On Tue, Feb 03, 2004 at 02:03:37PM -0500, Levi Bard wrote:
> > IMHO, Debian has been getting really sloppy lately. I have seen them
> > take days or even weeks to issue updates to some pretty serious recent
> > flaws (some of the recent sendmail problems in particular) and things
> > like this deal with their website/server going down and just not
> > mentioning it to anyone.
>
> IMO it's because the developers/maintainers are getting too busy or moving
> to other projects, and there's nobody to replace them due to the way the
> "become a debian developer" process works. (or doesn't work).
I know I shouldn't contribute to this, but I will anyway. ;-} I, too, am
dismayed by the whole l33t debian-developer clique. There are almost
constant threads on the debian lists about whether they should get rid
of this or that package or archive because it doesn't conform to the
Debian guidelines. Latest example I recall is the RFCs. They're
documentation, but somehow the Debianistas think that they should adhere
to the Debian Free _Software_ Guidelines. The problem is that you can't
just alter RFCs and pass the modified versions around, naturally. But
this happens to violate the rules for Debian's Free _Software_
Guidelines. I've bitched to Debian about it, and had people whine back
at me. I guess I just don't "get it"(tm).
Moreover, KDE and its ilk have been absent from both testing and
unstable for months now, along with other critical packages. Funny thing
is, guys like the Mepis guy have a working version of KDE3 in a distro
based on Debian. (You can probably get ports of things like this from
backports.org or apt-get.org, but why go all over to download critical
packages?) And of course, it takes years to get out a new Debian
release. The release manager has bitched at the packagers, but I don't
know how much good it's done. I have to say that I think that Debian's
bureaucracy and surfeit of rules makes the whole process way too lengthy
and cumbersome.
The main reason for my using Debian is that no other mainstream distro I
know of is so easy to upgrade. Red Hat, SuSE and others have always
built their distros like you're supposed to reinstall when the next
version comes out, or pay them money for it. Debian's a refreshing
change from that-- you can just tell it to update/upgrade and you're
done. The problem is that when you go to do that, if something like KDE
has been removed from the distro for some reason, guess what? It takes
it off your machine. Yikes!
I'm looking at alternatives like Mepis. I'd rather not compile
everything from scratch, as I have a life (no offense intended to those
who prefer this; I just don't have the time). I have to agree with Derek
and Levi. But I'm a very long way from going Mac.
Sorry for the rant. Levi struck a nerve, so it's his fault. ;-}
Paul
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