The Debian Flamewar Strikes Back! (was: ARTICLE - ESR gives up on Fedora)

[Ben Scott]

On 2/26/07, Paul Lussier <p.lussier at comcast.net> wrote:
>   This illustrates 2 of the things I really like about Debian:

  Oh boy!  As it happens, I spent part of the weekend mothballing my
installation of "Etch" (which I've been using for 6+ months) and
installing FC6.  So this is tapping right into fresh material for my
all-time favorite, stupid, endless, perpetually reoccurring thread!

/cue "Star Wars" theme

        D I S T R O     W A R S
Episode V: The Debian Flamewar Strikes Back

It is a dark time for the user group. Although the x86-64 threads have
finally come to an end, ESR's rant has driven the users from their
mail readers and pursued them across the list archives.

Evading the dreaded Red Hat, a group of Debian fans, led by Paul
Lussier, has established a new thread on the remote list server of
GNHLUG.

The pedantic nerd Ben Scott, obsessed with complaining about Debian,
has dispatched thousands of messages into the far reaches of the
'net...

/fade to black

>    1. There's accountability for every package

  Can you help me find out who is accountable for the X server package
that provided the NVIDIA binary-only driver, which initially worked
great on my Etch system for a few months, than vanished one day,
taking my X subsystem with it.  Seriously.  I'd like to know what
happened.  I was kind of surprised it was there in the first place,
but since it was, I was a fair bit perturbed when it exhibited a
spontaneous existence failure.

>    2. Things don't make into stable until they've lasted a while in
>       testing without breaking things ...

  Unfortunately, this also means that "stable" is generally only good
on three-year-old hardware.  Every single time I've tried to install
"stable" on anything made within three years of the present date
(maybe 10 attempts since 1999 or so), it's been unable to find the
disk controller, which means no hard disk, which means no install.
This was the case when I started my latest excursion into Debian this
past summer.  It looked at my Dell Precision 380 and said "Huh?".

  The combination of Debian's policy of keeping their kernels as
"vanilla" and conservative as possible, combined with the slow release
cycle, pretty much guarantees this situation.  I know they have the
best of intentions, but the fact is it effectively makes Debian
"stable" unworkable for many people.  If it can't install, you're DOA.

  Fortunately, the snapshot of "Etch" I installed from worked fine.
Indeed, I was quite impressed at how well the install worked.  The
installer was much improved from past releases.  It detected all my
hardware, without asking me to choose a module or supply parameters.
It let me set-up LVM.  It was good.  Not flashy, but good.  I like
good.  I'll take substance over empty style any day.

  Then I found myself in the strange position of having the system get
worse as updates were installed.

  First, I had issues where with the X server would intermittently
lock up, or sound wouldn't work, depending on which kernel update I
used.  Fortunately, those worked themselves out over the next few
weeks.  Hurray for free software!  Bugs getting fixed!

  But then I had a few episodes where the X server got upgraded out of
existence.  Once apt-get even popped up a box *telling me* that it was
about to remove the X server, which "it" knew was probably not what I
wanted, and that I would have to manually install the packages again.
This was all fairly easy (for me) to correct, but I wondered why these
problems were happening, especially with apt-get, which everyone knows
is better than sex and free beer rolled into one.

  Then the day came where the NVIDIA packages just disappeared.  I was
stuck with the x.org driver, which (as Debian ships it) has a very
irritating bug regarding the text insertion point.  Still, NVIDIA's
driver *is* a closed, binary-only, restricted thing, so I couldn't (in
fairness) blame the whole situation on Debian, at least not without
knowing more.

  The thing that pushed me over the edge was when, last week, I booted
into Linux, and half the system spontaneously didn't work anymore.

  It couldn't find one of my LVM VGs at boot.  No messages indicating
why.  It found the other VG just fine, though.  Since the LVs from the
missing VG didn't work, it kept dropping into an fsck recovery shell
during boot.  If I set that filesystem to "noauto", and manually
activated the VG after boot, it worked fine.

  Then I started X, and discovered that sound had gone away too.

  I figured I might try an apt-get upgrade to see if there was
anything new.  That's when I discovered that my network interfaces
were no longer configured.

  The really funky part is that I'm fairly sure that I had not run any
apt-get upgrade's since the last time I booted the system into Linux,
and it was working fine then.  On the off chance that I had upgraded
my kernel and forgotten about it, I booted the previous kernel version
(I always keep the previous kernel around, just in case).  That one
exhibited the same behavior.

  So I rebooted into my old Fedora Core 5 installation.  Despite being
covered in about six months worth of digital dust, it worked fine on
the first try.  I ran a "yum update" cycle, rebooted for the new
kernel, and it still worked fine.

  That was when I gave up on Debain.  Again.

> and they don't make into testing without going through unstable for a while.

  I thought things only had to be in "unstable" for seven days,
without any issues being filed against them, before being promoted to
"testing"?  I certainly saw quite a bit of package churn while running
"Etch".

>   If esr moves to Debian and sticks with stable he won't have *these*[1]
>   problems.

  You can screw up just about any system, including one running Debian
stable, if you tinker with it in ways the developers don't expect.
Long ago (on Potato, I think), I once got apt-get into some kind of
circular dependency loop, just by farting around in dselect
extensively.  And it's a near-certainty that ESR will tinker with it
in ways we couldn't even imagine.

-- Ben