Debian insanity

[pvaneynd]

I could not stay silent anymore and commented on the DFSG v2 issues. I feel Debian is getting run over by fanatics. Where is the Debian rejected the close association with the FSF so that contrib and non-free could exist for the benefit of our users? Why is the license of the bloody firmware of any importance? Don't these people understand that a lot of what they consider hardware has been software for a long time? Will they demand that intel GPL's the microcode of the pentium IV soon? At least Marco D'Itri seems to have the correct idea. I know I should be out there, arguing without end in debian-legal and stuff, but I just do not have the time or energy to waste on their illusions.
Am I turing into Erik Naggum?

Comments

[zonereyrie.livejournal.com]

I think for many of us Debian hit the AmigaOS, AtariOS, OS/2, etc, point a while back. I stopped considering it for anything a few years ago when it looked, to me, like they were more interested in being a 'pure' OS than a 'usable' OS. Which is a fine goal and all, but to me it put them in a niche of 'not to be used for business' in my mind. Now, I'm probably biased - I pretty much personally went from Slackware to Red Hat and now I'm running Fedora. I've considered SuSE, but RHL and Fedora have always done what I need and worked reliably so I had no incentive to use anything else. But I've made Linux recommendations for various companies and my list has generally been - Red Hat, SuSE, and maybe TurboLinux.

[pvaneynd]

I converted a few RH 7.X servers to Debian with one argument: "apt-get dist-upgrade"
Does Fedora finally have something similar? Does it have alternatives? update-rc.d? debconf? A minimal install of 20 odd megs?
The RHAS 2.1 server I installed recently was pretty high on the "sucks" scale for me I fear...

[zonereyrie.livejournal.com]

The minimal install I have no idea about - I haven't installed on anything smaller than 500MB since ~1995, these days I usually give Linux at least 10GB on a multi-boot system since I do development and I like lots of space for multiple CVS checkouts, etc.

Fedora has the RH 'up2date' by default I believe, but YUM is commonly installed - and that's what I normally use. APT is also available, but I haven't used it.

[pvaneynd]

We have different targets I fear. When we install a server to do X in general we only want X on that server. All extra packages means another reason for a possible intervention later, so we have systems with IIRC 20 MB's of base, postfix, ssh and that's it. Not even "ftp" or scp to help possible crackers to download stuff.