Confused about a couple things [LWN.net]

Confused about a couple things

Posted Dec 3, 2003 3:42 UTC (Wed) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510)
In reply to: Confused about a couple things by mmealman
Parent article: A UserLinux manifesto

Well, I think the main way in which it might differ from Debian is configuration. One aspect is that it will select a list of packages for you. And I think that a lot of Debian packages tend to not do enough configuration at install-time. And what really bothers me is that a lot of Debian packages don't put themselves into a useful state at install time - the user must come along and do more configuration before they will work. The assumption is that the user will want to do that. I don't agree.

So, I am thinking about a number of packages that have the sole purpose of configuring another package, and are pulled in with that package by a hook we'll put in the package system. Over the long term, I'd hope that the package maintainers would fold this stuff in to the main packages.

But Knoppix has been there for a long time and Debian folks didn't move to incorporate its features into the main system. So, maybe they need a bit of a push from outside.

Bruce

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Confused about a couple things

Posted Dec 3, 2003 3:45 UTC (Wed) by walters (subscriber, #7396) [Link]

Like what packages?

Confused about a couple things

Posted Dec 3, 2003 10:18 UTC (Wed) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link]

> Well, I think the main way in which it might differ from Debian is
> configuration.

It sounds promising. However, I wonder whether you (chief developers) will have enough courage to make it in the Right Way from the ground up, throwing away the accumulated since 70-s Unix garbage like /etc mess and providing a clean light-weight configuration API with bindings to all reasonable scripting languages starting with /bin/sh. Or, I'm afraid, it'll become another attempt of cosmetic (de-facto, not in the terms of manpower spent) tidying-up.

Problems with Debian

Posted Dec 3, 2003 16:15 UTC (Wed) by emk (subscriber, #1128) [Link]

I'm a Debian user, and I've encountered several significant, long-term problems with Debian which have been encouraging me to take a long, hard look at Fedora.

Problem 1: Installation, installation, installation. Debian requires more kernel patches, more screwing with drivers, and more general pain than any of the commercial Linux distros--by a significant margin. I can turn out RedHat 9 servers with a few mouse clicks, but Debian frequently descends into a twisty little nightmare of hardware problems.

Problem 2: dpkg. While I adore APT, I strongly dislike dpkg. No matter how many RPMs and dpkgs I build, I get tired of dealing with dh_this, dh_that, dpkg_theother. There's about two dozen of these little tools, and they all work via nasty executional semantics and loads of cryptic text files. RPM relies heavily on declarative semantics and two or three command-line tools. If sysadmins want to make local packages, this whole mess needs to be sorted out. (And merging Connectiva's cool apt-rpm features back into apt-get would be a big plus, too.)

Now, Debian has many enormous virtues--which is why I still use it on about half of my personal machines--but it's still not up to par with ordinary commercial distros for business use.

Problems with Debian

Posted Dec 3, 2003 16:33 UTC (Wed) by dilinger (subscriber, #2867) [Link]

Point #1 will hopefully be addressed by userlinux, the enterprise debian sub-project, or whatever springs up (once debian accounts are unlocked).
Every company I know that uses debian currently uses custom kernel packages. The kernel images that are distributed w/ debian are generally out of date, and don't include the extra patches/features that redhat kernels include. One of the things we'll be working on is a separate kernel package that looks more like a redhat kernel than a debian kernel. Work must be done to streamline the installation process as well, to actually make use of this new enterprise kernel.

As for point #2, check out cdbs (Common Debian Build System). When I create packages using cdbs, I generally don't have to touch any debhelper commands; as a matter of fact, if you have a standard autotools-using package, you can cut your debian/rules file down to approximately 4 lines. Combine this with the various things available in the devscripts package (debuild & co), and creating debian packages becomes a whole lot easier.