package management again, and Debian
Toomas Karmo
verbum-qazKcTl6WRFWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org
Tue Oct 28 16:45:26 UTC 2003
I've been in correspondence with some people about package management. I
wrote my thoughts up at some length, and will recycle that piece of
writing for this listserv (since recycling may help a few readers,
given the interest sparked on the listserv
yesterday when Debian package management came up for discussion).
Rapidly,
Tom = Tom Karmo
http://www.metascientia.com
((RECYCLED-WRITING___ESSENTIALLY-QUOTE))
Dear Rob, Prof. MiddleAgedProf-IdentityConcealed, et al,
Yes, as Rob remarks, Debian is available for zero dollars.
Here's some further background on Debian and other distros:
* Debian, unlike RedHat, Mandrake, SUSe, and Slackware,
has a charter, or similar constitutional
document, formally forswearing commercial ambition.
This insulates Debian from commercial pressures which have
led RedHat at one point to incorporate beta software in a distro,
and have led Mandrake (when troubled, many months ago, by the
French equivalent of Chapter 11) to make what appeared to me to
be a misleading statement, a piece of suit-speak. (Sorry, eveyone,
but I can't remember the DETAILS of the seeming fib, the
seeming spin out of Armani/Calvin Klein/Gucci space. I just
remember being convinced that some Mandrake corporate pronouncement
was not candid.)
On the down side, it does make Debian a little slower than RedHat
and Mandrake in rolling out new stuff. I SEEM to remember that it
took Debian a long time to make the 2.4.x series of kernels
available. And Debian does rely, I guess even more than Mandrake,
on charitable contributions to keep its wheels turning.
* In appraising the quality of Debian, it is rational to check
the quality of documentation. I'm not as well briefed as I could
be here, but can at least give a pointer to the best of the
various Debian manuals:
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/reference/reference.en.html
(That's a manual under the umbrella of the Debian Documentation
Project, or DBP.) I **SEEM** to remember that that manual
goes into the nitty-gritty of the Debian packaging formalism.
It's essential that that nitty-gritty be documented at
the level of
detail appropriate for a curious user.
We need to know, for example, how we can
inspect the actual script that installs a given package.
Say you are installing foo on your box. There has to be a script
which decides what directories to create, what symbolic links
to make, what permissions to
bestow, etc, etc. The script might end up being VERY
complicated - as is indeed, I'm sure, the case with the Debian
install of asrophysics tool IRAF, not as yet tested on my Debian box.
Recall that IRAF when installed in a more naive
RedHat setting is quite tricky, obliging us to create a special
account by hand,
and moreover to make the default shell for that account
the rather archaic shell
tcsh rather than the contemporary shell bash.
I think that in Debian all that stuff no longer happens by hand,
but is scripted.
Further, I think we are given the
e-mail adddress of the package maintainer, responsible for the
sanity of the script. (Part of the Debian culture is a notion
of human, as opposed to corporate,
accountability: each package is associated with an
identifiable individual
responsible for it, who does such things as script-writing,
ideally liaising all the while
with the upstream developers. The Debian IRAF
package maintainer, then, is likely to be a careful script-writer
who at least in the ideal case
maintains contacts with the upstream people, the actual
IRAF creaters, at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. When
he's puzzled on how to script something for the Debian IRAF
installer, then, I hope, he
gets in touch with the actual IRAF programming team at NOAO.)
* Syntax for my daily updates of the whole Debian system:
((QUOTE))
apt-get update
apt-get check
apt-get -u upgrade
((/QUOTE))
This syntax updates the list of available packages in the Debian
"stable" branch, then upgrades any package that has been updated
in the last 24 hours. The apt-get tool is configured in such a way
as to be sure to contact inter alia the special Debian server
that urgently reflects security-related updates.
* Size of Debian: 8 CDs if bought, for around CAN$70,
from the www.chguy.net guy in Manitoba or Saskatchewan or
whatever. (One can burn one's own CDs for free. But
the www.chguy.net provides tech support for no extra
charge if asked,
and moreover ploughs some of the dollars he gets from his customers
back into Debian, by way of a charitable donation.)
I think this is about twice the size of Mandrake and
RedHat, meaning that we get extra goodies. (Sometimes we WANT
extra goodies. Just Saturday night, I found it useful
to run not IRC, but its archaic predecessor, talk. Unrusprisingly.
talk was absent from my system, since it's IRC that I know and use:
but a rapid invocation of
apt-get install talk and apt-get install talkd fixed that problem,
in just one minute.)
The trick is to install very selectively,
only puttiing in the packages thare are useful.
The installer, conveniently, gives for each package not a
one-line description, but an
at-least-one-PARAGRAPH description, in some
cases with some juicy detail like the URL of the upstream
developer's organization. (Those
at-least-one-paragraph descriptions are
part of what gets updated
daily with ((QUOTE)) apt-get update ((/QUOTE)).)
* If Engineer-IdentityConcealed
needs to investigate distros at some stage,
he might find it helpful to contact the Dept of Physics at the
University of Calgary. That particular Department runs on
Debian, not on RedHat. Of course RedHat will be NEARLY ubiquitous in
the universe of North American physics-and-astronomy
departments.
* Here's the full history of my involvement with all THREE distros:
+a__In ancient times, that is to say the summer of 1997,
I went for RedHat, since that particular distro was much
in the news. I found a lot of software misconfigured,
but toughed it out.
+b__In perhaps the autumn
of 2000, Prof. EmeritusProf-IdentityConcealed and I together
found a consultant, more recently vanished off the face of the
earth, who was knowledgeable about distros. That consultant
pointed us to Mandrake, as a firm which had started its rise
to prominence by repairing RedHat's configuration errors.
Prof. EmeritusProf-IdentityConcealed
and I found Mandrake quite stable and clean.
+c__I've taken the position that I must find out what the
best infotech engineers are doing and imitate them. (This
rule ****ALWAYS**** works. Peple who followed that rule in
1955 or so would have found themselves using those new-fangled
shortcuts, the "compilers", and making plans to replace their
hot valves with so-called "transistors". People who followed
that rule in 1965 would have taken "time sharing" seriously,
and would have deprecated the
then-almost-ubiquitous idea that you format your job
as a stack of keypunched cards, which you hand
over the Computer Centre counter to a clerk.
People who followed that rule
in 1985 would have found themselves in a Sun-
or HP- or IBM- or Digital-crafted Unix, to their
great benefit, and would have bypassed such
things as Microsoft.
People who followed that rule in 1995 would have migrated
away from a restricted-licence
Unix to Linux, again to their benefit.
And I believe that when compilers first came out, many
scoffed at them. And I KNOW that when time-sharing was new,
people thought it dirty.
And I boldly predict that people who follow my rule in
2010 or 2015 will migrate away from Linux to a better, quite
different, kernel, the "Hurd" kernel - already available as
Debian GNU/Hurd, but not at present mature enough to be safe.
So, working in a spirit of considerable cynicism, I avoid
**ANY** loyalties of a personal kind in operating system space:
as soon as the next Best Minds at M.I.T.
or Cambridge or Stanford or
whatever get onto the Best Operating System Flavour, I
unashamedly follow them. Woof! Woof! I'm shameless, I stress.)
In the spring of 2003, I decided, on the strength of of
conversations with Rob, that my infallible
rule now entailed a switch
out of Mandrake into Debian.
Very rapidly,
rather enjoying these mails,
Tom
PS: Engineer-IdentityConcealed,
Prof. MiddleAgedProf-IdentityConcealed,
whoever: Do forward this mail to anyone who
may need to see it at any stage. ((SNIP))
On Mon, Oct 27, 2003 at 12:52:02PM -0500, Robert Brockway wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, MiddleAgedProf-IdentityConcealed wrote:
>
> > This is very interesting! What do the Debian and Mandrake management systems
> > cost?
>
> I can't say much about Mankdrake (I rarely if ever use it) but will
> comment on Debian...
>
> The software and the management system in Debian are completely free.
>
> The Debian developers (about 400 individuals spread all across the world)
> maintain the highest levels of professionalism in the development of the
> distribution. The distribution known as "Debian Stable" goes through
> months of rigorous testing and a code freeze[1] of several months. This
> extensive testing not only provides for a very robust operating system,
> but it also allows for a powerful software management system. The ease of
> maintaining a Debian Stable system (including adding security updates)
> has to be seen to be believed.
>
> If there was sufficient interest in the possible deployment of Debian we
> could arrange a demonstration. We would also be happy to show off the
> power of thinclient and some of the other capabilities available in modern
> systems like Debian.
>
> [1] During a code freeze, only code required to fix security issues or
> bugs is added. No software is moved to a newer version.
>
> Rob
>
> --
> Robert Brockway
> Senior Technical Consultant, OpenTrend Solutions.
> Phone: 416-669-3073, Email: rbrockway-wgAaPJgzrDxH4x6Dk/4f9A at public.gmane.org, http://www.opentrend.net
> OpenTrend Solutions: Reliable, secure solutions to real world problems.
((/RECYCLED-WRITING___ESSENTIALLY-QUOTE))
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