I saw the message below while reviewing the list archives along with some
other posts that had me thinking Debian might be a bit misunderstood as a
distro.

Debian has two primary standards for packages.  License and volatility.  On
the license front, Debian has held the line on the "Free Software" ideology
more than any other distro I can think of. There are a TON of distros out
there - so maybe more accurate to say "most 'pure' of the well known
distros".  For more on Debian's views on Free Software and the principles
that guide their decision making, see this page about the Debian Social
Contract.

http://www.debian.org/social_contract

Debian's strict adherence to their principles is the source of some of
Debian's idiosyncrasies.  (e.g., where's pine?)

Beyond that, to understand the relationship between Ubuntu and Debian, it
helps to understand Debian's release process, because Ubuntu (based on
Debian) fills a gap in both cadence and out-of-the box functionality.
Debian has four defined release branches.  Briefly, they are:

   - *Stable *- Only bug-fixes are ported into this release, not new
   features.  It is nearly always safe to take changes to deb-stable without
   disrupting a service running over it.
   - *Testing - *The next stable release, new features are allowed here.
   - *Unstable - *This branch usually has recent (current) releases of
   software.
   - *Experimental *- bleeding edge stuff.

A friend of mine jokes that "Debian Stable = Debian Obsolete, Debian Testing
= Debian Old, Debian Unstable = Debian Current".   As a result of Debian
defining release points in terms of volatility (specifically, almost no
patches), formal releases of Debian are often over a year apart.

That's where Canonical, Ltd steps in.  They provide a six-month release
cadence with a focus on integration and providing a useful and usable
platform by default.  That kind of resources needs a bit more money behind
it.  Mark Shuttleworth, an entrepreneur and the (former?) maintainer for
Apache on Debian, gave it a try and so Ubuntu (the distro) and Canonical Ltd
(the company) were born.  Ubuntu tries very hard to stay true to their
Debian roots, making exception for graphics and hardware drivers, and maybe
some fonts too.  A lot of Debian maintainers and release managers are now
employed by Canonical.

It's pretty easy to bag on Debian.  From many people's standpoint they are
slow, ideological, and opinionated.  As one person pointed out they made an
egregious mistake with an openssl patch years ago.  But in the context of
the overall "linux-distro ecosystem" they are a vitally important and
respected distro.  Despite some mistakes, they are definitely "the good
guys."  The world's a better place for having Debian (and in turn, Ubuntu).


Hopefully anyone who made it this far found this interesting.   Also, if you
see any inaccuracies in what I wrote above please call them out.  I'm pretty
sure I got the details right, but at the same time I don't have a degree in
distro-geneology.  :)

Cheers!

-Rob



 ---------------------------------------
On Tue, 11 Aug 2009, Matt Hallacy wrote:

> On Tue, 2009-08-11 at 13:50 -0500, Mike Miller wrote:
>> On Tue, 11 Aug 2009, Matt Hallacy wrote:
>>
>>> If you want a solid server distribution, CentOS, RHEL maybe Slackware.
>>> If you want a solid desktop/laptop distribution, Fedora, or SuSE.
>>
>>
>> Is there anything wrong with Ubuntu?
>
> Despite all the hard work the Ubuntu folks have put into it, it still
> receives a great deal of its package repository from Debian which has
> proven repeatedly that they really have no standards for package quality
> or package maintainers.


No standards at all?  That is bad.  I haven't had any problems yet, that I
know of.  I thought one of the arguments advanced in favor of Ubuntu was
that it was like Debian with better packages -- more up to date, at least.

Mike
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