Debian, Sidux, Ubuntu, reference distributions for Rev

[Peter Alcibiades]

Oh dear, Oh dear, Oh dear.  If the best and the brightest here don't
understand this stuff about Linux, what hope is there for Rev on Linux?

Betamax and VHS were different products.  It was one or the other.  You got
your stuff to run on one, it would not run on the other unles you redid it. 
You supported one, you did not support the other.  Tapes for one would not
play on the other. 

These things are not like that.  Sidux is Debian.  Ubuntu is Debian.  Just
like Windows Vista Beta is Vista.  Just like Rev 4.x public beta is Rev.  

If Debian were to vanish, there would be no more sidux, and no more Ubuntu
either.  There is a reason they are called .deb files, there is a reason
they can all use apt-get. 

Mandriva, Suse, Slackware, Red Hat, Fedora etc are not Debian.   There is a
real choice between the Debian family and one of them. 

Richard's argument might be valid, or would be more valid, if he were to
phrase it differently.  A more valid form of it would go, don't use
Slackware or Mandriva or Red Hat/Fedora as a reference distribution.  Use a
Debian based one. The total market share of the Debian based ones is
probably larger than the Red Hat based ones.  

To which the reply is, Yes, there are good arguments for using a Debian
based one, the question is which one?  Then we start having the kind of
debate that I am engaging in, which says, don't pick unstable moving targets
as your reference implementation of your chosen platform.  You would not
pick Vista Beta as your chosen reference implementation of Vista, what makes
you think its intelligent to pick the latest, or any particular, version of
Ubuntu or sidux as a reference implementation?

Its similar to, if you want it to be Red Hat based, we could have a
discussion about whether you should pick Fedora or Red Hat itself.  Just
like if you want to run a Red Hat based server, what are the benefits of
CentOS?  The thing that is just a complete misunderstand is if we start
arguing that Fedora is doing better in the market, and so we only need to
test on that, its the market leader after all.  Its like VHS, and in some
way we think of Red Hat as being like Betamax?  That is really getting the
wrong end of a stick.

This is not about taking sides, about market share of one variant or
another, its about picking  sensible ways of going about things in software
testing.  It is obvious that what Rev is doing on Linux is not working.  I
think it may, may be down to what implementation of the Debian platform they
insist on testing against.  Or that may be a substantial factor.  I don't
know for sure, not having been into Edinburgh and looked, but it seems
plausible.

And when I hear people talking about the different implementations of Debian
in terms of Debian being Betamax and the others or some of them being VHS,
it makes that seem more plausible.  If Richard doesn't understand this
properly, what hope is there that Edinburgh does?

This is probably all I will say about this for now.  Looking forward to 4.5,
and we'll maybe revisit things then.
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