Just one more uninformed reviewer [LWN.net]

Just one more uninformed reviewer

Posted Mar 3, 2005 16:14 UTC (Thu) by leandro (guest, #1460)
Parent article: Debian vs. FreeBSD as a Web Serving Platform, Part 1

Great concepts suffer from being out of line with what people have grown used to expect, and Debian is no exception.

First, if one wants to compare Debian to BSD on being up-to-date, the baseline should be not stable but testing.

Second, the article completely ignores the most benefical aspect of Debian, its policies and their effect in systems administration, including reliability and security. Make that third too, it's really important.

Fourth, most obviously any such comparision should start not with packaging and policies but with the OS itself, that is, the kernel, C libraries and basic utilities. Pretty much everything else comes from the same sources, but there are important points to compare -- like Linux running on pretty much anything, having more flexible and functional utilities and experimenting more, while FreeBSD is leaner and arguably having some advantages for databases.

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Just one more uninformed reviewer

Posted Apr 14, 2005 10:33 UTC (Thu) by vinci (guest, #13772) [Link]

> Second, the article completely ignores the most benefical aspect of Debian, > its policies and their effect in systems administration, including
> reliability and security. Make that third too, it's really important.

I don't think Debian is more secure than other Linuxes. The thing is, that old software tends to have more know security leaks. Often brand new, rewritten code changes some architectural weaknesses of a program.

Fedora at some point drops support for old releases (that are younger than the newest Debian release). The support is than made by the Fedora Legacy project. Debian also should concentrate on packaging new software an making a good distribution. You will allways have bugs. Older distributions a re not necessarily more secure. People think that and tend to leave their server alone. But that's not a good idea, either.