The Debian System Explained

An anonymous reader writes "XYZComputing has a great interview with Martin F. Krafft, the author of "The Debian System". From the article: 'Despite Debian GNU/Linux's important role in today's computing environment, it is largely misunderstood and oftentimes even discounted as being an operating system which is exclusively for professionals and elite users. In this book Krafft, explains his concept of Debian, which includes not only the operating system but also its underpinnings. Debian is not only a robust and scalable Linux distribution, but it has many other features which are worth looking into, like its open development cycle and rigorous quality control.'"

Comments

Other Distros

[IAAP]

FTFA:Many people actively involved with Debian development are working as system administrators themselves. Thus, they know very well what their own needs are, and in case Debian doesn't meet them, they are in the position to fix that. However, ideally, one should not have to be a Debian contributor to successfully deploy Debian in production environments.

I'm not an admin - outside of my own hacking at home. But, help me out here, is Debian more of an enterprise-admin friendly-scalable distro than, say, RedHat Enterprise?

From what I've seen between various distros(No Debian), there's their add-ons (desktop add-ins, installation software, etc...), and then there's just Linux, XFree86, and all of the GNU software stuff. Is Debian that much better whe it comes for day to day operations?

Great book, too bad about the software

[FishandChips]

Kudos to Martin Krafft for writing his book. Many dream but few ever get it together ...

That said, I spent most of 2005 running Debian Unstable and Debian Testing on different systems and ended up finding both overrated and generally a disappointmennt. Debian was too demanding of time and needed seemingly endless fiddling around and careful management. It also took a lot of time to set up, though admittedly that is a one-off when an installation is still fresh. More important, the Debian developer community seemed shot through with an obsession with doing things the Debian way, with college-level debates (aka rows), with considerable disdain for new users and with frankly pretty obscure things of little interest to many in the everyday world. Overall, I began to wonder if some of these guys would recognize an end-user if they fell over one and my faith in the Debian way rapidly dwindled.

None of this should detract from Krafft's achievement, though. It's a heck of a good thing to have done. I do find it a little odd that he should recommend that new users try Ubuntu rather than Debian. One is tempted to ask: what's the problem whereby they can't use Debian, then?

For myself, I've now gone back to another distro. It's pretty nearly as capable as Debian, with the difference that its devs are technical experts who confine themselves to delivering what works. A distro that puts out for its users without striking tiresome poses or co-opting its users into politics of some kind is much the more preferable, for me at least.

Re:Great book, too bad about the software

[FishandChips]

This is the perfect example of not understanding "The Debian System". YOU aren't supposed to use unstable. You're not even supposed to use testing. If you don't want to have to fiddle with the system, use "stable". That's what it's for. This is clearly explained in a number of places in the documentation.

Actually, that's the perfect example of why Debian doesn't work for everyone, for stictly my two cents. Not every user is in it to be hectored (an obsession with the Debian way, in full caps) or treated with disdain (must be too stupid to have read any documentation, etc.). Personally, I use Linux to get away from all that stuff about we own your ass so do what we say.

To answer another reply, I now use a mucho tweaked SuSE. Works for me. Any number of other distros, including Debian, may well work better for you, maybe more so now Martin Krafft has given everyone the gift of a full-up guide to Debian.

Re:Debian SUCKS on SPARC --- won't install, period

[raynet]

I have couple Sun Ultra 1 workstations and had no trouble installing Debian Linux (Sarge) on them. Just checked couple faqs and howtos to be sure my hardware was supported and how to change screen resolution and how to patch firmware to support 64-bit mode (though I think it was Solaris that required the firmware patch to even boot).

Either you did something wrong or just happened to have an SPARC that wasn't supported or tested.

The Community Sucks

[c_spencer100]

I've never had anything against Debian itself. My problem, as with a lot of other people, was always the arrogance that just seemed to ooze from the average Debian user. If you don't know what I'm refering to, then you probably relatively new to the Linux Community. It seemed for the longest that every question posted on every forum yielded the answer "get Debian". Debian's problem was NEVER being misunderstood - it was being misrepresented by the zealots that actually think their pretentous attitude represents the Debian Community as a whole.

Re:Modifying packages to conform to FHS = bad

[rekt]

i can't believe this is being moderated as Insightful. What are you mods thinking!?

i'm a huge fan of djb's work, and i use his software (and i use Debian), but quoting his theories about cross-platform compatibility as support for your argument is pretty weak. djb's strong suit is his technical and mathematical rigor, not his infamous interpersonal skills.

For those of us who maintain more than a handful of machines, cross-package similarity is a real and significant advantage:

• Just installed package foo, but don't really know quite how you might use it best? debian policy lets you confidently look in /usr/share/doc/foo and know that you'll find *something* that the package maintainer thought would be worth reading, even if it's only the changelog.
• package doesn't have a man page? thanks to policy, that's an actual bug, not just an inconvenience.
• need to understand exactly how service foo starts and stops? you can read /etc/init.d/foo
• where are the config files? you can find them in /etc/foo/
• and so on...

djb is right that cross-platform incompatibility is a significant hassle. But what's his solution to that? He invents a whole new filesystem standard (see "Filesystem layout" on this page)! I respect the man for his technical prowess. And i'll grant that his proposed scheme probably makes more technical sense than the FHS, when viewed in isolation.

But you don't achieve cross-platform compatibility through technical rigor. You achieve it through compromise, social and political consensus, transparency, legacy support, and published standards. The FHS currently represents all of those things, as does debian. In fact, that's why debian endorses, attempts to comply with, and contributes back to the FHS, because it is committed to cross-platform compatibility. djb's technical nit-picking, while usually a good thing, does him a disservice in this particular area, and debian gets it right.