<br>I saw the message below while reviewing the list archives along with some other posts that had me thinking Debian might be a bit misunderstood as a distro. <br><br>Debian has two primary standards for packages. License and volatility. On the license front, Debian has held the line on the "Free Software" ideology more than any other distro I can think of. There are a TON of distros out there - so maybe more accurate to say "most 'pure' of the well known distros". For more on Debian's views on Free Software and the principles that guide their decision making, see this page about the Debian Social Contract. <br>
<br><a href="http://www.debian.org/social_contract" target="_blank">http://www.debian.org/social_contract</a><br><br>Debian's strict adherence to their principles is the source of some of Debian's idiosyncrasies. (e.g., where's pine?) <br>
<br>Beyond that, to understand the relationship between Ubuntu and Debian, it helps to understand Debian's release process, because Ubuntu (based on Debian) fills a gap in both cadence and out-of-the box functionality. Debian has four defined release branches. Briefly, they are: <br>
<ul><li><b>Stable </b>- Only bug-fixes are ported into this release, not new features. It is nearly always safe to take changes to deb-stable without disrupting a service running over it. <br></li><li><b>Testing - </b>The next stable release, new features are allowed here. <br>
</li><li><b>Unstable - </b>This branch usually has recent (current) releases of software.<br></li><li><b>Experimental </b>- bleeding edge stuff. <br></li></ul>A friend of mine jokes that "Debian Stable = Debian Obsolete, Debian Testing = Debian Old, Debian Unstable = Debian Current". As a result of Debian defining release points in terms of volatility (specifically, almost no patches), formal releases of Debian are often over a year apart. <br>
<br>That's where Canonical, Ltd steps in. They provide a six-month release cadence with a focus on integration and providing a useful and usable platform by default. That kind of resources needs a bit more money behind it. Mark Shuttleworth, an entrepreneur and the (former?) maintainer for Apache on Debian, gave it a try and so Ubuntu (the distro) and Canonical Ltd (the company) were born. Ubuntu tries very hard to stay true to their Debian roots, making exception for graphics and hardware drivers, and maybe some fonts too. A lot of Debian maintainers and release managers are now employed by Canonical. <br>
<br>It's pretty easy to bag on Debian. From many people's standpoint they are slow, ideological, and opinionated. As one person pointed out they made an egregious mistake with an openssl patch years ago. But in the context of the overall "linux-distro ecosystem" they are a vitally important and respected distro. Despite some mistakes, they are definitely "the good guys." The world's a better place for having Debian (and in turn, Ubuntu). <br>
<br>Hopefully anyone who made it this far found this interesting. Also, if you see any inaccuracies in what I wrote above please call them out. I'm pretty sure I got the details right, but at the same time I don't have a degree in distro-geneology. :)<br>
<br>Cheers!<br><br>-Rob<br><br>
<br><br> ---------------------------------------<br>On Tue, 11 Aug 2009, Matt Hallacy wrote:<br><br>> On Tue, 2009-08-11 at 13:50 -0500, Mike Miller wrote:<br>>> On Tue, 11 Aug 2009, Matt Hallacy wrote:<br>>><br>
>>> If you want a solid server distribution, CentOS, RHEL maybe Slackware.<br>>>> If you want a solid desktop/laptop distribution, Fedora, or SuSE.<br>>><br>>><br>>> Is there anything wrong with Ubuntu?<br>
><br>> Despite all the hard work the Ubuntu folks have put into it, it still <br>> receives a great deal of its package repository from Debian which has <br>> proven repeatedly that they really have no standards for package quality <br>
> or package maintainers.<br><br><br>No standards at all? That is bad. I haven't had any problems yet, that I <br>know of. I thought one of the arguments advanced in favor of Ubuntu was <br>that it was like Debian with better packages -- more up to date, at least.<br>
<br>Mike<br>