On Wed, 21 Aug 2002, Meir Kriheli <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Debian (or Gentoo or any other distro) is not the end all be all of=20
> distributions. Any distro has an intendend audience and niche (some larger
> than others). If someone does not fit your niche, fine - OK. You don't have
> to go bad mouthing those not fitting it or trying/looking another one.
Gentoo doesn't fit ITS niche, simply because the Gentoo developers are
newbies who have no idea how things work. I refuse to succumb to fads,
and I will do my best to advise people to act likewise.
You call it "bad mouthing", I call it "explaining to people the technical
flaws in Gentoo". Potayto potahto I guess.
> > well -- it's not a matter of a continously widening gap. Debian *means* to
> > be be no less than a year between releases -- requiring people to upgrade
^^^^^^^^
> > early and often is stupid.
>
> *Means* is nice. Potato was released on August 14th, 2000, woody was released
> on 19 July 2002 (not counting point releases which are bugfix/security
> updates).
Your inability to read once again manifests itself.
> Linux and OpenSource depends on early and bleeding edge testers, if you don't
> want to be on, fine, but other will. See "The Cathedral and the Bazaar:
> Release Early, Release Often" in
> http://www.kde.org/food/cathedral/cathedral-paper-4.html
Um. I'm supposed to learn about free software practices from an example
about a *mail downloader* (I've written half-a-dozen in my life, because
rewriting was easier then finding out where the last one was) which
does *way more than it should* (MIME parsing? header rewriting?), doesn't
do what it should (adding Received headers properly) and the few things
which it should do that it does, it does incorrectly (needing an SMTP
service instead of just /u/s/sendmail)?
> > Bad package management is easy. Correct package management is non-trivial.
>
> I did it for long time on LFS which doesn't even have a native package manager
> and I don't consider myself a hotshot. non-trivial is not always equal to
> easy.
Obviously, you are also unable to understand what "good" means.
> This is just FUD and unbased/kneejerk response. Building a usable system from
> scratch (not using the precompiled stage files) including kde and X took 2
> days max (on my machine P3 866Mhz). You can build the system from your
> current distro in a chrooted environemnt and if want to conserve resources
> renice the build process.
Just two days? To install it? Please.
> Few months ago (up to a year, can't remember) I've testing (woody) server,
> and dependencies of php4 installed X related packages on my machine.
> I didn't go
> around bad mouthing Debian packagers saying it shows thier lack of
> understanding of dependency issues, I just dealt with it and the problem got
> fixed later. All developers are human and no one is god.
Of course you didn't go around bad mouthing Debian -- you would have gotten
flamed for your decision to use a "testing" distribution on a server.
Testing breaks. Stable very very rarely breaks.
> No daemon is turned on by default. You must add it to the defult run level
> by yourself. e.g:
>
> rc-update add xinetd default
What if I want servers which get installed to actually work? This is
the common case.
> That's why woody's freeze took so long ? If this is correct the freeze
> should've been a month or two. No need to run around throwing idealistic
> statements with no base in reality.
The freeze took two months. Most of the time was spent rewriting the security
infrastructure to support automated builds on 11 architectures. You should
possibly get a clue.
> My machine is stable with no crashes and you're just throwing FUD.
stable != no crashes.
Stable means a *stable target platform*. With well proven versions.
> Debian and Gentoo and other distors have a place in Linux's world and form
> different functions.
Yes. Gentoo is a nice proof of concept: that is an important function. Debian
is a nice production quality distribution: that is an important function
too.
> Today I've helped and guided a Gentoo (and former Redhat) user with woody
> install on another partition on his Gentoo system, as IMHO it is important
> for serious Linux users to at least know/use other distros.
I disagree. There is no reason to be familiar with anything other than
Debian. (I've used slack, red hat and mandrake.) What is needed is
for serious free software users to use alternate operating systems --
Hurd, NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Luckily, the Hurd is in Debian,
and the *BSDs are getting there.
> You should at least give it a run and use it for sometime.
I've seen enough of people having bad experience with Gentoo, and I have
better uses for my time.
Gentoo is a Toy. I used to think it is a piece of shit, but I was wrong --
it is only bad if you use it for something it wasn't intended for (production
use). I have yet to see a competent user who actually thought Gentoo
was any good.
=================================================================
To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command
echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
