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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