Re: [Sheflug] Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" to be released this weekend

[Richard Ibbotson <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 02 February 2011 14:51:53 Peter Humphrey wrote: 
> Oh, I agree. And I worked in software development for 25 years or
> so too (the last being a £30-million transatlantic project - £200
> million if you include all the civil works as well). All the same,
> that many bugs during development does seem a lot.

If you take a long look into the Debian project you'll see a lot of 
things.  More than 25000 packages which covers mobile phone software, 
laptops and netbooks and servers and desktops.  For [alpha][amd64]
[arm][armel][hppa][i386][ia64][mips][mipsel][powerpc][sparc][s390]
[source][multi-arch]  hardware.  Lot of things to go wrong there.  
It's the codebase for Ubuntu and derivatives which is the most popular 
Linux software on this planet.  I think Amazon use CentOS and Ubuntu.  
Not sure about that but I think so.  The RPM based distributions rely 
on some of this so that they can use the code for Fedora and CentOS 
and many others.  Then there's Slackware, Gentoo and some others. 

> What the hell - at least they've been fixed!

Mostly, but soon fixed when a bug or mistake is found.  I remember in 
the early days of the Debian project that some things didn't get fixed.  
Others were fixed right away.  As in, same afternoon or before the 
weekend.  Which is supposed to be one of the strengths of open source 
software.  At least in the present day there is an infrastructure 
within the Debian project which didn't used to exist.  Planning and 
thinking is a good idea when you run a project that is as big as 
Debian.  People can vote for or against things if they do or don't 
like something.  Different from the benevolent dictator model.  Ubuntu.  
Which is the whole point of GNU/Linux.  You get a choice.  You can 
choose your own poison.

-- 
Richard
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