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In Defense and Praise of Debian
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Comments (42)
Ian Murdock is just another pundit now?
Seems to me, when talking in context of Debian, that this is like saying that Linus Torvalds is just another kernel hacker.
I guess you've missed Mr. Murdock's comments on various issues over the past few years. Remember, his direct involvement with the Debian project ended at an early stage, around 1996. Ever since then he's been firmly rooted in the business world. Which I'm not saying is either bad or good, but he does have a different perspective and goals than the Debian project.
**edit** Check out this Hartley-quality whine about the woes of software installation on Linux: http://ianmurdock.com/2006/12/15/software-installation-on-li...
The rest is a long whine that blames Linux for the shortcomings of Sun's installer.
**edit** Check out this Hartley-quality whine about the woes of software installation on Linux: http://ianmurdock.com/2006/12/15/software-installation-on-li...
Quoting: Unless an application is included with your Linux distribution of choice, installing that application on Linux is a nightmare compared to Windows. Here’s an example. To install Sun’s Java Studio Creator on Windows, I just click on the .exe on Sun’s web site..
The rest is a long whine that blames Linux for the shortcomings of Sun's installer.
Debian sux
20 earlier comments in the full thread.
There's a distro called Fabio? Fabio? Does he know?
Carla, Hans,
first: Lenny isn't a user system. Bob tried to explain that several times in the past. If some software is too old, there's the backports repositories, if the kernel is too old, well, Etch-and-a-half is coming.
second: this is the wrong place to complain. In case of bugs, they should be reported to Debian. In case of questions, there's the mailing lists, and the same content is also accessible in the newsgroups. I can understand your frustration, but here is simply the wrong place for it.
third: my wife still runs Lenny, much out of the same reasons like Hans said: she wanted to see all that newer stuff and test newer software and such. She's pretty happy with it already, and more and more bugs are gone by now.
Still, I don't remember how I set up her machine last time, so to reproduce TC's results, I got a new Lenny netinst iso from the Debian site, and installed it into a virtual machine on my computer. It came up just fine. My image was dated "Fri Feb 8 21:34:56 UTC 2008", so maybe you can try with own virtual (or even real) machines with that one?
I did not get grub2 however; mine just says 0.97-30
HTH, Wolfgang
first: Lenny isn't a user system. Bob tried to explain that several times in the past. If some software is too old, there's the backports repositories, if the kernel is too old, well, Etch-and-a-half is coming.
second: this is the wrong place to complain. In case of bugs, they should be reported to Debian. In case of questions, there's the mailing lists, and the same content is also accessible in the newsgroups. I can understand your frustration, but here is simply the wrong place for it.
third: my wife still runs Lenny, much out of the same reasons like Hans said: she wanted to see all that newer stuff and test newer software and such. She's pretty happy with it already, and more and more bugs are gone by now.
Still, I don't remember how I set up her machine last time, so to reproduce TC's results, I got a new Lenny netinst iso from the Debian site, and installed it into a virtual machine on my computer. It came up just fine. My image was dated "Fri Feb 8 21:34:56 UTC 2008", so maybe you can try with own virtual (or even real) machines with that one?
I did not get grub2 however; mine just says 0.97-30
HTH, Wolfgang
Another one:
After finishing, I went to the "known issues" link from the Debian Lenny installer page, and it brought me to
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Today
And there, in the "Past" section, I saw an entry "[04 Feb 2008] The installation of grub will fail when installing Lenny for i386 or amd64 using daily built images. Reason is a change in the default inode size for ext2/ext3 partitions. An update of grub has already been uploaded."
Maybe that explains something...
As was said so often: work in progress. Sorry bout your bad experience, guys & gals.
best, Wolfgang
After finishing, I went to the "known issues" link from the Debian Lenny installer page, and it brought me to
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Today
And there, in the "Past" section, I saw an entry "[04 Feb 2008] The installation of grub will fail when installing Lenny for i386 or amd64 using daily built images. Reason is a change in the default inode size for ext2/ext3 partitions. An update of grub has already been uploaded."
Maybe that explains something...
As was said so often: work in progress. Sorry bout your bad experience, guys & gals.
best, Wolfgang
The daily build of the netinst ISO that I used is dated "20080206-21:38" and, like I already said, it didn't have any problem installing GRUB in ext3 partition on an i386 computer. So the Debian developers seem to have fixed that problem pretty fast.
Of course, this bug has only hit people who tried to install Lenny using the daily builds of the debian-installer. Users who already had Debian testing installed wouldn't have noticed anything.
The daily builds of the debian-installer can be horribly broken from time to time and they probably shouldn't be used as an indication of the general quality of Debian's testing branch.
Of course, this bug has only hit people who tried to install Lenny using the daily builds of the debian-installer. Users who already had Debian testing installed wouldn't have noticed anything.
The daily builds of the debian-installer can be horribly broken from time to time and they probably shouldn't be used as an indication of the general quality of Debian's testing branch.
"Debian sux"
*sigh* If it bothers you that much, stay away from the bleeding edge stuff.
*sigh* If it bothers you that much, stay away from the bleeding edge stuff.
> hkwint, while I love Debian, you have just found out the reason I moved away from it and finally landed with Sabayon.
Ditto for me, only I moved to Arch rather than Sabayon. I wasn't going to jump into this thread given that I started the previous one, but you summed up my feelings very nicely, Hans. This whole thread makes me confident that I made the right choice.
Ditto for me, only I moved to Arch rather than Sabayon. I wasn't going to jump into this thread given that I started the previous one, but you summed up my feelings very nicely, Hans. This whole thread makes me confident that I made the right choice.
Arch. I may have to try that sometime.
A clarification is in order: When I said bleeding edge, I meant Lenny, not plain 'ol Etch. :)
It's also quite helpful to read the release notes before attempting an install. On the other hand, I am guilty of not doing that myself. *runs and hides*
A clarification is in order: When I said bleeding edge, I meant Lenny, not plain 'ol Etch. :)
It's also quite helpful to read the release notes before attempting an install. On the other hand, I am guilty of not doing that myself. *runs and hides*
Okay, I'm starting to understand how this Debian version and release system work I think / hope. It looks like some people - like myself - may assume Debian sucks because they don't understand the version / release system. In my opinion, it's all rather complicated, but nonetheless I'm trying to understand. Maybe this is the wrong place, but 'familiar' people are helping here.
So there are two ways to use Debian testing: -I can use a daily build which may be broke, and if it's broke, maybe there's one bug report saying it is broke, but that's not relevant because the next day will have a new daily build where the bug might be gone. Probably not much people try the daily builds, since most 'testers' will update incrementally, because that's less work. -Also, I can use a 'stable' branch, and in an incremental manner update to testing. -Also, if I want about the same experience but a bit more stable, I could use the stable branch instead, but use the 'backports' for newer software, -There are 'in between' releases of stable releases, like Etch and a half.
Is that correct? If it is, using a daily build just seems like an unfortunate choice new users should be warned of, as it's kind of a 'CVS/SVN checkout' or so, and people like me can understand a 'CVS/SVN checkout' may be broke, like with almost any software project. However, surfing the Debian site and trying to find out how to install 'Testing', Debian recommends me to use the daily snapshots
http://www.us.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
Also, I found this line interesting:
That's odd for 'new potential' Debian users like me. As 'Testing' is ought to be the new stable, one would suppose bugs in 'Testing' are fixed more quickly, but on the other hand it seems Unstable is where all the work is done.
Phew, quite confusing, but as indicated, I have the idea I start to comprehend a bit of it. When it comes to usability, a lot could be done about the way Debian explains its version / release idea to 'Debian-noobs' like me.
So there are two ways to use Debian testing: -I can use a daily build which may be broke, and if it's broke, maybe there's one bug report saying it is broke, but that's not relevant because the next day will have a new daily build where the bug might be gone. Probably not much people try the daily builds, since most 'testers' will update incrementally, because that's less work. -Also, I can use a 'stable' branch, and in an incremental manner update to testing. -Also, if I want about the same experience but a bit more stable, I could use the stable branch instead, but use the 'backports' for newer software, -There are 'in between' releases of stable releases, like Etch and a half.
Is that correct? If it is, using a daily build just seems like an unfortunate choice new users should be warned of, as it's kind of a 'CVS/SVN checkout' or so, and people like me can understand a 'CVS/SVN checkout' may be broke, like with almost any software project. However, surfing the Debian site and trying to find out how to install 'Testing', Debian recommends me to use the daily snapshots
http://www.us.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
Also, I found this line interesting:
Quoting:Testing breaks less often than Unstable. But when it breaks, it takes a long time for things to get rectified. Sometimes this could be days and it could be months at times.
Unstable changes a lot, and it can break at any point. However, fixes get rectified in many occasions in a couple of days...
That's odd for 'new potential' Debian users like me. As 'Testing' is ought to be the new stable, one would suppose bugs in 'Testing' are fixed more quickly, but on the other hand it seems Unstable is where all the work is done.
Phew, quite confusing, but as indicated, I have the idea I start to comprehend a bit of it. When it comes to usability, a lot could be done about the way Debian explains its version / release idea to 'Debian-noobs' like me.
It appears that tuxchick found a bug in the daily build of the Lenny installer that was fixed soon afterwards. However, this installer bug (or GRUB bug, to be more precise) didn't affect people who already had Debian testing installed.
The debian-installer doesn't have similar "unstable-testing-stable" stages as the rest of the Debian distribution -- it only has stable versions (that are used in the stable Debian releases) and a development version. When the installer is under heavy development, the development version of the installer may occasionally become broken.
Using the latest stable version of the installer (in this case, the Etch installer) should always work and users can then use apt-get (or aptitude) to upgrade their installed system from stable to testing, just like tuxchick did. But the development version of the installer also needs testers who send bug reports and help developers to improve it.
The debian-installer doesn't have similar "unstable-testing-stable" stages as the rest of the Debian distribution -- it only has stable versions (that are used in the stable Debian releases) and a development version. When the installer is under heavy development, the development version of the installer may occasionally become broken.
Using the latest stable version of the installer (in this case, the Etch installer) should always work and users can then use apt-get (or aptitude) to upgrade their installed system from stable to testing, just like tuxchick did. But the development version of the installer also needs testers who send bug reports and help developers to improve it.
Quoting: Really. And how low a bar do you think is reasonable? Apparently 'useless'.
You're griping about the quality of beta software (perhaps alpha at this point). It's reasonable to expect stability from the stable branch, it's silly to expect it from the testing or unstable branches. Yes, you usually get it, but you know what you're using, so take your lumps when something bad happens and question if maybe you need to run stable instead if you're going to be so sensitive to bumps in the road. I installed Lenny a few months ago after Etch starting getting a little old, and it could not at that point compile the Nvidia driver for my card. Did I blame Debian for putting out a crappy product? No, I cursed myself for trying the testing branch instead of staying with stable. Hey, it was my fault, I knew the risks. So did you.
Spoken as a Debian outsider, the consensus seems to be that if you use anything other than stable with backports, you have to expect things to break on occasion. Which is not unreasonable, but is not the way Debian testing is usually reported to the public by Debian users.
In the final analysis, it sounds very much like running Slackware-current, which is not something I'd recommend to most users.
In the final analysis, it sounds very much like running Slackware-current, which is not something I'd recommend to most users.
Quoting:That's odd for 'new potential' Debian users like me. As 'Testing' is ought to be the new stable, one would suppose bugs in 'Testing' are fixed more quickly, but on the other hand it seems Unstable is where all the work is done.
Right, Hans.
Most Debian Developers I know run unstable, because that is where the uploads go anyway. If they don't get any grave/severe reports, things move to testing after 10 days, more or less automatically.
And "testing" is called "testing" because that is the point where users (and some developers) really start testing the stuff. If some bugs are discovered, they are solved, and new packages are put into - unstable of course. That's the "normal" way of a package through the repositories.
Noone is really discouraged to go and try and use testing - but end-users (sorry, Carla and Hans, both of you are not the typical "end-user" in that sense) are also not encouraged to try it. And if they do, then yes, they should expect that things can/will be broken in between. Usually, the "worst" time is directly after releases, when developers try out new things, and it constantly improves short before a release, when all the bug-squashing parties happen.
cheers, Wolfgang
Quoting:The debian-installer doesn't have similar "unstable-testing-stable" stages as the rest of the Debian distribution -- it only has stable versions (that are used in the stable Debian releases) and a development version.
OK, that probably was intended to make life "simpler" for users trying to wrap their heads around the unstable-testing-stable thing. After reading this whole thread, I suppose the best way to 'test' Debian would be to make a stable install with the stable installer - and apply security fixes, than use the backports to update some packages, make a backup while all still works, and than maybe 'upgrade' to the testing branch.
That's rather different than the ports system found in *BSD and Gentoo I'm familiar with, where only 'stable', 'no info available' and 'proven to break your system' exist (at least that's true for Gentoo) and 'stable' is almost nowhere mentioned at all, so you don't even _know_ you are running stable. Also, 'stable' for Gentoo most of the times means 'not older than one month' or so. Someone just needs to become familiar with the differences in the concepts and terms between those distro's I assume.
Quoting:usually, the "worst" time is directly after releases, when developers try out new things
Right, Sander already warned me for that.
OK, after all is said and done, I think I should try it on a VM. Life would be easier and especially less confusing if I never used other BSD and Linux distributions and thought the 'Debian way' was the only way to go I guess.
Thanks Laika, that's some good information.
On a sidenote, TC:
One of the DDs just posted something about grub2, at
http://oskuro.net/blog/freesoftware/time-for-grub2-2008-02-0...
So that seems to be the "current" state of it. Maybe I'll go and try it; I just set up a couple of (virtual and real) machines, so...
cheers, Wolfgang
One of the DDs just posted something about grub2, at
http://oskuro.net/blog/freesoftware/time-for-grub2-2008-02-0...
So that seems to be the "current" state of it. Maybe I'll go and try it; I just set up a couple of (virtual and real) machines, so...
cheers, Wolfgang
Quoting:There are 'in between' releases of stable releases, like Etch and a half.
There aren't. There are more current releases of Etch, but they are simply plain old Etch with all security fixes already applied so you don't have to download 300 Mb of updates after installing Etch. They don't have new versions of packages.
Quoting:That's odd for 'new potential' Debian users like me. As 'Testing' is ought to be the new stable, one would suppose bugs in 'Testing' are fixed more quickly, but on the other hand it seems Unstable is where all the work is done.
It does make sense if you understand how Debian is developed. When someone finds a bug in testing, the bug is fixed and the updated package is put in unstable, not in testing. The fixed package will spend at least 10 days in the unstable branch to make sure that nothing else goes horribly wrong. Then it's put in the testing branch. So, any bugs in the testing branch will take at least 10 days to be fixed.
Only in very rare circumstances can a package skip the 10 day wait. An important security fix for example, or a bug that causes major system-wide breakage but which has a trivial fix.
Quoting:There are 'in between' releases of stable releases, like Etch and a half. There aren't.
There will be, Sander. That Etch-n-half is a new trial, to make the stable distribution run on more recent hardware. See:
http://wiki.debian.org/EtchAndAHalf
However, there's a DD doing things like these since long. His name is Kenshi Muto, and he just posted:
http://kmuto.jp/b.cgi/debian/d-i-2624-etch2.htm
So, for anyone wanting to have a stable yet recent version of Debian (assume a brand-new notebook for instance), these would be a good choice IMHO.
cheers, Wolfgang
I wonder, what's the difference between etch-and-a-half and etch+backports? Aside from the fact that etch-and-a-half comes on an installation disk.
After reading the minutes, seems like that 'release' will be supported till Lenny is released, so it's a 'static' target. Etch+backports in more like a moving target I guess? Also, Etch-and-a-half will not have updated KDE/Gnome, while backports probably will, I assume.
Yeah, backports is just what some people want on their stable systems, so they compile whatever they need for stable (at the moment, Etch). I've done that myself in the past, tho I never made any "official" packages.
Etch-and-a-half is more like a test to see if people will want this for newer hardware, until the next version becomes stable. No new "biggies" in there like Gnome or KDE, just a newer kernel and maybe some backports.
And an installation disk is important if you have to deal with newer hardware, which would otherwise maybe even not connect to the net afterwards. So yes, Etch-and-a-half will come as an installer.
cheers, Wolfgang
Etch-and-a-half is more like a test to see if people will want this for newer hardware, until the next version becomes stable. No new "biggies" in there like Gnome or KDE, just a newer kernel and maybe some backports.
And an installation disk is important if you have to deal with newer hardware, which would otherwise maybe even not connect to the net afterwards. So yes, Etch-and-a-half will come as an installer.
cheers, Wolfgang
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