It seems to me that there are boatloads of distros out there. I happen to like Debian precisely because - thus far - it Just Works(sm). Of the machines here, one runs MacOS, three run straight Debian-latest, one runs Kubuntu, and one is RHEL4. And there's plenty of Knoppix boot CDs around.

If you are in *such* a hurry to be a developer, then start your own. Or contribute where it's "faster". If you look at what the project team expects, it's impressive, to the point of staggering. At least if you are hoping to be a full-blown package maintainer.

If the current problems are really representative of inefficiencies*, then by all means, "fix" the problem somehow. But if it slows down the process of adding the 69th music player app or the 432nd paint program, that's fine. Too many cooks really can spoil the broth.

-Del

* too lazy to follow the link to the current forum furor.

As a mere user of debian. I don't notice any problem. Updates seem to come along often enough and there's a nicely paced version development.

I'm a systems engineer/administrator, not an antiques dealer, so I stopped using debian.

I'm not a corporate lackey, so I don't use Redhat.

I'm not a sheep, so I don't use umbongo, sorry, ubuntu.

No, I'm a wanna-be steve ballmer bum-licker so I use SuSE!

There are some bottlenecks and problems with delays in some of the core teams in Debian; that's an acknowledged issue that I'm going to be working on very soon. As in many volunteer projects, it's not always easy to ensure that all the "boring" tasks get done as quickly as some people would like.

My term officially starts in just under an hour(!), and over the next few weeks I'll be reviewing the work of all those teams to see where more effort is needed and how we can improve performance. That's the most important of my campaign promises.

C'mon, if you aren't using Slackware on hardware you built yourself from scratch (bonus points if it's at least 1% electrical tape), you might as well use OS X or something else from Fisher Price.

What do the "Debian Package Maintainers" do? First of all they take someone else's software package. Then they move the directory and file structure around into different places according to some arbitrary notions. Of course everything was better before they moved it, and everything worked without the changes, which were completely unnecessary.

Then they make a "package" of it. Then they stick some extra notices on the package telling you to report bugs to them, and they will report the bugs back to the people who made the software. Of course it would be easier if you just reported the bugs to the author of the software, not the Debian person, who doesn't really understand the software anyway, and who then has to run around reporting the bug "upstream" where it should have been reported in the first place.

Also they make their own little scripts to do things like installing software. Many of these scripts are not carefully written or robust.

What these people do seems just "busy work": pointless meddling with software packages which didn't need any adjustments. In the worst cases bugs are introduced by badly-written configuration files introduced by the Debian maintainers.

Plus the documentation of Debian is not only extremely bad, but it hasn't improved in ten years. In fact it seems to get worse rather than better.

It's open source, what did you expect? No one really took it seriously or more than a whopping 18 people would have tried to become developers in the past four months. Obviously not a lot of interest. Seems that people might not really want to give away their work after all....

@Steve McIntyre

I hope all this talk is just FUD and perhaps Del Merritt has a point - don't know. But if there is a problem I hope you sort it out - Debian is too precious to let die.

Good luck and thanks in advance!

@Solomon Grundy

How do you know only 18 people tried to become developers? These are only the ones who weren't put off by the process (the point of the article if you'd read it properly. sigh) and got through the initial stages.

@BKB

I can't speak for all the packages in Debain but all the major ones are very well maintained. If you want a stable server and run the important packages you can't go far wrong.

Thats 18 more "competent" programmers than Microsoft has.

5. 6. 7. 8.

Lets all start spitting venom about the OSes we hate.

SK you rock :)

If you want cutting edge, use something like Ubuntu - all the debian advantages, plus the latest developments.

If you want trusted, stable, go with Debian.

Works well for most

@ Del Merrit/James Dunmore: I'm with you dudes - if I want lockups and crashes then I'll use my Ubuntu-running laptop (my own damned fault for using 64bit - the s.o.b. locks up at least three times a week). Meanwhile, my media server etc runs Debian because "excitement" is the last thing I want - I need it to just work (which it does)!

@BKB - Debian packaging has to follow the rules of where to put stuff, if it doesn't then it becomes a flippin' nightmare to find anything (think Windows!). If some of the scripting is amateurish, then I'll agree that the packaging engineer needs a bit of mentoring. And they say to report the bugs to them first in case it IS their packaging at fault and not the core package.

Hey, if you think it's that easy a job to do then YOU have a go! Part of my job is repackaging software for Unix platforms (not Debian though), and I'll tell you now - it's not as easy to do as you'd think - especially the (de)install scripting that goes around the main package.

@Steve McIntyre: Nice to hear your feedback. All the best to you and the rest of the packaging team. As you'll see from some of the comments here, most of us are appreciative of what you deliver!

I use Debian *because* of the package system, not despite it.

Mind you, BSD's /usr/ports is still the best around.

Smug anti-Linux / anti-OSS bitches contribute NOTHING, so it's safe to ignore you.

i've only once hard debian crash on me, which was my fault as i was messing around with desktop settings and then deleting it didnt undo what ever it was i did :-S. i run debian as a tin client server and i have found it to work fine. im really pleased that i can update as its being used with out any problems.

if i cant find a how to guide for debian i look on the ubuntu site or anyother debian based distro as it is often very similar to how to do it in debian.

the debian packaging engineers do it in they're free time, which means they things might not be done on time, but who cares its free and works

good work keep it up, the next new PC i get will be running debian from the start

We run Debian on all of our servers, and linux-based workstations. It is incredibly reliable, uses less memory and runs faster.

I'm not going to rag on other so-called "cutting edge" distro's. On the other hand, I would never rely on them with my business data in a production environment either.

@Steve McIntyre:

Good luck to you Steve. We are all looking forward to you addressing this and other issues.

They are picky if you get to do it good if not do something else. I use Slackware there is only one guy working on it though he gets lots of help and I trust him and he trusts them so far this works, but for a distro with the kind of broad appeal of Debian there has to be a gauntlet to run.

@Steve McIntyre

Good luck, all Linux distros benefit from a strong and reliable Debian.