Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Happy 20th birthday Debian

bits.debian.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 91 posts

Re: Happy 20th birthday Debian

#71

Post by derefr »

kunai wrote: post #30

I recently switched from Ubuntu to Debian, and I keep wondering to myself why I didn't switch much sooner. The lack of any integration with a specific desktop environment, and having pure GNU and Linux underneath a pure DE is something that is really quite satisfying. It gives you modularity and customizability without having anything break or feel out of place; something that often happened to me while switching DEs…

Asking anyone who knows: Is there a way to "backport" Ubuntu-targeted DEBs to Debian? There seems to be a recent movement in what I might call "indie" OSS software (e.g. Docker) where the pre-1.0 versions are only targeted at/built for/tested on Ubuntu, because:

- A. nearly every developer uses Ubuntu on their own workstations, and

- B. Ubuntu has all the other shiny new pre-1.0 stuff to pull in as deps (it's a network effect, in other words.)

So, would, say, slapping Ubuntu's apt repo-set into Debian work to satisfy an Ubuntu-targeted DEB's prerequisites, or would there be tons and tons of conflicts?

Re: Happy 20th birthday Debian

#72

Post by shykes »

derefr wrote: post #71
kunai wrote: post #30

I recently switched from Ubuntu to Debian, and I keep wondering to myself why I didn't switch much sooner. The lack of any integration with a specific desktop environment, and having pure GNU and Linux underneath a pure DE is something that is really quite satisfying. It gives you modularity and customizability without having anything break or feel out of place; something that often happened to me while switching DEs…

Asking anyone who knows: Is there a way to "backport" Ubuntu-targeted DEBs to Debian? There seems to be a recent movement in what I might call "indie" OSS software (e.g. Docker) where the pre-1.0 versions are only targeted at/built for/tested on Ubuntu, because: - A. nearly every developer uses Ubuntu on their own workstations, and - B. Ubuntu has all the other shiny new pre-1.0 stuff to pull in as deps (it's a netwo…

Speaking for Docker: it's true that we've only released packages for Ubuntu, but we've been working on a Debian package as well. Starting in 0.6 we expect to offer both in parity.

On a practical note, we are forced to maintain these 2 packages separately if only because Ubuntu uses upstart and Debian doesn't.

Re: network effects of Ubuntu dependencies. In our case that was not a factor, since Docker is a static binary built in Go, and all distros are equally hapless in their management of that. In fact, we are divorcing ourselves completely from distro-specific dependency management. As of this week, docker packages are built by us in an environment we control, not the distro build farms (hint: we build docker with docker). Then we wrap it with fpm and call it a day. Separately, we are working with downstream maintainers of each distro to help them package docker in a policy-compliant way. But those are 2 completely separate tracks.

Re: Happy 20th birthday Debian

#73

Post by justincormack »

jlgreco wrote: post #61
kunai wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you know what comes next after Arch... ...Gentoo.

LFS with the aide of NetBSD's pkgsrc. ;) I've been tempted to go down that route before...

Looks doable without too much work based on scanning http://wiki.netbsd.org/pkgsrc/how_to_use_pkgsrc_on_linux/

Re: Happy 20th birthday Debian

#74

Post by homeomorphic »

derefr wrote: post #71
kunai wrote: post #30

I recently switched from Ubuntu to Debian, and I keep wondering to myself why I didn't switch much sooner. The lack of any integration with a specific desktop environment, and having pure GNU and Linux underneath a pure DE is something that is really quite satisfying. It gives you modularity and customizability without having anything break or feel out of place; something that often happened to me while switching DEs…

Asking anyone who knows: Is there a way to "backport" Ubuntu-targeted DEBs to Debian? There seems to be a recent movement in what I might call "indie" OSS software (e.g. Docker) where the pre-1.0 versions are only targeted at/built for/tested on Ubuntu, because: - A. nearly every developer uses Ubuntu on their own workstations, and - B. Ubuntu has all the other shiny new pre-1.0 stuff to pull in as deps (it's a netwo…

Grab the source packages from Ubuntu and build debs with debuild (see the man page). Most of the time, the build dependencies match up well (the dependencies for the Ubuntu-built debs don't). With pbuilder and friends it's also easy to set up your own PPA-like infrastructure.

Re: Happy 20th birthday Debian

#75

Post by bnegreve »

BadassFractal wrote: post #68
kunai wrote: post #30

I recently switched from Ubuntu to Debian, and I keep wondering to myself why I didn't switch much sooner. The lack of any integration with a specific desktop environment, and having pure GNU and Linux underneath a pure DE is something that is really quite satisfying. It gives you modularity and customizability without having anything break or feel out of place; something that often happened to me while switching DEs…

Is it possible to run Steam on Debian? It's supported on Ubuntu, and I'm wondering if that extends to debian as well.

Yes, I run it on Debian testing (with multiarch packages). I installed it through dpkg without a problem.

Re: Happy 20th birthday Debian

#77

Post by [deleted] »

BadassFractal wrote: post #68
kunai wrote: post #30

I recently switched from Ubuntu to Debian, and I keep wondering to myself why I didn't switch much sooner. The lack of any integration with a specific desktop environment, and having pure GNU and Linux underneath a pure DE is something that is really quite satisfying. It gives you modularity and customizability without having anything break or feel out of place; something that often happened to me while switching DEs…

Is it possible to run Steam on Debian? It's supported on Ubuntu, and I'm wondering if that extends to debian as well.

[deleted]

Re: Happy 20th birthday Debian

#78

Post by voltagex_ »

shykes wrote: post #72
derefr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking anyone who knows: Is there a way to "backport" Ubuntu-targeted DEBs to Debian? There seems to be a recent movement in what I might call "indie" OSS software (e.g. Docker) where the pre-1.0 versions are only targeted at/built for/tested on Ubuntu, because: - A. nearly every developer uses Ubuntu on their own workstations, and - B. Ubuntu has all the other shiny new pre-1.0 stuff to pull in as deps (it's a netwo…

Speaking for Docker: it's true that we've only released packages for Ubuntu, but we've been working on a Debian package as well. Starting in 0.6 we expect to offer both in parity. On a practical note, we are forced to maintain these 2 packages separately if only because Ubuntu uses upstart and Debian doesn't. Re: network effects of Ubuntu dependencies. In our case that was not a factor, since Docker is a static binar…

Hey shykes, I'll come into IRC to discuss this more at some point, but wouldn't it be better to give the main docker package a dependency on docker-startup-scripts and then have that dependency fulfilled either by docker-upstart or docker-sysvinit?

Re: Happy 20th birthday Debian

#79

Post by espeed »

ics wrote: post #11
mhurron wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Debian is a large part of that history isn't it? Debian was an early full Linux distribution, but it wasn't the first. Debians big (early) contribution was apt, which could install packages and resolve dependencies over the internet and made package management easier than rpm based distributions of the time.

Slackware's 20th birthday was just last month! It's a little hard to view in landscape mode but Wikipedia has this cool graphic to show the development of Linux distros.

RedHat reaches 20 in a year and nine months.

Re: Happy 20th birthday Debian

#80

Post by swatkat »

kunai wrote: post #30

I recently switched from Ubuntu to Debian, and I keep wondering to myself why I didn't switch much sooner. The lack of any integration with a specific desktop environment, and having pure GNU and Linux underneath a pure DE is something that is really quite satisfying. It gives you modularity and customizability without having anything break or feel out of place; something that often happened to me while switching DEs…

I used to see occasional, unexpected reboots (crashes?) when I had Linux Mint Cinnamon on two of my laptops. So, I switched to Crunchbang on one and Linux Mint Debian Edition on the other; they're lightweight, simple and rock solid.
Post reply on HN