From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 22108 invoked by uid 1002); 15 Jul 2003 17:36:11 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gentoo-dev-help@gentoo.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-dev@gentoo.org Received: (qmail 9876 invoked from network); 15 Jul 2003 17:36:10 -0000 From: "Martin, Stephen" To: gentoo-dev@gentoo.org Message-ID: <3F143DE4.4000100@veridian.com> Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 10:46:12 -0700 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030312 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 References: <20030715094234.6f6f2636.zhen@gentoo.org> <3F141CB1.70704@gentoo.org> In-Reply-To: <3F141CB1.70704@gentoo.org> X-Enigmail-Version: 0.74.0.0 X-Enigmail-Supports: pgp-inline, pgp-mime Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo part IIa. X-Archives-Salt: 6f1cbc5a-4449-4d02-9f20-e01d3e923d9b X-Archives-Hash: 3a95a729c053c720f2dd88b1b5a5b5ac 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 -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list