Slashdot Mirror
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."
Haha! Two comments and already the server is not responding. They must be running Debian on that thing, *LOL*
(yes, I'm kidding)
Except that Ubuntu is derived from Debian unstable every 6 months.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
why plan for "future growth" if the markets and stastics show you aren't going to grow
I can not fathom the lack of logic in that statement.
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.
<sarcasm>Brilliant...</sarcasm>
This sig rocks the casbah.
We can do better then this.
'Than' would be better than then, then?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
It seems that nowadays no discussion of Debian is complete without mentioning Ubuntu. I'm very much impressed with what Ubuntu has accomplished. It really is a great distro. But Ubuntu would be nowhere without Debian. I would have liked to hear his thoughts on Ubuntu. Does it's existence help or hinder Debian? I have heard elsewhere that Ubuntu and Debian do work together on some issues, and that it has been positive for both distros. Still, I would have liked to hear whether he considers Ubuntu a good thing, and what his experiences have been in dealing with that team.
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
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".
Both distros have their uses. Here are some examples: - kubuntu : for my 10 year old cousin who likes flashy things - ubuntu : for my sister who needs a stable office desktop - debian testing : for whenever I feel like developing a kernel module - debian stable : for whenever I need a server that wont crash Different users have different needs.
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.
I am trolling
I wonder if that's now a clause in his interview contracts: :-P
I will not talk about Ubuntu.
Do not ask me about Ubuntu.
If you force me to listen to a question about Ubuntu I will stick my fingers in my ears like this and go "LaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLa!"
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
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.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
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.
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.
I am trolling
So? I didn't say that it's not benefitial for Debian. But Ubuntu is NOT "debian done right" because it's not a fork, but more a layer on top of it, depending on everything below. Ubuntu depends on Debian the same way it depends on GCC and Linux, that's good, otherwise I wouldn't have such a nice OS on my machine.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Your comment about sounding like RMS went without justification. Perhaps if more people listened to what RMS said and why, we'd have a community of people who aren't so eager to give up their software freedom for a little convenience.
I really wish people would stop calling debian (and even linux) a product. Furthermore it would be very helpful if people stopped thinking about it as a product too.
Linux is a gift to the world, it's a game, it's a social experiment, it's the last ditch attempt at building a selfless meritocracy but it's not a product.
There I got that off my chest now.
evil is as evil does
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?
"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.
--
make install -not war
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.
I love humanity, it is people I hate