Gustavo Franco <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> > PS: Some friends have always argued that the debian way is the only >> > sustainable way to go. If mdk is going to do it just like debian, why >> > not fold and move the idea's and effort into making debian a better >> > distro instead of duplicating the effort? > > Sorry, but i've the same view!
There are some interesting possibilities there, and I see Mandrake and Debian as being largely complimentary. That is, Mandrake's strengths are Debian's weaknesses, and vice-versa. As an example, Mandrake's installer is a lot nicer than Debian's, but Debian's package manager makes upgrades easier. There are both technical and on-technical issues. On the technical side, the most obvious is .deb vs. RPM. I can assure you that Debian is not going to switch, especially since most of us regard dpkg as being a superior tool. If this integration happens, it would likely have to do so within the dpkg framework. Debian is, however, a highly modular system. We have seen installers for Debian ported over from Caldera, among other places, as an example. Then there are non-technical questions. The main one I see is how Mandrake developers would find a place to do what they like within Debian. Since I know little about the Mandrake community, this is a tough one to speculate about. One possibility is forming a Debian-Mandrake project in Debian, along the lines of the Debian Desktop project. Or, joining the existing Desktop and installer projects. I imagine it could be frustrating for people used to doing the packaging themselves to have to deal with an already-established Debian maintainer for something. On the other hand, Debian doesn't have any code from Mandrake, so those would all come in as new packages. There is also the problem with Debian's new-maintainer system being slow. However, with enough support from the Debian side, that can be overcome reasonably well. -- John
