[ale] Debian 3.0 as a server platform?

Chris Ricker kaboom at oobleck.net
Thu Jun 2 06:59:23 EDT 2005


On Wed, 1 Jun 2005, Barry Hawkins wrote:

> No one who chooses to run Debian stable as their desktop install should 
> complain about package availability and updates, any more than they 
> should complain about not being able to run gPhoto on RHEL or SLES with
> their new USB-capable digital camera.  

I'm not sure why you think you can't run gphoto on RHEL. It's included and 
works well.

> Testing - the candidate for the next stable, as up to date as any other 
> distro, except for certain areas where the free software guidelines and 
> Debian's policies against packaging precompiled binaries in the source 
> packages and the like impede the more rapid pace of, say, Fedora or the 
> others.  See "what is testing?"[1] and "how it becomes stable"[2] in 
> the Debian FAQ for more.  

Again, I'm not sure where you're coming from. The policies for Fedora are 
almost exactly the same as for Debian; both only package open source 
software built from source. Fedora still manages to ship every 6 months, 
more or less (FC 1 - Nov 2003; FC 2 - May 2004; FC 3 - Nov 2004). Fedora 
Core 4 ships Monday.

For comparison, Debian 3.0 shipped July 2002. Debian 3.1 ships Monday. 
Something's very slow about the Debian stabilization process, but it's 
not the "open software only" guidelines.... My guess is it's that everyone 
involved spends too much time in flame wars on debian-devel ;-). 

Seriously, Fedora is deliberately on a 6-month schedule (develop 3 
months; stabilize 3-4 months; ship) while Debian is on more of a 
milestone schedule (make a new release when something significant has 
changed; spend some time stabilizing; ship). Other than that, the two are 
very similar in terms of what they'll package and what their goals are.

later,
chris



More information about the Ale mailing list