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Home > Archive > Debian Developers > February 2004 > Talk on "Why Linux, Why Debian"
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Talk on "Why Linux, Why Debian"
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| Manoj Srivastava 2004-02-25, 9:37 am |
| Hi folks,
With less than a day to go, I have put my talk up on the net
at http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/talk.html. Comments welcome.
I would like to thank all the people who helped me put this
together. Now, if only I don't blank out in stage fright tomorrow ;-)
manoj
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Once the erosion of power begins, it has a momentum all its own.
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| Adrian 'Dagurashibanipal' von Bidder 2004-02-25, 9:37 am |
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| Andreas Metzler 2004-02-25, 9:37 am |
| Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> wrote:
> With less than a day to go, I have put my talk up on the net
> at http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/talk.html. Comments welcome.
[...]
Nice. I've always felt the same, that having a consistent policy is
our killer feature.
Nitpicks:
* Afaik: s/snapshot.debian.org/snapshot.debian.net/
* | Debian attempts to ensure smooth upgrades skipping a major release
| - which is not something that I have seen supported elsewhere.
Afaik this is no formal policy and not necessarily true. (Yes, I know
it is true for _your_ packages). I'd suggest to simply drop this.
I think if you mention running "testing/unstable" on workstations you
should also mention that there are _no_ security updates for these
systems.
cu andreas
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| Andreas Tille 2004-02-25, 12:33 pm |
| On Tue, 24 Feb 2004, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> With less than a day to go, I have put my talk up on the net
> at http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/talk.html. Comments welcome.
>
> I would like to thank all the people who helped me put this
> together. Now, if only I don't blank out in stage fright tomorrow ;-)
Good luck. Perhaps some Custom Debian Distribution stuff for further
reading. It is far from finished but the "advertising" stuff is partly
included ...
http://people.debian.org/~tille/deb...ebian-cdd.html/
Kind regards
Andreas.
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| Gunnar Wolf 2004-02-25, 2:33 pm |
| Manoj Srivastava dijo [Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 11:20:42PM -0600]:
> With less than a day to go, I have put my talk up on the net
> at http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/talk.html. Comments welcome.
Ok, my comments are:
> Feature set and Selection of Software
>
> Debian has over 10000 packages now. The chances are that anything you
> need is already packaged an integrated into the system, woth a person
> dedicated to keeping it (and a small number of other packages) upto
> date, integrated, and bug free.
s/woth/with/;
Under maintenance and administration:
> (...)
> This means that systems get updated in minutes, whereas the
> recommended way to do an upgrade on a BSD OS involves recompiling
> the entire system (at least, the "world").
Ummm... Not true, at least in OBSD. In OBSD you must recompile only
the affected parts (and it can be automated using a little tool I
wrote [1]). Of course, there are always gotchas. In OBSD, most
binaries (at least those not in /usr) are (were?) statically
linked. When patching libraries, you get the easy procedure on how to
patch the specific library, and then just a note recommending to
recompile the binaries... But anyway, that's a long shot from the
entire system.
I see that (at least up to this point) you didn't mention the
multitiered(?) approach of the BSDs - Once again, I speak mostly of
OBSD, as it is the only one I have really been involved in. In the
'maintenance and administrator' section, I think mentioning the ports
is also important: In OpenBSD, ports are officialy not part of the
system, and should a security problem appear in one of them, you are
on your own. Yes, they do update the ports tree, but it is of
secondary importance - And that can do a bit more than just to ruin
your day :-(
(Yes, I now see you mentioned this further down, in 'security and
reliability', but keeping the OS up to date fits better in this
part  )
In 'Source builds':
> (...)
> nstead of having to go downloading, configuring, compiling and
> installing software machine per machine, without any sort of
> automated help ( I am not completely doing justice to emerge /
> portage here, but the point is clear, I hope ). I can emphasize this
> enough: for "serious"/production usage, binary distros are the best
> and only viable solution;
The Gentoo users/fans I know often remind people that although
emerge/portage are the best known tools in Gentoo, their system now
supports precompiled binaries, and most installations are done using
that. Yes, IMHO that makes Gentoo's supposed advantages self-defeated,
but anyway, they will argue about it
In 'security and reliability': You mentioned a link to OBSD's
http://www.openbsd.org/33.html - W^X and Propolice are also mentioned
in http://www.openbsd.org/34.html, and some people will call you names
for giving obsolete (and soon-to-be unsupported) links.
In 'scalability and performance':
> (...)
> FreeBSD 5.1 has very impressive performance and scalability. I
> foolishly assumed all BSDs to play in the same league
> performance-wise, because they all share a lot of code and can
> incorporate each other's code freely. I was wrong. FreeBSD has the
> second best performance of the BSDs and it even comes close to Linux
> 2.6. If you run another BSD on x86, you should switch to FreeBSD!
I think you meant that 'FreeBSD has the second best performance of the
tested systems', not of 'the BSDs', right? If it is the second best
BSD, why not recommending the first one? ;-)
(Remember to note that FBSD 5.1 is still not marked for use in
production servers - It has a release number, yes, but I understand
its status is closer to Sid than to Woody)
> OpenBSD 3.4 was a real stinker in these tests. The installation
> routine sucks (...)
Ummm... I would remove this first asseveration - Many people dislike
OBSD's installer, but many more think it really rocks. Simple, to the
point (although not as generic as ours, but that's not their goal),
quick, easy and consistent across platforms. This is too subjective to
just say it sucks.
Greetings, and best luck in your talk!
----
[1] Tepatche, http://www.gwolf.cx/soft/tepatche/
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| Matthew Palmer 2004-02-25, 6:33 pm |
| On Wed, Feb 25, 2004 at 09:33:53AM +0100, Adrian 'Dagurashibanipal' von Bidder wrote:
> On Wednesday 25 February 2004 06.20, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>
> | Debian packages trace theirs relationships to each other not merely through
s/theirs/their/.
- Matt
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| Jan Nieuwenhuizen 2004-02-26, 5:33 am |
| Manoj Srivastava writes:
Hi Manoi,
> With less than a day to go, I have put my talk up on the net
> at http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/talk.html. Comments welcome.
A great piece, here are my comments.
I agree with you when you say:
The differentiating factor is Debian policy, and the stringent
package format QA process
but reading your talk it is easy to miss what policy comprises and why
it is critical for choosing Debian over others. You mention most
important things, but fail to explicitely attribute them to policy.
You can fine-tune the degree of risk you want to take ...
But even the more adventurous choices are solid enough that they
virtually never break. And `stable' just never breaks ;-).
It would be good if you could be more convincing about the fact that
stable really is, and unstable really isn't. In my experience, herein
lies exactly one of the biggest image problems of Debian.
The uninitiated interpret Debian's choice of distributions as: stable
- hopefully as stable as Red Hat, but too out of date to use for
anything but a server that has not too recent hardware; testing - wtf,
a distro without security fixes?; unstable - I don't have the time to
fix my machine all the time.
Upgrades have been said to be the killer advantage for Debian.
They are, but I still don't think that people (Red Hat users, eg),
realise that Debian can almost invariably be upgraded remotely: it
does not need burning and popping in a CD, rebooting and handholding.
Jan.
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Jan Nieuwenhuizen <janneke@gnu.org> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
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