[CLUE-Tech] Debian Installer

[Nate Duehr]

Brandon N wrote:

>
>Debian has so many debian-centric cool commands (like
>update-alternatives) that it really pays to read through all the Debian
>documentation to learn about things you may have never even thought of
>asking about.
>  
>
This is true of Debian's highly-evolved standards for filesystem 
locations and other things about Debian also -- and the documentation 
level of these items is VERY high compared to most Linux distros. 

It's worth perusing the Developer's documentation and Packaging 
Guidelines and the other project documentation to find little perls of 
wisdom about Debian. 

I think standards-wise they were FAR ahead of the LSB long before the 
LSB existed, but most people don't realize they had standards back that 
far, because most Linux distros didn't follow any, and certainly didn't 
enforce the standards by rejecting packages!

(RPM has always suffered from the "who made this mess???" syndrome where 
a package made by a well-meaning, but wrong in-duh-vidual in his 
basement puts things in all the wrong places on the filesystem or worse, 
hammers existing configuration files.)

I've never been able to figure out why having an organized filesystem 
with rules about where things go never caught on with other distros 
until much later in the Linux lifecycle.

Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com