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."
Ha ha. Works perfectly here. You must be on an XP desktop.
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.
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
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.
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.
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