Talk:My Favorite Distribution - Shlomi Fish
From Hackers-IL
sitordartroc
General stuff
First of all, I think you should seperate arguments for Desktop distro from Server distro. There are vastly different considerations, and indeed many people have distinct favorites in these areas.
A few comments about your Debian points
- low 'stable' release rate -
- If your'e talking server: some people might agree. Others might find this to actually be an advantage - people want low maintainance servers, and having security updates available without the need to do a whole dist-upgrade several times a year has its merits.
- If your'e talking hackers' desktop - I don't know any hacker (or any user for that matter) that uses Debian stable for his desktop. By nature, hackers want the most up-to-date version of software. Debian testing/unstable might be considered "cutting edge" (not "bleeding-edge": most packagers package latest upstream "release" - not cvs). At this point you'd probably argue that people don't use stable because it's outdated - I'll just say that even on Mandrake most people don't stick with the official 'release' distro (did I hear you mention Cooker?) - if in Mandrake you use rpmsearch or add extra repositories, the equivalent in Debian-world would be to use testing or unstable.
- 'Integrated' - I'm not sure what you mean by that. There's integrated menus, font system, configuration database and more. It seems roughly on par with what I've seen in Mandrake (I might be a bit outdated - never used the 10.x series yet). If you mean GUI config tools - they *are* available. It's just that generally Debian's approach to integration is to provide a *backend* - basic command-line scripts, sometimes just a spec. On top of that there's usually several frontends available, as seperate packages (which nowadays would probably be autoselected if you use Gnome or KDE). Maybe you should give specific examples...
- Social Contract thing:
- The social contract itself is almost identical to OSI's OSD, which other people have also been using for stuff other than software. You might be referring specificly to the GFDL issue (e.g. - no trouble with Creative Commons AFAIK) - in that case please note that they have specific & concrete objections to that license, all related to it (supposedly) being too restrictive (i.e. prohobits distribution of the binary documentation in too many cases) - see the three points mentioned in the overview - roll up a few lines above this anchor
- Stuff that goes out because of such consideration does not disappear, but goes into non-free. The non-free repository is maintained (suggestions for dropping it were repeatedly voted out), and most people use it. Still, I admit that over-moving packages there can sometimes be annoying (and that's mainly because other packagers tend to unjustfuly drop their dependency on the moved package from Recommends to Suggests, which makes them operate badly).
- Unfriendly advocates -
- True that debian has more of these than most distros (though I believe not as much as Slack, and certainly not as much as the BSD's). There might be some chicken-and-egg-like mechanism to this - having an elitist name (and unpolished installer) attracts the sort of full-of-themselves types that infest the mailing lists and make an elitist and hubris-full name for the distro. However, I get the impression that the local deb-community in Israel is more broad-minded.
- All Debianers I ever had any contact with are far from being this sort of type. If community is what your'e looking for - it's there, just ignore the people you don't like.
- re: some of the stuff you said in the pipermail link: The fact that someone does not release an RPM does not make them self-centered. Distributing a cross-platform tar.gz is good enough, and if they distribute the package they made for their own distro that's even better. Why should you force people to provide binaries for distros they don't use? Would you force them to provide windows installers too? And while wer'e speaking of this - the fact is that in most cases you find the exact opposite - people providing rpm but no deb (which is fine by me), sometimes even without a tar.gz (which is not). Would this make you ban Fedora or Mandrake for being self-centered?
--AmitAronovitch 04:27, 7 Jun 2005 (IDT)
Response to Amit Aronovich
Hi Amit!
First of all why are you using CamelCase for you name? This is MediaWiki and page titles can include whitespace. Now to your points:
1. I am maintaining a server with Debian Woody and I can say that I'm distressed about the fact that I have heavily outdated software. CPAN breaks on Debian Woody. PHP is incredibly ancient (the recent release of MediaWiki broke compatibility with its PHP). All the software is much out of date. I'd rather have more frequent releases, even for servers.
A 3 years between releases is way too long, especially in the computers and free software world where things change so rapidly. I realize that for the desktop I can use testing/unstable, but I'd rather use a stable release with some isolated upgrades from the bleeding edge. Mandrake gives me that.
2. "Integrated" - In Mandrake everything is made to work together. For example, when you invoke the print configuration tool for the first time, a few necessary packages are installed. There is a commonhttpd.conf file for configuring both Apache 2 and Apache 1 at once. Etc.
I don't know if Debian has it.
3. No, I am not talking about the GFDL, specifically. I'm talking about anything that is freely distributable but isn't really software. Graphics, music, texts, etc. These things don't play by the rules of software and don't require that they abide by the Debian Free Software Guidelines, and yet the core Debianists insist that they will be licensed under DFSG compatible licenses.
I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. And no, putting it in non-free is not the answer.
4. I personally know several Debianists that exhibit at least some traces of these symptoms. Some of them are Israelis. Hell, even Bruce Perens belongs to this category. And no I cannot ignore the people I don't like. There should be a general consensus against such behaviour in the community and if there isn't, it means the community is wrong-headed.
As for the RPM stuff - possibly. In any case, as a Mandrake user who often releases RPMs, I sometimes went to some length to ensure it had a Debian package in the packages pool.
