Comments on: Debian — troubling signs; can Slackware teach us anything?

By: Mackey J. McDonald

Mackey J. McDonald — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:30:28 +0000

Such a usefule blog?COOL !!!!

By: Jim Habegger

Jim Habegger — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 23:42:56 +0000

Even people with the best intentions will complain and find fault sometimes. In most cases it might be better to just ignore that part, and trust each other to try to do better.

I found a lot of useful information and ideas here for my purposes. Thanks to everyone who contributed.

By: Mc

Mc — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:24:57 +0000

I have recently had a big beef with debian, due to thier messing with the code and lieing about it.

They changed Firefox name to ice weasel, and said ” it was only a logo change because some graphics in firefox was not free”, they also blamed firefox for the need to change the name.

Yet iceweasel will not work with some of the plugins from mozzillas website.

Now I’m not a programer, but I believe if it was the same as firefox, then all the plugins would be the same, they should just work.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not against debian changing iceweasel, and they did at least change the name. What my beef is thier lieing to the normal folks such as myself, telling us iceweasel is the same as firefox with just copyrighted logo changes.

By: Daeng Bo

Daeng Bo — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:29:58 +0000

Regarding making changes to packages:
I haven’t done Linux from Scratch since about 2001, but even that minimal required several patches to get the system to compile. Lots of vanilla apps won’t compile with the set of libraries and compiler tools that Debian has by default on any particular release.

Debian also tries to do its own security audits, which are pretty important if you’re using software that’s over twelve months old and the upstream developer has already moved on.

I’ve been on Linux since 1997 and really like Slack, but I LOVE Debian. The Debian debacle was bad, but it mostly stung so much because that kind of thing rarely happens.

By: cae

cae — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:29:13 +0000

It’s this type of infighting to makes using other OS worthwhile

By: Pig_Pen

Pig_Pen — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:36:13 +0000

Slackware’s the best!

you really hit the nail on the head! kudos!

By: mongoosecage

mongoosecage — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:11:15 +0000

Maybe he prefers Xfce. Because 1st Desktop Environment is Xfce second is KDE. To be honest I hate KDE. I use to like it back in 2001 when I was really young and knew nothing. But I started using Ubuntu gnome and prefered it over the KDE environment. Now I love Xfce too. I always found KDE very much windows like

By: Takla

Takla — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:21:26 +0000

hmmm…an author who feels his opinion *needs* to be voiced, references to forcing himself towards the pure, misrepresentations (wilful?) of normal distro versioning of packages, offering incomplete and misleading summary re the openssl debacle, inflammatory language aimed at people who don’t subscribe to the author’s position (“proper place to dump all their dirty hacks and patches, and to completely spit at the hard work that upstream developers”), an assertion of exclusive faith “I truly believe that the Slackware way of distributing, is the right way”. This isn’t an essay on free software distribution, it’s an expression of religious intolerance/evangelism transcribed into a modern technical environment.

I have nothing against Slackware, actually I admire it, imo it’s one of the few major GNU/Linux distributions that really matter, alongside Debian, Red Hat, Gentoo and perhaps Suse. By matter I mean having an individual philosphy or approach, respecting licenses (GPL in particular), develop their own tools, make major contributions to the benefit of the entire free software community, and their health and continued existence affects everyone in the community.

By: Martin

Martin — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:02:32 +0000

“Again, if you’re going to modify the code that heavily, fork it, don’t pretend like you’ve left the original code alone.”

No you only fork a project when you want to create a new project which takes on primary development responsibilities. that’s why it’s a fork, you then have to cross pollinate to get fixes from the original project.

What we’re taking about is distros creating a custom version of a package. These are called _versions_ and they show in the version info. For instance package foo on ubuntu would be foo-1.2.12-ubuntu3 because version 1.2.12 has been patched by ubuntu 3 times to fix problems. Likely that those patches got sent upstream and 1.2.13 will have them (in an ideal world anyway)

I don’t think that distributions are fooling anyone, least of all their users. And I’d rather protect the freedom to modify without grief than the freedom to protect project purity in all distribution channels. That road gets you to the DMCA and it’s ilk.

By: Guy

Guy — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:33:29 +0000

Slackware may have one maintainer but it offers great freedom of choice as being highly customisable, as shown by the number of derivatives. I have done a Slackware install (with X) in as little as 600MB & built up a great system from there.