Time to move from Red Hat to Debian? [LWN.net]

Time to move from Red Hat to Debian?

Posted Nov 6, 2003 14:09 UTC (Thu) by wookey (subscriber, #5501)
In reply to: Time to move from Red Hat to Debian? by evgeny
Parent article: Time to move from Red Hat to Debian?

You make important points. These are considerations to take into account. There is a fundamental tension between stability (=old) and being up-to-date. Debian at least lets you choose. In practice security updates happen for unstable nearly as fast as they do for stable. They can happen for testing very slowly indeed as they just percolate down from unstable and that can take a while. This is important for those thinking they'll compromise between stable(old) and unstable(new) (and thus pick testing) - testing is a bad idea for a net-facing machine. This could of course be fixed if enough (competent!) people volunteered to be a testing security team - it's just manpower (old-stable, stable, unstable * 11 architectures is already more than enough security work for the team)

There is a genuine problem with running stable server machines but wanting some packages kept fresher (spamassasin is a particularly good example). You can now mix packages from stable,testing and unstable but things can break if you do this. You can also apt-get the source and recompile the packages for stable but that's work and you can still run into problems if it needs newer things to build.

What I do is use the backports apt repositories maintained by some Debian developers to solve exactly this problem. These provide quickly-updated packages for stable in a reasonably consistent form - apt-get.org lists the repositories. This works for me. I'd like to see the process made more official at some point - it probably will be one day.

All these things provide interesting compromises. Debian's entirely open process gives you various ways of managing them, or even collectively improving things.

(Log in to post comments)

Time to move from Red Hat to Debian?

Posted Nov 6, 2003 14:51 UTC (Thu) by mduregon (subscriber, #3792) [Link]

thanks wookey,

this posting of yours has cleared some questions I had in my mind about stable/testing/unstable ...

duri

Time to move from Red Hat to Debian?

Posted Nov 6, 2003 21:40 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link]

> There is a fundamental tension between stability (=old) and being up-to-date.

Right, and this tension grows exponentially with the development cycle period. Two years is just too much. Probably it was tolerable a few years ago, but not now, with the fast-growing rate of free software packages (both in number and, as more developers join, feature additions per unit time).

> Debian at least lets you choose.

It lets me choose only between the two limit cases. I want a smoother function ;-)

> In practice security updates happen for unstable nearly as fast as they
> do for stable. They can happen for testing very slowly indeed as they
> just percolate down from unstable and that can take a while. This is
> important for those thinking they'll compromise between stable(old) and
> unstable(new) (and thus pick testing) - testing is a bad idea for a
> net-facing machine.

I realized it, too. But doesn't it defeat the whole idea of "testing" if many potential testers are effectively discouraged from testing (sic!) of server-level networked apps? And which machine is not net-facing nowadays?

> What I do is use the backports apt repositories maintained by some Debian
> developers to solve exactly this problem. These provide quickly-updated
> packages for stable in a reasonably consistent form - apt-get.org lists
> the repositories. This works for me. I'd like to see the process made
> more official at some point - it probably will be one day.

Yes, hopefully.

Time to move from Red Hat to Debian?

Posted Nov 11, 2003 6:38 UTC (Tue) by MLKahnt (subscriber, #6642) [Link]

I have spoken of this to questions on the Debian-User mailing list, but think of it this way:

Stable: About as current and a bit more frequently updated than MS Windows, but vastly more reliable.

Testing: Usually more current than all but the version shipped in the last week by any other Linux distributions, and while the least secure of the Debian editions, it still puts MS to shame. About equivalent to sitting in a software wholesaler's warehouse, trying everything that comes in.

Unstable: Very current - about equivalent to sitting at the Beta tester's desk for currency of code, but with the polish of software ready to be used by most users. Still more stable than MS Windows.

I've had breakage with Debian when I tried to install Experimental packages for Gnome 2, but they are just that - still being tuned and integrated to install properly and consistently. I've had Red Hat up2date install software that left the DSL code trying to execute the configuration files for network access - leaving the system offline. I've read reports of breakage with not perfect installation scripts in Debian Unstable, but by the time it reaches Testing, all but the most obscure problems are caught.

If security is a concern - a recently discovered worm unveiling an unknown exploit and this being the patch to seal the hole - it is rare for a Testing user to not be able to move to the Unstable edition of the program - only occasionally requiring noticeable updates in the recent string of glibc updates. Debian packaging policy, edition pinning and apt will resolve which packages must be updated, and what must be removed in the process. Alternately, it is always possible to grab the fixed unstable source and build it against Testing as a Debian package, and install that. Sure, on Windows you wouldn't do that, but on Windows, you wouldn't have the fix that quickly.