Christian Perrier wrote:
> During the Solutions Linux expo in Paris, the DD's present at the
> Debian booth have been approached by a representative from Trend Micro
> Corp. who develops and sells security software (the most well known
> being probably a virus scanning software and such similar software
> suites).
>
> We ended with a very interesting and long discussion with their
> Product Manager for Client/Server messaging products about the proper
> way for them to support Debian.
General rule: support stable, follow development (before the next
release: support testing as well)
> It seems that such support is a growing request from their customers
> (some of them being important Ministries in France and probably others
> worldwide) who use big farms of Debian-based servers.
Sounds good!
> As far as I have understood, supporting Debian for this vendor is a
> real concern, but they fail to be sure in who to get in touch with for
> technical issues regarding the compatibility of their products and our
> distribution in general (which includes direct interaction with the
> Linux kernel, as far as I have understood from him).
For technical isues in general debian-devel sounds like a good
address. For technical issues with the Linux kernel debian-kernel
sounds like a proper address. It would probably help in the long term
if the engineers at Trend Micro would not only ask and drag
information out but also contribute some.
Also, a good idea probably would be to provide their products in .deb
files that are provided through an apt-ftparchive structure so their
customers are able to run apt-get to get the latest updates. This
would have to be set up for both stable and testing at the moment.
> Their concernes was also deciding about *which* release of Debian they
> should support. Though question as one may imagine because just
In general I'd say to go with stable. Howver, when Debian is close to
a release ans testing is about to be frozen or is already (partially)
frozen (as it is now), they should probably support this distribution
as well in order to suffice the needs of their customers that have
already upgraded to testing.
> answering "thou shalt use stable" is obviously not enough. From
> discussions I previously had with other visitors at the booth, he
> concluded by himself that focusing their developers on sarge would
> probably be a better investment than trying to support woody (this is
> still a matter of months of development, so hopefully sarge will have
> been released then).
If they follow development continuesly and also have a sid box
lingering around where they can test their product with the current
set of Debian, it's not much of a deal to support testing as well when
it is about to become stable.
Regards,
Joey
--
Open source is important from a technical angle. -- Linus Torvalds
Please always Cc to me when replying to me on the lists.
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
