[LAU] Patch wars ? Debian vs. Fedora vs. ...

[Brent Busby]

On Thu, 24 Sep 2009, lanas wrote:

>  Until now I was naively thinking that The Source of any package was 
> where 'It' was.  Eg. To get, compile and install a package, the web 
> page of the package's project was where to get it.
>
>  A colleague at work started to seed some doubt.  He's totally 
> pro-Debian and one argument is that the Debian people are patching 
> source packages to fix things.  And they eventually submit their 
> patches upstream.  And some are sometimes rejected, for whatever 
> reasons.

This is completely IMHO, of course:

I think Debian's changes are 99% helpful with things at the shell level. 
I run Debian for almost all our Linux servers at work, because for a 
server, they're hard to beat, and they really do fix a lot of userland 
problems that other distros don't worry about.

At the desktop/X11 level though, I think 99% of their patches amount to 
screwing with stuff that already worked, which upstream developers are 
already taking care of.  It creates a divergent desktop environment that 
is a Franken-mix of stuff from upstream and stuff from Debian. 
Sometimes you have problems that are unknown on other distros, and would 
baffle upstream developers.

[...]
>  Would this then mean that actually a distro can be better than
> another in a slice of time t ?  That you would not find that
> Qjackctl or Ardour (only examples, no bugs in there .. :-) bug if
> you use distro x over distro y ?

Absolutely.  I used Debian from 2.0 ("hamm") through 3.0 ("woody"). 
During that time, they got mostly better.  Then woody started getting 
extremely dated, as the next version was literally taking years.  I 
switched to Suse, and liked it for awhile, until they got worse.  Then 
Debian got better and I switched back, until they got worse again.

The thing I think I learned from this is that unless you want to be 
constantly switching distros, the only way to keep things the way you 
like them is if you manage the system build policy yourself.  That's why 
I'm running Gentoo now, and it feels like being let out of prison.  You 
can finally really be in control.  (And pro audio apps really work now!)

-- 
+ Brent A. Busby	 + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ UNIX Systems Admin	 +  banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago	 +  eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ Physical Sciences Div. +  Shakespeare.  Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ James Franck Institute +  we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky