package management again, and Debian

[cbbrowne-HInyCGIudOg at public.gmane.org]

Toomas Karmo wrote...
> * 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.)

That's quite a wonderful presentation on some of the differences between
Debian and other distributions.

But I have to disagree with the comments about the likelihood of Hurd
becoming a better choice.  That one is quite clearly a dead horse, at
this point.  Not only is it "not mature enough," it seems pretty
unlikely that it will become more mature any time soon.

The problem is that Hurd is tied to Mach, which never really got
properly finished, and which is tied to architectures that are rapidly
getting obsolete.  Hurd only supports filesystems up to 1GB in size, to
name the most problematic antifeature.  I can readily have more RAM than
that on hardware that is relatively pedestrian.  And the hardware I
_want_ supports on the order of 16GB.

I can't see Hurd returning to interest without them implementing a fresh
microkernel from scratch, which amounts to going pretty close to
starting over, and at that point, it's likely sensible to call it
something fresh.

Of course, by that point, it might be as sensible for (say) DragonFly
BSD (a project to build a highly threaded, message passing kernel) to be
run with a Debian or BSD Ports "user space" and have the improvements
we'll be looking for...
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