10 September, 2006

 

Mark Shuttleworth on Debian

Mark's take on what Debian's strengths and weaknesses are makes for an interesting read. The way I interpret it, he wants us to be the plateau that other parties can put their spikes on top of (to use his symbolism). He mentions etch towards the end as one of those spikes, but essentially suggests we focus pretty much all our energy on sid because this is what we are good at and where our passion lies.

I beg to differ.

I firmly believe that Debian must remain relevant as an end-user distribution. Not only because essentially this is what our Social Contract is all about but also because without (relevant) releases I very much doubt we'd be able to keep the momentum and attract (or even keep) good people as (new) developers.

From Mark's point of view, his line of argumentation certainly makes sense: The better sid, the better a derivative like Ubuntu. From our point of view I believe it doesn't.

And by the way, I do run sarge on my machine as "production" environment and I am thus much looking forward to the release of etch.

That said, I do think that Ubuntu is better than Debian in some ways (but certainly not all), so on this I agree with Mark. I am just not sure that this really has to stay this way. Competition is good. ;-)

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