[CLUE-Tech] Re: [CLUE-Talk] Upcoming Oracle presentations question

[Nate Duehr]

On Feb 29, 2004, at 11:10 PM, Keith Hellman wrote:
> My understanding is that is can't be in stable.  Oracle could certainly
> support a 'non-free' package (at least I think that's the one).  See #5
> of the Debian social contract (http://www.debian.org/social_contract)

Hard to say, but I wouldn't count on non-free always being available.  
A fairly good-sized contingent of Debian developers no longer think 
it's appropriate to support it.  Others have argued that by removing 
it, Debian would be breaking their own published social contract with 
their users.  It's been one of the heated debates on debian-devel and 
debian-vote this year.

Personally I'm not a voting Debian developer, just a long-time user and 
don't really have much of an opinion other than I do see where it would 
be difficult to justify asking mirrors to mirror non-free -- paying to 
distribute someone else's software that's not truly Free is not in the 
goals of many of the high-bandwidth mirrors.

Again, it's not about putting Oracle into Debian, it's about Oracle 
supporting Debian.  That could be done with a standard tar.gz 
installation, or Oracle can create .deb files just like anyone can and 
distribute them themselves.  The lack of .deb's is not the issue at 
hand, and Oracle does not need to create them if they don't want to.

The fact that one cannot run Oracle on Debian Linux (or derivatives) 
and expect official support from Oracle on that platform choice, is the 
issue I'd like to see Oracle address.

Obviously a number of people *do* run Oracle on Debian -- Google 
reveals a number of hints and tips -- but those users and sysadmins end 
up having to accept that they're not "officially supported", which is 
silly.  Linux is Linux.  And the differences between Debian and other 
Linux distros is far less than some of the less-popular "specialized" 
distros.  Surely supporting HP-UX creates more work for Oracle than 
another Linux distro would.  (Hint: There's a HUGE document of HP-UX 
kernel-tuning parameters that have to be tweaked to even get Oracle to 
RUN correctly on various versions of HP-UX... 30 or so pages of them.  
Keeping track of these kernel-tuning parameters must be a massive 
undertaking at Oracle in the test lab.  Firing up a copy of Debian and 
loading Oracle on it and running the standard battery of regression 
tests they probably run -- Let's hope anyway! -- would be MUCH easier.  
The number of variables (the things you're trying to remove in any test 
lab environment) is an order of magnitude lower, I'm almost certain.

Debian is a mainstream Linux distribution and deserves recognition as 
such by Oracle.  That's where I'm headed here... that and wondering 
aloud why they choose not to support it.

Meanwhile, life and learning go on... Hydrogen Peroxide on the surface 
of Mars... "who'd a thunk it?"  :-)  Very anti-life!  Marvin keeps a 
pretty clean house, eh?

Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com