[ale] Debian 3.0 as a server platform?

[Chris Ricker]

On Thu, 2 Jun 2005, Barry Hawkins wrote:

> I am a Debian package maintainer, and I collaborate and communicate with 
> Fedora/Red Hat folks on an ongoing basis, particularly in the area of 
> Java packaging.  I know for a fact that they do not require that package 
> contents build only from source.  Lucene, Tomcat, and a few other libraries 
> in the Eclipse package for Fedora are included as compiled binary downloads, 
> because building from source on free runtimes for those components is not 
> currently working.

I view that as being no different than, say, Debian's use of a binary 
compiler to bootstrap the compilers that are written in their own language 
-- you gotta start somewhere, even if that means initial compiles using 
non-distro tools.

> The release schedules for Debian have been embarrassingly slow, and it has 
> been a real "black eye" for perception of Debian.  Geeks in the know simply 
> use testing and unstable and roll on, but new folks who look at it and see 
> a last stable release of 3 years ago are immediately turned off - and rightly 
> so.  The hope is that we are making some big changes in that respect.

*shrug* The Debian release schedule actually doesn't bother me; there's a 
place in the world for maintained, very slowly changing distros. There are 
lots of servers I don't use Debian for (at least in part because of a need 
for something more modern, though things like needing EMC / Oracle / etc. 
support also enter in for some), but there are certainly places I use it.

> While the flame wars on debian-devel are as alive as they are on any other 
> distro's developer list, I am quite certain that the adherence to Debian 
> policy and the fact that it is indeed all-volunteer are major factors in 
> how fast things progress.  I also believe that Debian's not being encumbered 
> by corporate directives can account for the lax pace as well.  This has its 
> own set of pros and cons, but it is the set that I agree with enough to give 
> of my own time and effort.

In all seriousness, I think the slowness is due to a combination of lots 
of different things: the number of architectures (heck, given the slowness 
of, say, ARM builds, that alone holds up everything else ;-), the number 
of developers, the formalized policy (and seemingly endless debates over 
same ;-), the number of packages, the "milestone"-based shipping 
schedule.... The latter, in particular, encourages a "ship when it's 
ultimately ready" (which of course almost never happens) approach, rather 
than a "get what we have ready to ship by a fixed time" approach like 
GNOME, most of the BSDs, Fedora, etc. do....

> Fedora is not the same as Debian; obviously not in content, but also not in 
> its policies, aims, and driving motivators.  Both have their place within 
> the Linux ecosystem.  I only tend to see assertions that Fedora is like 
> Debian; I rarely see an assertion made in the other direction.

At least for me, the similarity is just that the spirit of both of them is 
largely the same -- providing high-quality distros built from open-source 
software. Beyond that, there's certainly lots that distinguishes the two: 
schedules, target audiences, platforms supported, number of packages 
included, number of developers involved, willingness to innovate, etc.

later,
chris