Distros, not ISVs, more deserve help -- and can't standardize w/o it [LWN.net]

Distros, not ISVs, more deserve help -- and can't standardize w/o it

Posted Aug 1, 2008 19:51 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: Distros, not ISVs, more deserve help -- and can't standardize w/o it by krishna
Parent article: Will LSB 4 Standardize Linux? (InternetNews)

If it was up to me and I was the king of the universe I'd issue a decree that everybody should
simply drop what they are doing and re-base off of Debian Testing. _Right_Now_.

Debian has the most complete, most consistent, and most bug-free packages anywhere I've seen
in any Linux distribution, bar none. And this is due entirely to the sort of thing you've
described AND the tremendous amount of work and organizational effort that they put into it.

Ubuntu _almost_ gets it right. Their mistake was not working towards backward compatibility.
If everything in Ubuntu was installable in Debian and visa versa that would save everybody
involved a lot of effort and a lot of heartache.

IMO, Ubuntu should be not a entirely new distribution, but a installer and a repository based
off of Debian. A carefully tested and configured default configuration that differs from what
you'd get from Debian's "tasksel desktop".

That is you would end up with something like:
deb http://example.com/debian/ Hardy main contrib non-free ubuntu

One distribution that seems to get it right is 64Studio. They do a very good job of making
their packages work with Debian transparently, while still making significant changes to the
kernel and other important system files.


-------

Of course this isn't going to happen and I am sure it would be a unpopular concept among
non-Debian developers.

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Distros, not ISVs, more deserve help -- and can't standardize w/o it

Posted Aug 1, 2008 21:05 UTC (Fri) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]

Ubuntu's marketing is based around being something different and special.  I also often feel
that they stick too many of their limited resources into reinventing wheels their own way,
rather than reusing other people's work well.