On Wednesday 09 February 2005 10:42 pm, Benjamin Scott wrote:
> (Long-time members of this list will recognize the subject, which I drag
> out whenever I get particularly irritated by all the Debian elitists who
> think nobody's ever installed software before. If you're not interested in
> this kind of crap, just ignore this thread.)
It was a small comment that I didn't expect would incite such a banter, but
let me throw a few words of explanation through here at least to try and
settle the water.
> The size of Debian's main package repository (the "distribution", really)
> is really what most Debian zealots like when they say they like apt-get.
> It isn't the tool, it's the effort that goes into that repository. That
> repository is one of the things that keeps bringing me back to try Debian.
That is right of course. When I say APT, I meant the attention to details in
Debian's package depositories and that is obviously a misnomer. But that
comes from the conversation about it being as simple as using APT to get
packages and by and large, it is. Now especially with APT available for
RPM-based repositories, it probably should be corrected, but it also seems
that RPM-based repositories are moving to using yum instead. Whatever floats
your boat...
> Unfortunately, it appears to me that Debian people, apparently as a
> universal rule, have no concept of software configuration management at
> all. So as the number of packages increases, the single-large-repository
> model takes longer and longer to do integration testing. That makes
> "stable" doomed to be perpetually hopelessly out-of-date. Which is not
> good. I keep waiting for Debian people to realize that until they break
> things down into manageable chunks, they're never going to make progress.
The single-large repository part is what's important. It takes a little
longer to unify configuration in such a way that it almost doesn't matter
which web server, or which MTA you install for example, but that extra time
it takes to try making sure everyone follows the same universal configuration
management practices is appreciated by Debian users. Again, it's just
different from other systems sometimes, but once you're familiar with a
Debian system, it makes a lot of sense. I think the same thing when I get on
a RedHat-based system.
As for the manageable chunks, I think the Debian offshoots are best at that.
There are lots of Debian sub-projects out there for education distros, office
distros, mythtv distros - some official, some not. Ultimately, that niche is
already filled with options... Debian doesn't need to break up to fill it.
On the topic of Stable still being hopelessly out of date, just consider how
annoyed you are hearing about Debian and APT and imagine the same from me
when I hear someone talk about Debian being out of date. Once more, servers
don't need the latest greatest KDE and Gnome and cd burning software and
office suites, etc. Stable is fine for them. This is probably the first time
in awhile that I have felt Stable is starting to get a little old with no
MySQL4, Exim4, Apache2, etc... but that's just because it's at it's oldest
now. Sarge will be out soon and magically, those will be available. And as
for non-servers, just use Testing. It's stable enough for any desktop. If
you can express your annoyance by Debian zealots, then this paragraph was my
Debian zealot rebuttal ;-).
> Another really impressive but usually overlooked feature of Debian is the
> general attitude that Free Software and community development are the way
> to go. Things like the Debian Social Contract and the Debian Free Software
That's true, but I generally associate that will ranting and try not to
mention that so as not to start flame wars about overly-obsessive lawyer-type
people with long shaggy hair. Regardless, I started a flame war anyway, so
yes, I'll mention I feel better knowing someone is paying attention to these
details, but I also dip into other repositories on occasion for things like
dvdcss and lame. I guess I'm a bit of a contradiction, but I find value at
least in knowing exactly which packages aren't really free.
> But all the Debian zealots just say "APT rocks and RPM sux!!" and wonder
> why nobody cares.
I don't recall saying RPM sux, just that APT was very valuable when you got
used to it. And also according to the misnomer discussion above, I'm really
just talking about the repositories and the attention to detail and all that.
> I've used both dpkg and rpm, and IMNSHO, I think rpm is the better of the
> two. Some operations are a lot faster, and others are just a lot nicer to
> use ("rpm -V" and "rpm -Uvh", for example). And the build tools and source
> management of rpm blow away Debian's offerings. Or they did when I last
> looked at them, which was admittedly a few years ago. But given Debian's
> rate of change, I don't expect it's that much different.
I don't use dpkg enough to compare to rpm for speed, but I generally find apt
far faster than yum. And apt-source is an awesome source management tool.
As is the kernel package tool. I was just having this conversation the other
day with one of the centOS developers (I work with him) come to think of it.
Ultimately, he didn't know about these aspects of APT/Debian either, but was
impressed with them. YMMV.
Anyway, as I said, I didn't mean to start a flame war. And perhaps if I had
attached this whole lengthy dissertation about Debian and a few explanations
of terminology and such, I wouldn't have sparked it... assuming of course it
would have been more valuable to you to read it and see my reasoning that to
react to a flame war. Whatever... I gotta get to work. The linux systems we
use there are mostly Red Hat and/or centOS if that makes you feel any better.
-N
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