Debian debates amd64 port

Posted Jul 29, 2004 12:29 UTC (Thu) by markc (guest, #4419) [Link]

Your points are very academic and technical according to the Debian
mantra. Fine. However I would suggest that 90% of potential users could
not care less about 90% of the points you raise nor for 90% of the
packages that Debian maintains. The 10% of those 8k packages that appear
on the Knoppix CD are the ones that really count over all the rest by at
least a margin of 10:1. The significant and major advantages of using a
Debian based system are apt-get and packages.debian.org, from a users
perspective, elsewise, most everything else about Debian involves dealing
with a brick wall of formality and condescending developers.

BTW, IMHO, Gentoo has some serious flaws too. They don't have an apt-get
for quick and easily installable binary packages and the python +
file-system based "portage" managing code sucks badly and will not scale,
as you point out... but for the prime substance of an end-users
cutting-edge desktop, it is far more uptodate and managable than Debians
"unstable" branch ever could be. Gentoo needs to be rewritten from scratch
using C/C++ for a single apt-get/emerge interface and using SQLite for all
meta-info (ie; fast and extensible). Both Debians and Gentoos update
systems are painfully slow and neither "emerge sync" nor "apt-get update"
will scale to double their current respective sizes. Both systems need to
look at providing diffs for package updates. Debian solved a certain set
of problems managing a linux system, Gentoo solves a different set of
issues for an uptodate desktop but the ideal or "best" distro system does
not yet exist.