[SlugLUG] Help Me Choose

[Rick Moen]

Quoting cerise at armory.com (cerise at armory.com):

> Deb politics have actually tied up a number of updates and changeovers
> over the years.  They were late coming out with an AMD 64 release for
> similar reasons, IIRC.  In the event of X.org, people were so sick of
> waiting that they were including ubuntu sources in their lists so that
> they could switch over.

FYI:  Phil saying "Debian politics" is a code-phrase meaning "I have no
idea what the issue was".

AMD64 took longer than the rest of the architectures to meet the
standard technical criteria for a stable release, so its "sarge" images
were not initially included in the official 2005-06-06 release.  They
fixed those problems two days later; thus the separate release
announcement of 2005-06-08.  (They also had to move their canonical
archives from the "alioth" development server to the main hosts, which
also took time.)

The move from XFree86 to X.org took time because Debian has stubbornly
treated all 11 (now, 12) CPU architectures as first-class citizens, and 
requires that substantively everything work on each of them.  (For quite
a few years, Debian had been the XFree86 Project's de-facto portability
engineering lab.)

> One thing I hate about the Deb maintainers -- complete disregard for
> certain bits of history.  Imagine my surprise when I found I had to
> tar -xjvpf a tarball instead of tar xjvpf.

Bollocks.

  $ touch bar

  $ ls -al foo.tar.bz2 
  -rw-r--r-- 1 rick rick 114 2006-09-29 17:33 foo.tar.bz2
  
  $ tar xvjf foo.tar.bz2 
  bar

  $ cat /etc/debian_version 
  testing/unstable

  $

-- 
Cheers,                  Higgeldy Piggeldy             "Phooey on Freud and his 
Rick Moen                Hamlet of Elsinore            Psychoanalysis --        rick at linuxmafia.com      Ruffled the critics by        Oedipus, Schmoedipus,    
                         Dropping this bomb:           I just loved Mom."