Debian continues to sprint ahead

Debian continues to sprint ahead

A poster above mentioned the Debian maintainer network and resulting quality of packages as the major advantage which makes Debian seem so much better at upgrading than, say, RedHat.

But this is only part of the story.

• With Debian 2.1 came apt, with its legendary dependency management capability. The quality of the dependency relationships throughout the 9000+ packages in stable and 13,000+ in unstable is, of course, the result of the hard work of the Debian maintainers.
• 2.2 (IIRC) saw the introduction of doc-base, which links all installed documentation from a single unified index. There are two front ends: a local HTML tree built by the package dhelp, and a tree built in CGI for a web server by the package dwww. The completeness of the doc-base index is, of course, the result of the hard work of the Debian maintainers.
• The Debian menu system has all of the GNOME and KDE and just about all other X11 applications in a single hierarchy which is linked to the menu systems of GNOME, KDE, Enlightenment, XFCE, GNUStep, and even FVWM2, so all applications are available in all environments. The completeness of this index is, of course, the result of the hard work of the Debian maintainers.
• The debconf configuration management system asks the admin configuration questions before packages are installed/upgraded, and constructs the configuration files accordingly during installation. More significantly, these answers are preserved to construct new conffiles on upgrades, automatically preserving admins' preferences across conffile format changes. Furthermore, the new HTTP backend allows an organization to standardize management of debconf options for a large number of machines. The extensiveness and thoroughness of package customization which debconf makes possible is, of course, the result of the hard work of the Debian maintainers.

Just as the Linux kernel guys can more easily make needed changes to kernel interfaces than, say, Windows kernel people, because the drivers and user-space tools which work with them are free, so Debian's infrastructure can adapt as necessary to preemptively provide the highest quality and simplest administration, because the thousands of packages which ship with Debian are all free.

So now RedHat has yum, SuSE's YAST does some of teh same, and GNOME has scrollkeeper, and GNOME and KDE have their menu systems, and there's even an effort to do debconf without Debian (can't find it just now, I think it's on SourceForge somewhere). But each of these is particular to its little universe, e.g. GNOME doesn't see the KDE documentation and vice versa, and what package support is there -- or will there be -- for this new son-of-debconf? And just as these guys are trying to copy Debian features, RedHat and Mandrake are rapidly trying to remake their package maintenance paradigm in the image of Debian's...

So you can wait for all these people to reinvent the Debian wheel, or you can just get Debian -- or one of its more easily-installed versions (Knoppix, Progeny, Lindows...) -- and enjoy the fruits of the hard work of the 1100+ Debian maintainers right now.