Moshe, I'm trying to understand why some people resent trying new distributions/ applications (note: at least trying). You don't have to act like some kid finding out his favorite super hero is being insulted or some knight defending his fort.
If you can't discuss things without throwing FUD or unbased assumptions (hearsay doesn't count) and conduct a civil discussion please leave it to someone who can. Debian (or Gentoo or any other distro) is not the end all be all of distributions. Any distro has an intendend audience and niche (some larger than others). If someone does not fit your niche, fine - OK. You don't have to go bad mouthing those not fitting it or trying/looking another one. I use both distros (among others) and like them for various reasons. Now that I've got it out of my system.... > > Debian is constatly falling behind and can't keep up with new software > > releases > > You probably meant "Debian actually tests software packages before > inflicting them on the users". Debian seems to manage to "keep up" quite > well -- it's not a matter of a continously widening gap. Debian *means* to > be be no less than a year between releases -- requiring people to upgrade > early and often is stupid. *Means* is nice. Potato was released on August 14th, 2000, woody was released on 19 July 2002 (not counting point releases which are bugfix/security updates). I want to test new software as it comes out. Yes, I know that some things will break, and with minimal intelligence there's no problem to figure out what. Mostly breakage is by users doing emerge -u world instead of (emerge -up world, like apt-get's -s). You wouldn't go running apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade if you're tracking unstable/experimental without checking what is going to be upgraded/removed (I hope you don't). Debian's package maintainers are humans as well and did/do/will make mistakes (I remember the PAM fiasco in unstable). You shouldon't treat them like gods, you have common sense and you can use it. Gentoo users who want a stable system, can emerge stable packages (yes, you can have kde 2.2.2 it is in portage (you can run it side by side with 3.0.3 if you wish). It is up to you to decide. If you can't or don't want to stand the heat it is OK, but you shouldn't stand out of the kitchen and shout: don't go in there it is too hot. You can warn about it and let people decide, some people are actually looking for it. > > (not to mention months of freeze time when unstable is stopped from > > being updated as well). > > ...and people who want the latest and greatest use experimental... > > > this is not a bad thing by itself, but usually when > > someone runs unstable they do it because they want the latest and > > greatest. > > No, they do it because they want the latest *well tested* packages. How's using Debian experimental different from running Gentoo (and no i don;t mind the compile times). What if I want to try kde 3.1alpha1 or the new koffice ? I'm the one testing it and taking the heat. Why should you care ? Linux and OpenSource depends on early and bleeding edge testers, if you don't want to be on, fine, but other will. See "The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Release Early, Release Often" in http://www.kde.org/food/cathedral/cathedral-paper-4.html > > Now that there are unoffical kde-3 packages, where are the rest of the > > distro's support. For example: there's and licq 1.2.0a release, and is in > > unstable. Try installing it wih kde pure environemnt, no luck. It is > > built against qt2. No qt3 plugin and no kde plugin supprt (which allows > > docking) in > > site. Those are the little things that make a distro polished. With > > Gentoo it > > is not a problem, > > Because Gentoo sends packages fresh from the upstream to the users without > checking everything works together. Note the emphasis "works *together*". > Gentoo still seems a collection of unrelated packages. Most of upstream packages are masked by default and if you want to use use the you have to unmask them. Packages get unmasked after a period of testing. Here's and exmample of packages.mask, regarding koffice-1.2-rc1 <snip> # masked for b0rk@ge + testing =app-office/koffice-1.2_rc1 </snip> Yes. I've unmasked and am using it right now. It is up to you to decide. Sometimes you and I want Debian (or other distro) packagers to decide for you, sometimes I want to do it myself. > > Package management is not that are and i handled even on LFS systems with > > quite an ease. > > Bad package management is easy. Correct package management is non-trivial. I did it for long time on LFS which doesn't even have a native package manager and I don't consider myself a hotshot. non-trivial is not always equal to easy. > > Seems like you never used Gentoo at all, and talking on from theory of > > how you > > think it works, and this is bad. You should at least give it a try for a > > week or two before you assume things or pass judgment. > > You mean "compile it for a week or two, then try it for two hours"? > For many of us, just seeing the lack of clue in gentoo about various > issues (like library ABI) is enough. This is just FUD and unbased/kneejerk response. Building a usable system from scratch (not using the precompiled stage files) including kde and X took 2 days max (on my machine P3 866Mhz). You can build the system from your current distro in a chrooted environemnt and if want to conserve resources renice the build process. Few months ago (up to a year, can't remember) I've testing (woody) server, and dependencies of php4 installed X related packages on my machine. I didn't go around bad mouthing Debian packagers saying it shows thier lack of understanding of dependency issues, I just dealt with it and the problem got fixed later. All developers are human and no one is god. > > Before/after the package is installed the ebuild can perform additional > > operations like installing a menu file, restarting the daemon or what > > ever (and many ebuilds do that). > > In which run-levels? When you emerge in run-level 1, do emerges of daemons > cause the daemons to be up? Can you configure the system *not* to put > daemons up before instructed to manually (so, for example, an insecurely > configured daemon will not go up). No daemon is turned on by default. You must add it to the defult run level by yourself. e.g: rc-update add xinetd default > > So what ? If I'm tracking unstable I want unstable and latest software, > > this point is moot. > > "Unstable" means "changing", not "crashes". > Learn to read. > Debian aims (though it is not there yet) to be in a state where unstable > is always ready to release. That's why woody's freeze took so long ? If this is correct the freeze should've been a month or two. No need to run around throwing idealistic statements with no base in reality. >Gentoo, apparently, aims (and gets there) to > be in a state where a stable release is an impossibility, and anybody > developing for the platform has a crap-shoot of which versions are > installed. My machine is stable with no crashes and you're just throwing FUD. You don't have to upgrade packages if you don't want to. But you must use common sense, and I don't see anything wrong with it as long the user is aware to that. Debian and Gentoo and other distors have a place in Linux's world and form different functions. e.g: many patches related to gcc3.x were contributed to app developers as a result of a testing system (1.3b - which I'm using right now) by Gentoo developers. Today I've helped and guided a Gentoo (and former Redhat) user with woody install on another partition on his Gentoo system, as IMHO it is important for serious Linux users to at least know/use other distros. He had no previous info or prejudice about Debian. He's first reponse was: Hey, this is slower than Gentoo why should I use it (no he don't mind compiling and even though he gets agitated from time to time with compile problems, he's still prefers it). I told him that he can't judge from first glance and must use the distro for sometime to understand and have better judgement. You remind me of him just the otherway around. Hmm, wait, no. At least he tried and installed Debian which is more than I can say about you and Gentoo. Like I've said Debian is an excellent distro, but so's Gentoo and both have their place and usage. I use and enjoy both. You should at least give it a run and use it for sometime. If not, it is OK, but don't run around spreading hearsay FUD please. You can go on looking at Debian with pink stained glasses (instead of being pragmatic), please don't give this glasses to users willing to experiment with some other distros. -- Meir Kriheli MKsoft systems http://www.mksoft.co.il ================================================================To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
