[Novalug] dynamic symbolic links

Mike Miller mike@mtmxr.com
Thu Apr 30 01:15:24 EDT 2015


Hi Peter, thanks for keeping this thread going and trying to help dispel
some of the FUD around systemd and other new and useful tools out there.

I invite you to give Debian another look and learn what is really going
on in the project :)

On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 13:47:49 -0400, Peter Larsen via Novalug wrote:
> Chicken vs. the egg discussion. It's about experimentation and trying
> something new. Clearly Fedora's purpose is to try out and make new
> technologies better where as Debian just wants to consume what has been
> proven to work elsewhere?

Hmm, AFAICT Debian has had systemd available for early adopters since
2010 [1]. Clearly some within Debian were experimenting with it as early
as possible.

> Open Source is about innovation. That requires distributions willing to
> innovate. And while I applaud Debian for trying to provide a stable
> distribution, it certainly doesn't put them in the innovation column.
> That's a shame - they used to be in that column - they were one of the
> big drivers to make the first useful distribution for Linux. But no more?

Sorry to see you repeat this misconception. I hope you'll be happy to
read that (IMHO) Debian continues to pursue quite a few innovative
efforts.

Please try not to conflate the Debian stable release with Debian the
distribution as a whole. Saying Debian is slow/behind the times because
of Debian stable is like saying Fedora is slow because RHEL :)

Some of my favorite in-progress Debian innovations:

  * Reproducible builds [2]
  * Debsources - browseable, searchable full history of all sources [3]
  * Clang rebuild of all packages [4]

Not intending to start a my-distro-is-better sub-thread, only to share
and inform.

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/597284 for example
[2] https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds
[3] http://sources.debian.net/
[4] http://clang.debian.net/

Happy to talk about Debian any time,

Back to lurking…

-- 
mike



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