replies mentioned (though I plan to now), so I can't comment on them, but it's definitely not a bad idea to clone the RedHat toolset, since it allows familiar ground for a lot of people used to RH environments, and I think chkconfig is reasonably intuitive and easy to use, to boot.

-Jay

Re:Future Growth?

[m50d]

If you don't plan to grow, you won't, regardless of markets and statistics. Based on your logic, if a college football team is ranked at the bottom of a poll before the season starts they should forfeit every game.

A college football team is always aiming to win the league. Debian IIRC has repeatedly stated they are not trying to become the OS everyone uses, just to make a good OS for the people who make it to use, and make it freely available for anyone who wants to use/improve it. So they don't need to plan to grow because growing isn't an important objective for them.

Re:Assumption? Hell no.

[b17bmbr]

i finally installed ubuntu this weekend. i had always been a mandrake fan, and also have used fedora some, but neither would recognize my belkin f5d6001 (admtek chipset) wireless pci card, or would configure it. also, couldn't get a linksys wusb11 (usb wifi) to work either. spare me the howto's. a modern distro should just do it. period. ubuntu did the belkin perfect, never tried the linksys. all i had to do was configure the wep key and viola. then, to install php, mysql, apache, etc. ap-get install whatever or use synaptic. holy freakin cow!!! i installed ubuntu and kubuntu, so i have latest gnome AND kde. how does ubuntu get it so right? i will never use another distro again.

Re:Future Growth?

[m50d]

The user base is growing because of distros like ubuntu.

True, but Debian doesn't need to care directly about Ubuntu growing, new users needing to learn etc. will be handled by Ubuntu. They need to make plans for how the growth of derivatives will affect them, but that's not the same as planning for their own growth.

If their objective is to make the OS freely avaliable to anyone then growing becomes an objective by proxy.

Not really. They already have enough ftp mirrors for anyone who wants to be able to get Debian to be able to do so pretty easily. They're freely available to anyone with an internet connection, and anyone with a spare fiver can get a CD which is still free in the GNU sense. (I'm not sure if that's their only objective or they also want free-as-in-beer availability wherever possible). Growing isn't going to help for anyone outside those categories in any way I can see.

PS: An operating system is different from a football team...

Agreed. It's not my analogy.

Paranoia Strikes: How Assure No Trojans in Debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

How can a user be assured that there are no trojans/backdoors built into the various contributed pieces of Debian?

Each package requires customization to work under Debian. Wouldn't it be easy to slip a backdoor or two into any number of given packages? E.g., a developer responsible for Debian GTK (or whatever) might add some backdoor code. Or there could be an even more subtle attack wherein one developer adds partial code to one package, a second developers adds partial code to a second package with the intent that a user who installed both packages would be subject to a backdoor attack. How could this possibly be detected?

Hacking the Whip

[Doc Ruby]

"Ready to ship"? How about if they just do more shipping? Better promotion of idle/orphan projects and tighter project management would keep Debian releases at a useable speed while retaining their valuable stability. One valuable technique would be promoting bugfixing on neglected packages to more active projects which depend on them down the chain. That is already in the interest of the dependant projects, but coordination from overall Debian management would produce more cooperation across projects, especialy in that productive "upchain crossroads". It leverages open source, open projects, and mutual selfinterest along with expertise in the code in question. That counts as "internal processes", though not as internal as focusing only on the core Debian team.

Ubuntu and Debian

[dartarrow]

So much said here about Debian and Ubuntu. I love Ubuntu. Yes its a spinoff from Debian but Mandrake was a Spinoff from RedHat before it went solo. Ubuntu is good not only because of the cutting edge technology it gets from Debian but also because of the management, marketting, and administration. A well engineered hybrid of technology and usability. Which sure as hell beats replies from Debian elitists who mostly go "RTFM. F-cake!" (i'm still hurting from that). With the experience Ubuntu gets from Debian, it would not be surprise if they able to go on for a long time even if Debian drops off.