A distribution bytes the dust!

[bob at sinister.com (Bob Keyes)]

On Tue, 4 Nov 2003 dsr at tao.merseine.nu wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 09:09:37AM -0500, David Kramer wrote:
> > All I want is to install a distro of Linux that is fairly modern and will be
> > supported for a few months!
> >
> > I can't take this!
>
> So, howzabout Debian?

So, how about it? I've been using it for a while, and while there are some
things that I really like about it, there's a long way to go. Maybe People
will get sick of the SUE/RedHat Bulllsh1t and switch to debian.

What works is that it is stable, and the apt stuff works pretty well. You
can set up a debian box, set it up to get the stable patches through
apt-cron, and pretty much forget about it for a good, long time.

What's un-nice about it is that the stable releases are lacking a lot of
things, such as support for 802.11 cards, and that certain things have
remained broken, such as a problem with old, isa based pcmcia adapters.
Another bad thing is the bloatware -- why a server has to have all this
crud related to X11 I do not know. And emacs -- don't mean to get in a
religious war here but why is this in the default install? There are also
some real problems with a clunky install, with package collisions (mtr and
mtr-tiny) resolvable just by doing the default thing, but unnerving.

I think that the debian project needs a dose of project philosophy, and
here's mine:

The battle for stability is a battle for simplicity: for the sake of fewer
factors to account for, and fewer to test, it is important to keep an OS
installation to the minimum that will get the job done.

In these days, surplus low power computers are cheap, and software exists
to create multiple virtual systems in one, so a good step towards
stability, ease of maintenance, security, and performance is to enable
users to install a well-tested single-purpose OS/application suite:

- DNS server, authoritative and caching

- SMTP server
 - SMTP only
 - SMTP with anti-spam tools

-DHCP server

-IMAP server

-WWW server

-FTP server

-Mozilla Workstation

-router

-firewall

-IDS


...and so on. Note the lack of a general purpose desktop, and a general
purpose development station - the reason for the first is that a desktop
by its nature is very personal so therefore customization is a difficult
task, and the second is missing because software development is both
custom AND anything written for one of the "sub-distributions" needs to be
compiled, tested, and installed on a development platform specific to that
sub-distribution.