Debian Internal Projects Slides by Andreas Tille

lagc writes "In this message to debian-devel, Andreas Tille present the slides he will use in his talks on LinuxDays Luxembourg event. The first explains the structure, motivations e advantages of Debian Internal Projects (Debian-Junior, Debian-Med, Debian-Edu and Demudi for now), the second presents the Debian-Med distribution. That is: Debian is the solid base for specialization in the Free Software World."

Speaking of Medical Software...

[GypC]

has anyone gottne The Medical Manager to run on Linux or *BSD? SCO OpenServer is stinky.

Re:Debian is irrelevant

[Anonymous Coward]

"The software they package is obsolete and slow (compiled for i386)."

so compile them yourself .. its not hard .. dont be lazy

"They spend too much effort on irrelevant architectures and thousands of packages noone uses."

Maybe that you dont use .. but others may .. and its not your money or time going to those packages.

"Debian developers waste time on mailing lists in endless debates about superficial issues."

They are important issues to Debian.

"Now that the apt-get technology is not exclusive to Debian there is no reason left to use the distribution anymore."

There's more than just apt-get. It's the whole system.

Debian will never be irrelevent. They make perhaps the best non-commercial distro available. They may lag behind people like SuSE or Mandrake, but perhaps they have different objectives and values in a distro than others. Just because you don't like them doesn't mean others don't. I find Debian to be the best all around distro, IMO. But thats me, and everyone is entitled to thier own opinion.

Re:Debian is irrelevant

[lagc]

Just as complement.

The real point is that while other distros are still lagging behind Debian about solid and well integrated packages, flexibility, and number of developers, Debian is walking forward with this kind of new structure.

Sub-projects! No new forks! No new Debian-based distros!

So, some problems today we face (too many packages, releases delay) can be resolved with this new approach.

Long life to Debian :-)

Debian is solid -and- a good base

[StarBar]

The apt-get technology is the most convinient way of installing new software I have ever tried. It is so easy to use that even my mother (a 60+ lady) would have no difficulty install a new fancy versions of Tetris. The apt-get itself is not the reason I like Debian but the fact that all packages integrates so easy on a running system in a consistent way. Try to make a debian package and you know why. Debian put a high level of quality thinking in their packaging and that is the reason I can swap hundreds of megabytes in and out of my harddisk and still have a working system! Old software is usually more stable than new ones BTW.

Try install a free game CD for Windows on Win-98 (I just did this for my son) and you see what I mean. Guess what...ehh never mind..:-/ And yes I stayed with Win 3.11 until Win-98 were available and swapped to Linux then.

Starbar!

Taking Sides?

["Zow"]

Okay, when I first read that, I thought it said: Debian Internal Projects Sides by Andreas Tille, and I thought, "Who has a problem with Andreas Tille?"

Time for more caffeine.

-"Zow"

Debian isn't a distro, it's a production method!

[evbergen]

Not to fork makes enormous sense. A 'Debian based' distribution is a hollow phrase to begin with, if it must do without the procedural, human and technical infrastructure of the Debian project. Debian's strength isn't apt-get, it's debian-policy, combined with a package system that's powerful enough to express the relevant parts of that policy.

Debian as a process has proven itself to scale quite well, considering the number of packages, the number of upstream authors, the number of package maintainers and the low number of bugs.

It seems a very good idea to re-use the model for other large free software projects with a high number of discrete components. Whether such projects should be integrated into the distributions currently produced by the Debian project or if they should be defined as separate 'products' may be another issue, but I'd say that if the product is an unix-like OS that uses the Linux kernel, integrating seems the obvious choice.

IANADD, though (yet).

Re:Debian isn't a distro, it's a production method

[castlan]

All very good points, especially about Debian Policy. Perhaps that is why Progeny Debian had to be deiscontinued, because that was what they were lacking - Debian policy and community. Perhaps the selflessness of the community might becompromised by introducing finances into the mix... but I really don't think it even got close enough to that point before withdrawing their distribution.

One little addition... even if the product doesn't use the kernel Linux, it is still probably a good idea to integrate - as policy is greater than any one kernel. As the presentation pointed out when it tried to describe Debian from the Linux point of view "Sorry, This was Wrong". Debian is greater than Linux, or even a Unix like OS that uses Linux.

Re:Debian isn't a distro, it's a production method

[evbergen]

About the addition: I didn't mean whether or not to integrate with the Debian project, rather than to whether integrate with the systems it currently produces--the unstable, testing, stable distributions of GNU (/Linux and /Hurd).