Ted Leung on the air : I wish Debian was Fedora

Ted Leung on the air
Ted Leung on the air: Open Source, Java, Python, and ...

Sun, 22 Aug 2004

Jon Udell's interview with Michael Tiemann helped me to understand the goals of Fedora. I like the way that Fedora is incorporating new features such as SELinux into the distribution, and it's sort of tempting to take a look at Fedora. Debian has been really good to me, and I haven't heard that any RPM based system can rival the quality of Debian. I just wish that the Debian people would stop letting ideology ruin the distribution. I use Debian because it works the best. Perhaps the Canonical team [via edd] will be able to appeal to folks like me.

[22:52] | [computers/operating_systems/linux/debian] | # | TB | F | G | 7 Comments |

You might want to give gentoo a whirl. Although the build from source stuff can at times be tiresome, I've found gentoo stable and upgradable in a way comparable to debian. And gentoo seems to be faster at getting new packages into their "stable" package list.
Posted by Seth Falcon at Mon Aug 23 06:49:39 2004

> I just wish that the Debian people would stop letting ideology ruin the distribution.

I'm looking forward to the popularization of Linux as then I can explain church denominationing with that parrallel.

Was there a time when Debians ideology provided a foundation for it to gain the stability and popularity it has today?

Your take on Gentoo would be appreciated. If building from source is tiresome, try the pre-built.
Posted by DeanG at Mon Aug 23 07:02:39 2004

What is the problem with Debian's ideology? They were a major factor in getting Qt available under the GPL, for instance, and have applied positive pressure in other instances as well. Everyone comes in with certain goals, and Debian is very clear about those goals. Aren't those goals -- a completely free, workable, useful distribution -- better than Redhat's (from the user's perspective)? And while Fedora is somewhat free of Redhat's goals, it's hardly an independent institution.

And while some people may have been put off by the ideology, a lot of people have been attracted by it, and a lot of developers have been brought into Debian as a result. Some people seem to think that you can have it both ways, that you can be attractive to people interested in ideology -- which is to say, interested in long term goals, the social relevence of what they are doing, the community they are building -- but never offend those who shy from ideology.

And since one committed developer is worth a hundred uncommitted developers, maybe ideology is the right choice. Considering the number and quality of Debian developers, this certainly seems to be the case.
Posted by Ian Bicking at Mon Aug 23 11:37:31 2004

Seth, DeanG,

Fink's unstable has put a bad taste in my mouth wrt build from source distributions, especially since most of the posts that I read show little performance impact for all that compiling.

I'm likely to be in the market for an AMD64 sometime soon, and I'll probably look at Gentoo at that point, but at the moment, I'm not interested in repaving my Debian boxes.
Posted by Ted Leung at Tue Aug 24 01:06:45 2004

Ian,

It seems that goal of a free distribution that is 'freeer than RMS' is becoming incompatible with shipping a distribution that people will regard as stable. I run Debian unstable and it's been 100% fine for me, but I worry that packages that I use will be orphaned due to ideology. How is that good for me?
Posted by Ted Leung at Tue Aug 24 01:11:56 2004

Hi Ted,
My last comment was lost (?), so let's try again.

You can use apt with rpm based distributions :
http://apt4rpm.sourceforge.net/

I have been using it now for a while on Suse 9.1 and it works really very well.

Fedora uses yum, which is very similiar to apt4rpm,
but is written in python (good for you ;) )

Regards,
Markus
Posted by Markus at Tue Aug 24 03:09:21 2004

I just happened to stumble upon this a few days later (looking for something else) so here goes:

Don't compare Fink unstable to Gentoo. Gentoo is more stable than that; they don't have to rely on Apple to Do The Right Thing and bear in mind that much of Fink is ported Linux software. OS X is very different from Linux, as I'm sure you're well aware. :-D Gentoo is a single OS. Not as rock-solid as Debian Stable, but it's okay.

I just tried Fedora. I was underwhelmed. And Fedora as an escape from Debian ideology? Hey, when I installed Grip, 'lame''s path was set as /usr/bin/oggenc. ??? I'm a big kid; I know the licensing issues behind lame, thanks. At least the Debian Grip maintainer doesn't do anything so asinine to force Vorbis on unsuspecting users...

I've decided to ditch Gentoo and Fedora for the time being for a mixed-release Debian system. Yeah, it's a pain (more of a pain than I initially realized), but right now it's running fine and dandy. And yes, I have many of those "questionable" software releases installed; that's the real joy of apt allowing for extra sources. :-D
Posted by Shane Simmons at Tue Sep 7 20:43:53 2004

You can subscribe to an RSS feed of the comments for this blog:

Add a comment here:

You can use some HTML tags in the comment text:
To insert a URI, just type it -- no need to write an anchor tag.
Allowable html tags are: <a href>, , , , <blockquote>,  , , <code>, <pre>, <cite>,  and .

You can also use some Wiki style:
URI => [uri title]
 => _emphasized text_
 => *bold text*
Ordered list => consecutive lines starting spaces and an asterisk

<	August 2004					>
Su	Mo	Tu	We	Th	Fr	Sa
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31