on Mon, Mar 14, 2005 at 12:33:06PM -0500, Peter Jay Salzman (p@dirac.org) wrote:
On Mon 14 Mar 05, 9:31 AM, Bob Scofield <rscofield@afes.com> said:
Of course I do not expect much sympathy from Debian users for this type of
computing. But after Ken's answer to my question about apt upgrading to new
versions of open source applications (eventually to Open Office 2.0, for
example) I marvel at what Debian is up to. It is clearly economically
suicidal for commercial distros to have apt. While Debian is considered
geekware, it has tremendous potential to the non-technically inclined.
Bob
Interesting thought. While my understanding is that apt has been ported to
other distros, like Connectiva (which is now owned by someone else) my sense
is that it hasn't really caught on. Maybe it doesn't have the blessing of
the distros to which it was ported.
Those who fail to understand Debian Policy are forced to reimplement it.
Poorly.
http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/talks/why_debian/talk.html
http://twiki.iwethey.org/Main/WhyDebianRocks
Policy - The Special Sauce
This is the crux, the narthex, the throbbing heart of Debian and
what makes it so utterly superior to all other operating systems.
Policy is defined. It is clear. It is enforced through the tools you
use every day. When you issue apt-get install foo, you're not just
installing software. You're enforcing policy - and that policy's
objective is to give you the best possible system.
In danger of starting a flame war, I am going to give my view of Debian.
Debian is in fact based on wonderful ideas, but it has horrible
implementation. Its rigid policy and arrogant developers end up making
it difficult to use for the general user. It's stable release is nearly
3 years old. Debian's installation process is difficult and requires
intimate knowledge of how linux works. In order to have an up-to-date
system, you risk instability (with the testing or unstable tree), or
must resort to 3rd party "backports".
