And people call Lannart arrogant???

Posted Nov 22, 2011 1:19 UTC (Tue) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203)
In reply to: And people call Lannart arrogant??? by khim
Parent article: That newfangled Journal thing

> Slackware, Debian, whatever.

Yes. That is exactly what I'm asking. At this point though it is very hard to figure out which, if any, of the major distributions plan on remaining recognizable as UNIX descendants. Which makes it kinda hard to pick one. What I'm saying is it is time for distributions to be honest with us poor users and tell us what the hell they are doing. Are they chasing The Year of Linux on the Desktop to the exclusion of the users who have been and currently ARE using their system? Have they even thought about it or are they just caught up in the daily grind of packaging up the same tarballs the other distos are so they show the same version number on distrowatch?

Ubuntu has pretty much told us they are. And we will probably know for sure about RedHat if they actually ship the controversial bits of Fedora as RHEL 7.0. (And if the paying customers eat the dog food, guess it was a good business decision and best 'o luck to em.) But that leaves questions. What of Debian? Do they just pull whatever upline throws them and follow along or what? Does this go unopposed until even Slackware is unrecognizable? It is clear the Windows refugees know exactly what they want and have the numbers to impose their will upon us, so if we don't speak up, and pretty quickly, I suspect there won't be many options other than *BSD, and that their taunt will have come true. That BSD is for people who like UNIX and Linux is for those who don't like Windows.

Maybe we end up having to port BSD to the Linux kernel... Sort of the reverse of Debian/FreeBSD.

And people call Lannart arrogant???

Posted Nov 22, 2011 6:06 UTC (Tue) by jrn (subscriber, #64214) [Link]

> What of Debian? Do they just pull whatever upline throws them and follow along or what?

You can see an approximate preview of the next Debian release by looking at what "unstable" does today (just like you can see a preview of the next Fedora release by running rawhide). If you don't like what you see, you can even participate to improve it by sending clear bug reports and patches.

Suppose you disagree at a fundamental level with an operating system developer --- for example, let's say you love KDE 3 and are upset that the KDE maintainers moved on to KDE 4. Even then, as long as you are doing the work, you can add packages that work the way you want in parallel (for example, you could package Trinity). If your use case requires changing someone else's package in a way that the maintainer does not want, then the technical committee[1] may listen to your arguments, weigh them (which involves, implicitly, weighing the impact on users and the amount of work you have done to bring your proposal about), and come up with a way to make it happen without sacrificing too much.

I imagine most distros work somewhat like this.

[1] http://www.debian.org/devel/tech-ctte