RunRev and Linux

[Peter Alcibiades]

Richmond, no, it can't be all bad.  But its Debian!  You do realize how it is
made and what it is made out of?  They have a six month schedule, on which
they take packages from Debian Experimental, and make a distro.  

Meanwhile, the Debian guys move those same packages out of Experimental,
into Unstable, then as an ensemble, into Testing, and every two-three years,
after they are OK that Testing is really, really stable, they release it as
a new exhaustively tested Stable.

The whole Ubuntu thing is Debian.  APT, Synaptic, it is Debian. The Gnome
that people admire so much is the same Gnome as you get do you install
Debian.   But it is Debian in a form the Debian guys would not tolerate, and
which more and more informed people who have tried to use Ubuntu to build
their downstream Debian derivatives out of have decided you cannot sensibly
use for that.  

Here are a couple links, the first being the redoubtable Caitlyn Martin, the
second Warren Woodford.  These guys are serious people and should be
listened to:

http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2010/04/ubuntu-is-a-poor-standard-bear.html

The other is the case she does not mention, that of Warren Woodford of 
Mepis who moved away a couple of years back

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS6170488551.html

It makes no sense to 'standardize' on a distribution which is made the way
Ubuntu is.  By all means use it if that is what one likes.  I have nothing
against that.  But this is not about what we like, its about what we use for
standardization, and the whole concept of standardizing on something which
is built new every six months out of someone else's experimental packages
makes no sense.

The problem with this is not whether I like Ubuntu.  It is that it will not
work to deliver quality, because it will be picking the wrong kind of thing
to be testing against.  You pick something to standardize on, pick something
that stays in the same place long enough for you to get a shot at it.  And
that is as exhaustively tested as possible, so you have some chance of
knowing whether its you or the distro that is making the mistakes.

By the way, talking distros and Rev, Slitaz is really amazing.  30Mb, a
graphical user interface, desktop icons, a package manager, and it seems to
run Rev as well as the mainline distros.  I haven't tested properly at all,
just fired it up and used it a bit.  It looks good, and its screamingly
fast.  Really worth a look if you ever need to bundle your app in a turnkey,
boot and run, form.  Swiss.  Gnomes from Zurich perhaps?

Peter
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