On Sat, Jun 17, 2023 at 11:45:06AM +0000, Andy Smith wrote: > > One person's long-overdue deprecation is another person's unwelcome > change. See any of the great Debian controversies such as systemd or > merged-/usr. Things would be vastly simpler in a project where a > small group of people get to decide quickly about such things, but > that's not Debian's way. There would be a lot of unhappy people on > the other side of any such decision. > In my own case, I have a server at home that I first installed more than 20 years ago. It is now in its third case/PS, on its fourth motherboard and processor, on its second hardware architecture (having moved it from x86 to amd64 some time back), its (probably) 7th and 8th hard drives, and so on and so on.
When I first installed it, it was running Debian woody. Now, I value progress as much as many in the F/OSS world. However, having worked professionally on RHEL systems for some years in the past, I can tell you that I prefer the Debian way. I prefer the range of choice that Debian affords and I really like the way that Debian as a project goes to lengths to make sure that there is always an upgrade/migration path whenever possible. You see, in the RHEL world, it wasn't until fairly recently (probably 5 years, IIRC), that Red Hat changed their stance from "there are no in-place upgrades from one major RHEL release to another, the way to upgrade is to throw out your hardware and put the new RHEL on the new hardware" (which, mind you, is not terrible when your target marget is enterprises that use commodity hardware and re-capitalize the hardware in 3-5 year increments) to something more like what Debian (and others) do with officially supporting in-place upgrades. All of that to say, Andy, that you are 100% right that if someone wants things the Debian way, they can use Debian and if someone wants things not-the-Debian way, there are a great multitude of non-Debian options out there. Regards, -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sánchez
