Review review [LWN.net]

Review review

Posted Apr 16, 2007 10:22 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: Review review by Max.Hyre
Parent article: Debian redefines itself with new release (Linux.com)

> Huh? For all its history, unless he's counting the startup period before it became a major distro. Ubuntu may be major, but it edges toward commercial, and is certainly not philosophically free.

Commercial != proprietary

There is no conflict in having commercial Free software. Ubuntu is definately a commercial distribution. As commercial as Redhat or anything else, but that's not a bad thing.

Debian is about the only large distribution that is ran by a non-profit community. This gives it a unique position compared to other popular Linux distributions and it's interesting how it comes out.

> I assume he means the ones that are patented—the non-free ones.

Not to also mention the copyright violations. He is talking about the _win32_ codecs, ( ...leaves out the Win32 codecs... ) which were never intended by their makers to be used in Linux and I expect that many of them have licenses that would forbid modification and redistribution (not that I actually looked that stuff personally).

I don't think there is any distribution that provides the windows codecs stuff, is there?

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My two cents:

Debian would be a lot more popular if they could get releases out on time. Not everybody wants to deal with > 300 megs worth of updates per month in Unstable and fixing stuff every time they update. They don't have the nessicary skills to deal with the schitzphrenic nature of Testing.

I think that if the new Debian president is able to pull off his idea of desktop upgrades for stable every six months then that will go a LONG way to making Debian usefull for mortals.

Just upgrade the kernel, X, KDE, and Gnome and the popular desktop applications (everybody does the popularity contest, right? :P ) to the latest release would be all you'd need. Leave GCC and other such messes for major stable upgrades. I think that would totally kick-ass.

There realy is a great deal of interest in Debian. It's a significant acheivement right now and people realy have a desire to use it, but it's just unreliable when it comes to releasing software and that has a huge cooling effect on the overall community.

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Review review

Posted Apr 16, 2007 19:02 UTC (Mon) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link]

The problem is, I don't think that's the order of difficulty. GCC should be easy; in practice, there will be a few bugs in GCC or the compiled programs that will be discovered, but most of the major C++ difficulties are in the past. X is so old that most of the compatibility issues are in the past, but the massive rearrangements it has gone through have been unsettling. But GNOME and KDE have such large dependencies that any changes to them can force a huge number of programs on the system to recompile and link to new versions of the libraries.