[clue-talk] Hello CLUE

[T. Joseph Carter]

On Mon, Jul 31, 2006 at 05:39:04PM -0600, Nate Duehr wrote:
> Hi Joseph.  Welcome to town.  I like your posts already!  (And I bet you 
> know how to use a turn-signal, unlike the majority of folks who've moved 
> here in the last 5 years or so!)  ;-)

You'd bet wrong as I have never driven a car, and am not likely to in the
near future.  *grin*


> >Debian just needs to give up on having a stable, period.  Gentoo needs to
> >dial back a little and have things actually work more often than not.
> >Ubuntu needs to care about something other than GNOME, with KDE and XFCE
> >and school people working on their own little projects on the side.
> 
> Isn't Stable exactly what's trying to avoid the problem you mention in 
> the first paragraph?
> 
> I've been doing all sorts of Distros for a very long time, and the "one 
> thing I can count on" is that Debian Stable will WORK for servers, no 
> muss, no fuss, the damn thing just runs and runs and runs and gets 
> timely security patches.

It is, but only at the cost of being potentially unable to install on a
new server.  There's also something to be said for holding up ia32, amd64,
and powerpc architectures for a month while you wait for an Atari Falcon
to finish compiling X before release.  ;)  Or more importantly, before
releasing a security patch for other platforms.


> All other distros make Linux look stupid and unprofessional in this 
> regard.  Debian sucks for desktops, but for server farms that you have 
> no time to screw around with constantly, there's nothing better.

Again, I'd have no trouble with Debian stable if they'd actually consider
things like an updated kernel and maybe X11 now and then.  Remember
slink.5 was needed by (then) VA Research so that they could actually
install Debian on their new machines.  My own effort at potato.5 was
needed for the same reason, but fell flat because woody would be out any
day now.  When woody finally shipped, a year and a half later, it too did
not work on current hardware.

Nobody even bothered to suggest woody.5, and I was flamed for predicting
that it would take three years to release sarge.  Three years later, sarge
is released, and Branden Robinson is DPL.  I always said I'd leave Debian
if he were ever elected (he'd been running for years by this time).  Of
course by the time it had happened I'd already gotten out.  I digress
though, sarge has the same problem regarding relatively recent hardware,
in the range of six months to a year old.


I can understand not having time to screw with servers on a regular basis.
My career change has taught me the value of set it up, monitor it,
firewall it as much as possible, and walk away until you see a CERT
advisory or something.