Hi! > In 2003 there have been 43 security advisories for SUSE Linux according to > SUSE's website: > http://www.suse.com/de/security/announcements/index.html > > RedHat has had 53 during the same time period: > https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/rh9-errata-security.html > > Debian has had 176 during the same time period: > http://www.debian.org/security/2003/ > > (Makes me wonder if the other vendors are really being honest. Is Debian > that bad? Or just much more thorough, forthright and conscientious than > the others?)
Debian is not that bad. There are 3 Debian distributions at the moment. The old Potato, the current Woody and the future Sarge. AFAIK there have been advisories that were specifically for versions that can be found in Potato. I'm not sure if there are already advisories for Sarge, but if not you can expect them to start appearing before the official release. Then there is the size of Debian. apt-cache stats will tell you the total number of potentially installable packages. On my Woody machine it is more than 8800 packages. And on my Debian unstable machine it says more than 17000. Or put in different words, the Red Hat taroon beta I downloaded was 4 CDs. Debian Woody alone is 6 CDs. Sarge will be bigger. It is almost true that if you cannot find it in Debian, it does not exist. With a code base that large, it is not surprising that there are more advisories for Debian than for other, much smaller distributions. Groetjes, Peter Busser -- The Adamantix Project Taking trustworthy software out of the labs, and into the real world http://www.adamantix.org/ _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html