You are correct

Posted Feb 1, 2008 0:38 UTC (Fri) by N0NB (guest, #3407)
In reply to: You are correct by jd
Parent article: Why companies don't support Debian (LinuxWatch)

Too much Free Software???  I think I understand your point that the Free Software community is
generating code faster than the distributions can keep up.  That is a fair assessment.

As I see it, Debian is drifting toward putting the best of the best into Main and putting less
emphasis on trying to package every piece of Free Software on the planet for the distribution.
This is a sensible approach but it does lead to the issue that distributions were created to
address, that of users having to build their own packages from source.

Ideally, Free Software projects would create their own Debian packages, but this becomes a
problem as well.  At some point a package may depend on something not available when Stable
was released and Unstable at some points moves fast enough that a package created today is
outdated next week, so it's unrealistic for Free Software projects to expend the man-hours to
sort this all out.

Perhaps this is an opportunity for an enterprising person or company--build unofficial Debian
packages of Free Software not in or not up-to-date in Debian and make them available for a
small fee.

Exactly.

Posted Feb 1, 2008 7:31 UTC (Fri) by jd (guest, #26381) [Link] (3 responses)

It is unreasonable for Free Software projects to put in that level of extra work, but it would be entirely reasonable for corporations (who rely on getting bugfixes and security fixes as fast as possible) to invest in precisely this sort of work. In fact, it's insane for them not to, because they suffer more than anyone else. An hour downtime costs far more than an hour of QA and patch development.

One relatively cheap solution (for a corporation) is to produce a huge server farm, where multiple versions of packages are built, dependent on different valid parent packages. Package managers would need to be somewhat smarter, because they'd need to search multiple alternative versions to find the optimum permutation of valid packages, which may mean swapping an existing package for an alternative of the same version but with subtly different dependencies.

There are plenty of other options. What's really not an option (in my opinion) is to have distributions become overly specialized to remain fully working, or highly generalized (good) but dependent on people not staying up-to-date (bad). Users are likely to end up having to compile some things for themselves, the aim (I believe) should be to keep this to a minimum and to make it as painless as possible when it does happen.

Exactly.

Posted Feb 8, 2008 2:09 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm sorry, but "the corporations" that you want to pick up the slack do have a much narrower view than "the community". If said community doesn't want to pay for something, be it testing, packaging, whatever, it won't get done for the all-encompassing interest of something like the set of Debian users. And by "pay" I mean not necessarily money, but in effort.

The "corporations"

Posted Feb 8, 2008 19:25 UTC (Fri) by jd (guest, #26381) [Link] (1 responses)

...want to sell their products to Linux business users. They are there to make money, after all. Linux business users get the same Linux software everyone else gets, more-or-less. If that software is unreliable, business users won't use it, which means Linux products won't sell.

Why sell to Linux users in the first place? Too many variants of Unix, too many of which only have a subset of the features needed or wanted, too much competition from Microsoft and generally not much security. A unified baseline that has Linux has a key platform has far better odds of long-term survival. Provided it can be brought to some provable (rather than anecdotal) quality level.

But to do that, money must be spent on Linux QA. You've got to make people want Linux, want it so bad that alternatives aren't worthy of consideration. That won't happen until there has been some serious QA.

What if no QA happens at all? Then businesses will regard Linux as something vendors aren't interested in, and those businesses will go elsewhere, costing those vendors potential sales. Sure, it would be nice if the Debian community did more QA work, but really QA is a full-time job and most Debian deveopers have two or three of those already. It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it.

The "corporations"

Posted Feb 8, 2008 21:38 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

Who says that the people selecting packages and building "enterprise" distributions don't do QA? They have to restrict the breadth of software offered if they want to keep some sanity in all. Yes, that means that it is very probable that "my favorite package" isn't in the supported set.