On June 4, 2008 09:53:33 pm Christopher Browne wrote: > The crucial differences between Debian and other distributions are > two-fold: > > 1. It has a public, democratic governance system, whereas other > distributions tend to be under the control of some non-public > organization. > > To some extent, the various Red Hat derivatives are controlled by Red > Hat Software, irrespective of public participation. Likewise for > Ubuntu and Canonical. > > Various Linux distributions have gone away due to changes in direction > of the "owners" (Caldera being a most obvious example); there is > little risk of that taking place with Debian due to its governance > model. > > 2. As a result of the wide-spread participation, there needs to be a > great deal of policy, which indeed extends to tooling for managing all > sorts of aspects of software packaging and the interaction of packages > with one another and with the distribution. > > Traditionally, the "engineering" of Red Hat-sourced distributions took > place entirely internally to Red Hat Software, and packaging was a > "pre-cooked" thing where you could only be fairly certain that things > would work if the packages had RHAT people working on them. The RPM > tool could build packages and manage a local installation repository; > in contrast, Debian has long had a VASTLY more extensive set of > package tooling addressing *way* more high level issues, and helping > to enable a much more diverse set of contributors to contribute > well-integrated packages. > > The consistency of having the huge set of diverse, yet well-integrated > packages is what has enabled the creation of "private labelled" things > like Ubuntu and Knoppix that derive the huge set of software by virtue > of harnessing Debian's work at relatively little cost.
Well said, Christopher! Chris W. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]