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Leaderless Debian

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Re: Leaderless Debian

#12

Post by joshvm »

gekkeboom wrote: post #7

What whould be the case today anno 2019 to use Debian over CentOS, Ubuntu or one of the other distro's?

Debian is all over the place in embedded. It's pretty much the de-facto distribution (you see Yocto, Arch, Ubuntu server etc too) for consumer boards. Not sure what the distribution is in private industry, but typically manufacturers provide Debian images at a minimum. This is a problem for embedded systems because you're relying on a company to provide hardware-specific patches. While those are typically kernel patches (and so somewhat distro-agnostic), most people don't want the hassle of compiling their own kernel. That means you're likely going to be using Debian.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#14

Post by devnonymous »

exabrial wrote: post #3

I would hope an Amazon, Google, Digital Ocean, Rackspace, or other major vps player could get someone involved for an oss project critical to their business. I guess as a user I frequently take this for granted.

Why not Canonical/Ubuntu ? After all they are presumably the most affected by the state of Debian. Just a couple of days ago I made a comment along these lines in a different thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19353816

  > While this is sad and painful to read, I can't say I'm surprised.
  > 
  > The problems listed are precisely the kind of problems that Redhat
  > strategically supports fedora with, in terms of investment of resources.
  > For all the hate Redhat receives it has consistently been a good
  > community member by being willing to help fedora in areas that it knows
  > are hard and yet not 'cool' enough to attract volunteer contributions.
  > 
  > What has Ubuntu done for the debian community along the same lines?
To further contrast this difference, here's what Redhat does for fedora and OSS in general:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions

https://getfedora.org/sponsors

versus:

https://db.debian.org/machines.cgi

https://www.debian.org/partners/

https://www.debian.org/mirror/sponsors

Of course, that doesn't stop 'em from throwing in lip-service:

https://www.ubuntu.com/community/debian

https://www.canonical.com/projects

Re: Leaderless Debian

#15

Post by bloopernova »

exabrial wrote: post #3

I would hope an Amazon, Google, Digital Ocean, Rackspace, or other major vps player could get someone involved for an oss project critical to their business. I guess as a user I frequently take this for granted.

There isn't (to my knowledge) a large enterprise-supported version of Debian like Red Hat / CentOS. You could argue Ubuntu, but Ubuntu is significantly different in focus to Debian, while Red Hat is almost identical to CentOS.

Debian also, unjustly, suffers from its non-corporate image/reputation.

Most of my professional sysadmin career has been spent managing RPM-based Linux distributions. The time I was asked to netboot and automatically configure multiple Ubuntu/Debian/Mint workstations, I found that there just wasn't the breadth of netboot/kickstart-type documentation available on Debian based systems. The smaller number of users doing that sort of thing led to less documentation. (I'm not saying that is definitively the case nowadays, it's just that lots of large scale deployments mean a lot of documentation and projects to support such activities)

Re: Leaderless Debian

#16

Post by bloopernova »

devnonymous wrote: post #14
exabrial wrote: post #3

I would hope an Amazon, Google, Digital Ocean, Rackspace, or other major vps player could get someone involved for an oss project critical to their business. I guess as a user I frequently take this for granted.

Why not Canonical/Ubuntu ? After all they are presumably the most affected by the state of Debian. Just a couple of days ago I made a comment along these lines in a different thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19353816 > While this is sad and painful to read, I can't say I'm surprised. > > The problems listed are precisely the kind of problems that Redhat > strategically supports fedora with, in terms of in…

I would hope someone could set me straight if I'm wrong, but I thought that the relationship between Canonical and Debian was mostly one of taking rather than giving back?

You're right about Red Hat though, they get a lot of negative feeling from people who may not understand just how much they give back to the community at large.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#18

Post by devnonymous »

bloopernova wrote: post #15
exabrial wrote: post #3

I would hope an Amazon, Google, Digital Ocean, Rackspace, or other major vps player could get someone involved for an oss project critical to their business. I guess as a user I frequently take this for granted.

There isn't (to my knowledge) a large enterprise-supported version of Debian like Red Hat / CentOS. You could argue Ubuntu, but Ubuntu is significantly different in focus to Debian, while Red Hat is almost identical to CentOS. Debian also, unjustly, suffers from its non-corporate image/reputation. Most of my professional sysadmin career has been spent managing RPM-based Linux distributions. The time I was asked to ne…

The relationship between Debian and Ubuntu is more akin to that between fedora and RHEL.

Having a different focus than fedora, in fact, one could say almost radically different[1] hasn't stopped Redhat from contributing people, hardware and support to fedora -- leaving the volunteers to focus on contributions -- be it by code or as you point out documentation.

Help with 'administrative' or grunt-work tasks goes a long way in large OSS projects and Ubuntu/Cannonical simply haven't stepped up where they should have.

[1] for business vs for developers, cutting edge vs stability, ..etc

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