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From: "Martin, Stephen" <stephen.martin@veridian.com>
To: gentoo-dev@gentoo.org
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo part IIa.
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 10:46:12 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <3F143DE4.4000100@veridian.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <3F141CB1.70704@gentoo.org>

Brad Laue wrote:
> Debian may be stable, but Woody's sheer age really does indicate that 
> something is wrong with their development model. I don't imagine 
> suggesting a faster paced release model to their core developers would 
> be met with much openness, nor would it be put to a vote. FreeBSD and 
> RedHat, to name two, have live package build systems (ports/rawhide 
> respectively) and cut a release from these every four months on the dot 
> with impeccable QA. I don't think I could suggest such a thing to Debian 
> developers without being laughed out of the discussion.
> 

My impression is that the paralysis we've all seen in the Debian 
community is due to two factors: 1) ridiculously inflexible rules 
regarding free vs. non-free software and 2) a 
we're-the-best-and-don't-need-to-change attitude.  I've seen long and 
apparently serious discussions on the Debian lists over whether gcc 
should be removed from the main distro because the man pages aren't 
released under a "free" license.  I've seen hundreds (who knows, 
thousands?) of posts describing problems with apt-get and deselect 
dismissed cavilierly.  In my opinion THAT is what's killing Debian - the 
inability to distinguish worthwhile questions from intellectual 
masturbation and the unwillingness to accept criticism.  I don't see 
either of these elements present in Gentoo now, and I don't see zhen's 
proposals changing that.

As for the long time between Debian releases, it seems to me that trying 
to support 10,000 packages on 11 architectures with "rock-solid 
stability" is a big part of that.  Again, I don't see anything in zhen's 
proposal on that order of magnitude.  Certainly, asking one attendee of 
a meeting to dump a log to the website isn't going to slow development.

Heck, the glacial pace of Debian releases wouldn't even be a problem if 
their upgrade system was robust.  "Install the old version, then run 
apt-get upgrade repeatedly until the conflicts go away" isn't 
acceptable.  Again, Gentoo does not suffer from this problem - it's 
essentially a releaseless distro.



-- 
Stephen C. Martin

PGP/GnuPG key 1024D/8C4FCA5D






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gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list


  parent reply	other threads:[~2003-07-15 17:36 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 11+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2003-07-15 13:42 [gentoo-dev] Gentoo part IIa John Davis
     [not found] ` <1058280489.2910.27.camel@biproc>
2003-07-15 15:06   ` John Davis
2003-07-15 16:15     ` Grant Goodyear
2003-07-15 15:24 ` Brad Laue
2003-07-15 17:44   ` [gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-core] " John Davis
2003-07-15 17:46   ` Martin, Stephen [this message]
2003-07-15 17:47     ` John Davis
2003-07-15 19:09 ` [gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-core] " Stewart Honsberger
2003-07-15 19:23 ` [gentoo-dev] Gentoo part III? Daniel Robbins
2003-07-15 20:27   ` John Davis
2003-07-16  0:30     ` Daniel Robbins

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