12/31/2005
Debian Doesn’t Hate Their Utopia Team
So after hearing weekly calls from the Gnome Herd to disband Project Gentopia, I just read a blog post from a Debian developer and was shocked to read that they have a Project Utopia, which is what Gentopia is named after. And their Gnome team (aka herd) and KDE team are working with their Utopia team on coordination and actually allowing the Utopia team to help them and working on making transitions happen properly. Unlike Gentoo where we’re constantly fought and dragged through the mud. Downright shocking… rather then fighting help and working as a well oiled and coordinated machine they’re working together. I guess this is why Debian is always rock solid and Gentoo always has that hackish feel.
http://oskuro.net/blog/freesoftware/gnome-2.12-unstable-2005-12-15-14-19
Oh and for those who are curious, I consider “Debian unstable” similar to our ~ARCH tagging. Debian unstable will actually have newer versions of some packages then our ~ARCH teams currently have. AND AND AND!!!! Here’s the shocker… Debian stable actually works! Unlike Gentoo “stable”, which doesn’t compile or work and users constantly e-mail me complaining but I’m forced to reply “Sorry, the currently marked stable version is horribly broken… I have made requests to up the stable marked version to something that will compile but the ARCH teams aren’t marking anything. And upstream laughs at any issues with the currently marked stable because there were known problems with it, hence why newer versions are released.” (this is dbus 0.23 -> 0.23.4)
Anyway, it’s random rant/complaint from me. I do however need to blog some more about relevant stuff.
Filed under: General, Gentopia, Linux
6 Responses to “Debian Doesn’t Hate Their Utopia Team”
Leave a Reply
January 1st, 2006 at 6:52 am
I have been a Gentoo and Debian user for quite some time now. I support what you say about Debian unstable actually working (most of the time) compared to Gentoo ~ARCH. Debian unstable is way more stable than Gentoo ~ARCH!
Debian unstable is sometimes more recent than Gentoo ~ARCH but that isn’t always the truth. I am a KDE user and I can tell you that it has sometimes taken months to get new KDE releases into the unstable branch. Sure, it is possible to use packages from some user that is impatient and builds their own (or build my own) but that would be counterproductive in the long run.
Anyways, I have used Gentoo ~ARCH on my main system now for 3-4 years but I have already decided that I am leaving Gentoo. I plan to redo my main system and install either Debian unstable or Arch Linux. I haven’t decided on which yet (I am still evaluating Arch which seems like good fun).
What I will miss the most about Gentoo is the help available at the user forums which is second to none (but the Arch forums comes close). What I won’t miss is the compiling and the constant breakages that I really don’t have the time or energy to constantly fix. I think this is actually Gentoo’s worst enemy because once something breaks, recompilation (which takes time) needs to be done, sometimes several times before things turn out right.
I just don’t have the time to mess around with such stuff anymore.
January 1st, 2006 at 8:49 am
I can second that.
Gentoo ’stable’ could easily be called ‘abandoned’ in some cases.
I chose to use Gentoo at work because i was impressed by the wealth of packages in the portage tree - which gives me all the tools i need - I don’t care much about recompilation - that’s something that can be done in background after the daily backup. But the ’stable’ portage tree sometimes is in an awful shape.
- packages marked unstable for years, no open bugs in bugzilla.
- broken packages marked stable. X.Org on gentoo was broken for months because the maintainer seemed to have pulled in a pre-alpha patch from CVS HEAD and refused to fix it. Working ebuilds were deleted due to GLSA.
- I sometimes have the impression, unstable gets fixed quite quickly - while stable does not get fixed at all unless it’s security related.
I can imagine it’s a hard job keeping a distribution consistent. I chose not to go ‘unstable’ because I need a working system.
Finally - i think Gentoo stable is not the equivalent to Debian stable. Debian does AFAIK no package upgrades in stable other than security. Gentoo stable does this after a grace period for packages (most of the time). Sometimes it just looks like ’stable’ is very low priority - especially if you stumble over a bug and find the months old fix in bugzilla - for unstable.
January 1st, 2006 at 10:19 am
> Gentoo ’stable’ could easily be called ‘abandoned’ in some cases.
Well, that’s unfortunately true. Developers come and go, but that’s not an excuse. There’re some devs who constantly add new packages, instead having a look at the unmaintained stuff. Moreover some of those suckers add packages, but leave the maintenance to others.
> - packages marked unstable for years, no open bugs in bugzilla.
So file a buga and request stabilization. There is no guarantee that this happens, though. We simply don’t have enough helping hands; Guys with a mouth wide from one ear to the other, complaining - lot’s of them.
> Working ebuilds were deleted due to GLSA.
Shall this be an argument? If so, it’s ridiculous. When there is no one caring for an application upstream and it has vulnerabilities, of course it gets removed. We maintain ebuilds, not the applications behind it.
January 1st, 2006 at 3:09 pm
Hi everyone, happy new year!
With my few exeperience, I can say one thing, sometimes happens that some package version don’t enter into the official tree because is a development version.
This appens for example for the newest GNOME, and for other things…And then unofficial tree and ebuilds borns…
IMHO this is not the better way to do the things, a portage package can be easily marked as testing (~) or masked:
The persons at BMG(and so on) mantain ebuild, so can do it also for the things in the official tree if they comes official developers.
The availability of the newest development version can help the development (testing) of these software (without having MANY packages in an overlay) and the testing of this packages into a gentoo system, this help to resolve bugs before the stable release. And this increase the general stability of a gentoo system.
All this, of course, IMHO.
January 2nd, 2006 at 3:20 am
Maybe Gentoo needs a more liberal way of thinking about stable/unstable. The package management is pretty good, but no one really takes responsibility for the stability. Most active users run a mix of stable/unstable anyway so there isn’t a good user base for the stable tree. Perhaps we need some external source for declaring a set of packages stable.
January 2nd, 2006 at 10:09 am
I would like to point out that I have worked with you in the past on KDE issues when you have been less than polite. Others have made comments on the way in which you ask people to do things and I have to agree that you could do with working on that a bit. I will continue to work on making KDE just work, and I do work with Gnome herd members where necessary and spent significant time working the on the hal/dbus stuff.
I also work on amd64 stabling as do several other members of the architecture team. I wouldn’t say that stable has been abandoned, but there are certainly places where it has. In my roles in the scientific and KDE herds I work towards stabilising packages in reasonable time frames and always aim to have stuff in ~arch working. Where there is doubt it goes in p.mask or an external testing tree. I will work with anyone who has similar goals even if they don’t always communicate them in the best way.