25 Sep
2009
25 Sep
'09
4:59 p.m.
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