on Mon, Mar 14, 2005 at 12:33:06PM -0500, Peter Jay Salzman ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
On Mon 14 Mar 05, 9:31 AM, Bob Scofield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
Of course I do not expect much sympathy from Debian users for this type of computing. But after Ken's answer to my question about apt upgrading to new versions of open source applications (eventually to Open Office 2.0, for example) I marvel at what Debian is up to. It is clearly economically suicidal for commercial distros to have apt. While Debian is considered geekware, it has tremendous potential to the non-technically inclined.
Bob
Interesting thought. While my understanding is that apt has been ported to other distros, like Connectiva (which is now owned by someone else) my sense is that it hasn't really caught on. Maybe it doesn't have the blessing of the distros to which it was ported.
Those who fail to understand Debian Policy are forced to reimplement it. Poorly.
http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/talks/why_debian/talk.html http://twiki.iwethey.org/Main/WhyDebianRocks
Policy - The Special Sauce
This is the crux, the narthex, the throbbing heart of Debian and what makes it so utterly superior to all other operating systems. Policy is defined. It is clear. It is enforced through the tools you use every day. When you issue apt-get install foo, you're not just installing software. You're enforcing policy - and that policy's objective is to give you the best possible system.
In danger of starting a flame war, I am going to give my view of Debian. Debian is in fact based on wonderful ideas, but it has horrible implementation. Its rigid policy and arrogant developers end up making it difficult to use for the general user. It's stable release is nearly 3 years old. Debian's installation process is difficult and requires intimate knowledge of how linux works. In order to have an up-to-date system, you risk instability (with the testing or unstable tree), or must resort to 3rd party "backports".
Just my view. Maybe I've never given it a fair chance since every install I've tried has failed.
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