Sorry to hear that Lovechild, it should be OK before long. There are many reasons for the messed up state of the project. Mainly, the reasons lie in a bad way of updating into unstable and stable that caught up to them with the release of almost totally incompatable (backwards mind you) core packages. The 2.4.x kernel has finally started to stabilize for the corporate level at around 2.4.16pre6, so this has been a major hinderence too.
Taking this in mind, the package developers have decided they would rather fix the newest versions than stabilize the older releases so they work right and you have a total mess as a maintainer. The only way that the new maintainer has finally got control of the programmers fixing the bugs in the not-so-recent releases is to mandate that anything not in "unstable" by xxx date and compatible with "foobar" core packages _will_not_be_on _the_next_release. So then you have half a million programmers trying to get to bugs that have existed in releases that are 6 months old that should have been taken care of _long_ ago.
Things should be cool within a month or so with the Debian trees, I just feel sorry for the maintainer. If he released something with as many bugs as the Slack8 I'm running now, he shouldn't be running the trees. Heck, KDE has had a bug in the rLISA/Samba setup for atleast 6 months (reported) that apparently they don't even care to look at.
Don't blame Debian, blame people demanding only the newest versions when the old versions are still buggy.
Windows is communistic (in practice). One big corp owns it and everyone else gets to use the same product. Linux can't be communistic because everyone's kernels might be slightly differant in some way or another. Communism demands that everything be the same for everyone (in simple terms).
hah!
apt-get install ralinux &&
apt-get remove apt &&
echo "Welcome To Heaven"
about the communism: i wouldn't say debian is a communist distro. it's just totally open-source so it would be 'more correct' to say open-source in general is kinda communistic.
but on the other hand open-source is really more like a democracy. everybody kinda has a 'vote'. for instance: if u don't like a certain WM u can just use another one. If that WM just happens to have a lot of other people who 'elect' to use it, it might even become the top WM... kinda like a politician can get elected as a mayor for instance.
I always thought it was kinda funny that the type of software development most desired by capitalism is so communistic in nature (I'm talking about the communism that the russians had in practise, not the idealistic communism that Marx proposed).
Anyway. With Closed Source, you have a ruling elite (the programmers working for the company who makes the program). And they make all the decisions and write all the code with impunity. Occaisionally you'll get an "enlightened monarch" who will ask the user what they want and code that for them, but most of the time they just code whatever and try to make people use it.
That is, no matter how you look at it, a very oligarchic method of software development.
With Open Source, everybody has a say. Anybody can fix anything that's broken, and anybody can make improvements as they see fit. In theory it's ideal communism, where everybody works in cooperation with everybody else to do good work, and everybody is happy. In practise it's more like a model democracy where there are a few people in charge of organizing a software project, but everybody is still free to have a say in what happens. If you happen to think the people in charge are doing a bad job, and won't listen to you, you can fork the code and start your own software project from the existing codebase, sort of like a coup d'etat, except that instead of overthrowing the existing "government", you're both in power simultaneously.
As an example of the 'model democracy' idea, look at the linux kernel: Anybody can write patches and send them in, but only a select group of people decide what gets included in the next release. If you really think they're doing a bad job, there's nothing stopping you from taking the linux kernel source code, applying your own patches, and releasing it as a seperate kernel, and maintaining it yourself. I wouldn't advise that course of action, though
Exactly.Don't blame Debian, blame people demanding only the newest versions when the old versions are still buggy.
I couldn't have said it better myself. That's why it's called OpenSource. These programmers do not get paid for their work. So it's not fair to blame at them for something that is not working. I'm sure they tried their best for it. If you don't believe me, try to become one of those maintainers yourself and you will know.If you really think they're doing a bad job, there's nothing stopping you from taking the linux kernel source code, applying your own patches, and releasing it as a seperate kernel, and maintaining it yourself.
Trying to compare Debian to some political structure isn't really logical. Debian developers work on it on a voluntary basis, not because they have to.
Debian can be better likened to a voluntary army. We've seen the results of voluntary armies vs. armies of conscription in the past, and the voluntary armies always surprise people. They always do better then expected (doesn't necessarily mean they win though.) However, all armies have their limits, and Debian developers are no different. There are just too many packages to maintain right now.
Debian's slowness is also also a problem of democracy. Communist governments can actually enact policies quite quickly, whereas democracy take a long time because the majority must agree to it. Debian is very much a democracy and a majority must agree to releasing something as stable. Look at the US' government. In 200 years, there have been only 26 amendments to the constitution. Sure, there are other laws, but many laws can be strucken down by the judicial branch if they are found to go against the Constitution.
Imagine trying to get a majority to agree that Potato should be released as Stable. That's not an easy task.
Ah, Potato IS stable.... ;DImagine trying to get a majority to agree that Potato should be released as Stable. *That's not an easy task.
Woody you mean??
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