Of course this goes to a General Resolution

Posted Feb 14, 2014 2:08 UTC (Fri) by mgb (guest, #3226)
In reply to: Of course this goes to a General Resolution by joyuh
Parent article: The Debian technical committee vote concludes

This one and only true ultimate non-distribution that you envisage ...

Will it be stable like Debian or bleeding edge like Fedora?
Will it be a rolling release like Gentoo or a versioned release like Slackware?
Will it be free like Ubuntu or $$$ like RHEL?

Is it possible, do you think, that different Linux users have different preferences, and that different distributions cater to those distinct preferences?

Of course this goes to a General Resolution

Posted Feb 14, 2014 2:50 UTC (Fri) by joyuh (guest, #95216) [Link] (4 responses)

In that model, upstreams would necessarily release directly to users, so it would probably work like Firefox on where you choose whether you want releases, betas, alphas or nightlies and automatically get the latest one of what you choose (unless you disable updates).

Which is, you know, what happens on all OSes except on Linux distributions.

Of course this goes to a General Resolution

Posted Feb 14, 2014 3:23 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] (1 responses)

Great idea! That way nobody will be able to try to reproduce your particular problem unless you give the exhaustive list of what exact branches of each piece of relevant software is on your system. That will certainly boost QA productivity sky-high...

Of course this goes to a General Resolution

Posted Feb 14, 2014 4:23 UTC (Fri) by joyuh (guest, #95216) [Link]

That's correct.

But you can trivially automate both the process of giving a list of the exact versions of each piece of software, and the process of building a filesystem that precisely corresponds to such a list.

Currently it's even worse because most distributions, due to their ancient packages and not including all software, force users to install some software on their own, sometimes in a way that isn't tracked by the package manager, which means you can't even produce the list at all.

Of course this goes to a General Resolution

Posted Feb 14, 2014 3:45 UTC (Fri) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link] (1 responses)

And there, gentlemen, we have a revelation of the decade. *BSD are Linux distributions. Thus the horrible secrets are coming out - *BSD folks had managed to hide this one for a long time, but joyuh has finally exposed it.

Well, either that, or s/h/it is a bold-faced liar. Or has no idea what it's blathering about. But that wouldn't be anywhere near as interesting, would it? After all, one doesn't need to look further than splashsnot to find thousands of lying and clueless wankers, whereas such discoveries are much more rare. Inexistent, even...

Of course this goes to a General Resolution

Posted Feb 14, 2014 4:16 UTC (Fri) by joyuh (guest, #95216) [Link]

BSDs are mostly irrelevant as full OSes, their only relevant parts are the FreeBSD kernel (since it unfortunately empowers several wannabe-monopolists due to their incorrect license choice) and to some extent OpenSSH and perhaps some other offshoot projects.

They can indeed be considered Linux distributions for the purposes of this discussion, though.

But they are even worse than them, since they even cause fragmentation at the kernel level, making people a bit more reluctant to rely on advances in Linux.

And in fact, accelerating the death of the BSDs will likely be one of the (intentional) effects of systemd.