> Terry Collins wrote:
>
> As a guess, I think Michael was alluding to the RH style where they
> continue to release fixes for older versions. However, I expect that
> Debian doesn't have the personnell assets that RH has.
Methinks you underestimate distributed development, Terry. :)
> > for a release that was superceded two months ago,
> > in the entirely reasonable expectation that you will upgrade,
> > *for free* to the new release!
>
> Is this a reasonable expectation?
> That really declares Debian as a distro only for "professionals"
> TANSTAAFL!
One of your longer acronyms I don't understand... You could be our acronyms
page maintainer! ;)
It's a reasonable expectation for many reasons, the first being that Debian
doesn't operate the same way other distributions do. It's an iterative
process, and widely tested amongst developers and users alike.
slink is also hopelessly old. :)
> My experience in upgrades is such that I never upgrade now, unless the
> machine it totally sacrificial and I have time to waste. Too many
> "upgrades" have gone belly up. I'm yet to experience a debian upgrade,
> but don't see how it will be different to other distro's.
Hmm. Wonder if I can make it out to MacLUG to give a demonstration...
Debian's different. It's easy. Scarily so. That's why it's hard to shut up
newly impressed users like me, who can't believe what an incredible OS,
community, and ethos they've found.
> Time spent having to "upgrade" regularly is also lost income from a
> business sense as it pushes the support cost higher. The benefit of
> supporting older versions is that it drives the support costs down from
> a business viewpoint. I guess it depends on how you see Linux achieving
> world domination {:-).
The famous quote from Jamie Zawinski goes like this: "Linux is only free if
your time has no value." A classic example of jwz's ruthless sarcasm, but at
least he's not poking himself in the eye with some of the idealistic tripe
that comes out of Slashdot every now and then.
I used to spend a great deal of time fart-arsing around installing packages,
finding the missing dependencies, configuring things, making sure it did
everything I wanted. Now I don't. I spend about a quarter of the time on
basic system administration than I used to.
Why?
I'll give you an example. Recently, I installed wwwoffle on a Red Hat
machine for simple small office caching (I used wwwoffle because it has a
lot of cute little features and doesn't require as much memory Squid). I
installed the RPM, and got it up and running.
Every time I went to a page whilst using the cache though, it showed me it's
"Mark this page for later download" page. A quick read of the wwwoffle docs
showed that you needed to tell it when you were online and off, so I simply
changed the ppp scripts. I also had to modify the configuration so it only
allowed connections from the local network. Plus, ntsysv'ed and set it to
run on startup. Done.
At home, on my Debian gateway? I installed the package. Done.
This is even more apparent with more complex packages, plus you get both
upstream and Debian documentation in /usr/share/doc/, so you know what's
going on if you need to.
Rot your brain^W^W^WSave time for the important stuff.
- Jeff
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Ye shall be cursed to fall in love so easily, and yet be so
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