On Fri, 12 Apr 2002, Dimitri Maziuk wrote: > Basically, Debian project seems to be moving towards > more feechoorz, more luser-friendly helper apps etc. > Most software engineers believe that this exactly the > wrong thing to do: more complexity => unforseen > interactions between the parts => more bugs, less > stability.
And people wonder why I think both KDE and Gnome suck. 8:o) > Besides, there already are newbie-friendly > distros, why try to muscle in on the niche that's already > been filled? It's newbie friendly. Debian won me over on price, but I stayed for it's features. > 1. I've nothing against helper apps. as long as they *can > be turned off*. Dexconf cannot be turned off (don't get > me started on general idiocy behind dexconf. Or alsaconf). What is dexconf? > 2. Current practice of building packages with "commonly > used options" and adding dependencies to packages that > provide those options. I thought it set packages at "recommended" when a particular feature had the dependancy. > 2.1. Who decides what's "common"? Which idiot decided > that analog's libgd should depend on X11 libraries? I've noticed this a lot. It bugs me when I try to install something on my older box (that I don't have X on) and it insists on installing xlibs and whatever other x stuff it can find, when I know perfectly well it's not an X prog. > 3. Potato is too old for many real-life uses. Woody > is unsuitable for many production systems -- not only > for political (managers have every reason to distrust > "officially beta" OS), but also for technical (Woody > doesn't get security updates, Woody breaks) reasons. > That will change once woody is released, but then the > cycle will begin again. On top of that, 2.2. makes > Woody unsuitable for certain class systems, and that > will not change with Woody's release. The point? -- > Debian is becoming less versatile with every release. That's always bugged me about stable: It ages quickly. > Oh sure, RPM format was really inferior back then. Now, > Woody is still better that Seawolf (RH 7.2, that's the > one I had in mind). What I'm afraid of is that Woody+1 > will not be any better than Seawolf+1 -- it'll suck as > much, only in different ways. RPM *still* puts files in the wrong places, and you *still* have to find packages and resolve dependancies by hand. > Murphy must have been asleep, then. As for dist-upgrading a > 4-yo potato, lots of updated packages will come with impoved > and slightly incompatible config files (X v.3 => X v.4, for > obvious example). If you're upgrading a fully-configured box, > you have every reason to expect it won't come back up after > the upgrade -- so expect at least 10 hours downtime (just > like you describe: Friday, Saturday and maybe Sunday, too). > Obviously, this won't work on a 24x7 e-shop webserver: you Sure it is. Round robin DNS, upgrade one server at a time. -- Baloo -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
