Dunc-Tank To Help Meet Debian Etch Deadline

Da Massive writes, "Debian GNU/Linux is experimenting with a new project called Dunc-Tank, which is aimed at securing funding to pay two key release managers — Steve Langasek and Andi Barth — in an effort to ensure the forthcoming Debian 4.0, known as etch, is released on time in December." Dunc-Tank is not affiliated with the Debian Project directly, and in fact was controversial on the debian-private list.

One way...

[DreddUK]

... to do it. Can't get on the site at the mo'. Seems to have died for some reason ;) Anyone got a mirror of it?

Couldn't they ask for donations as well? I remember on of the other distro's doing this (was it Mandrake?).

Pssst

[Anonymous Coward]

is Mark Shuttleworth slipping in a few $$$ here?

Re:if i win big

[OrangeDoor]

While individual rich people can help many by tossing their money at projects, distributed funding methods have proven extremely effective as well. The only problem is that they only tend to work at times of crisis where sometimes it's too late (I'm talking both about non-profit/small businesses as well as natural disasters). An easy way for many people to donate small amounts of money, especially on a monthly basis, might be more reliable... searching google revealed some begging sites though, perhaps Dunc could post a page for donations there... "Open-source operating system project managers must pay bills while saving world from..."

As for the lottery, my friend calls it a tax on the mathematically challenged. We'll see what he says after I win.

Buying a single ticket is logically worth it, especially if picking numbers that will have a higher return (less likely to have multiple winners). $1 for a chance to win huge! There's a bigger difference between a zero probability and nearly zero probability than there is between nearly zero and nearly zero. It's the people who buy more than $1 that I can't really understand. That's my logic and I'm sticking to it.

I also pledge to Dunc some OS devs/pm's if I win the lotto.

Uhm, no?

[abrotman]

I've been using Debian for quite some time, and to me the point of Debian is stability. I couldn't give a rat's ass when etch releases as long as it works the way Debian is meant to. Please don't force the release to meet a deadline. You'll only be hurting the users that depend on Debian to be a stable and functional system.

Re:Vista anyone?

[nurhussein]

Oh but think about it, if Etch gets released before Vista, Debian (the distro infamous for glacially slow release cycles) will have released three times between the last 2 versions of desktop Windows.

So to all the "Linux sucks on the desktop, Windows pwns all" naysayers, even the slowest-releasing distro is improving at a rate faster than Windows. Say what you like about desktop Linux now, but it's one hell of a fast moving target, and it's only getting better.

Re:The solution....

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

AFAIK, the problem is that those packages are designed to work with Debian, not Ubuntu, so you end up with more problems than you'd have if you just ran Debian sid.

Personally, I feel that Ubuntu is sort of a Debian for Beginners. As soon as you're no longer a beginner, Debian proper is probably a better option. That said, I still recommend Ubuntu to people who I know are beginners.

Re:The solution....

[csirac]

I use Debian for ? 11 years or something and have worked as a Debian sysadmin. ...
Again IMHO, using Debian involves an unnecessary amount of effort just to get it running, simply because the mentality is that the system must be shiped naked with no configuration choices made

Wow. I've only been a Debian user for 5 years, some of that time as an admin.

I use Debian precisely because it saves me from having to configure stuff. I had a need to start developing with Zope the other day, I didn't have to edit a single .conf file to get it up and running - apt did everything for me.

Packages like gforge are utterly remarkable. The debian apt installer scripts ask you basic questions and will setup/configure/create (dbs, tables, domains, user accounts, etc) for every dependency: OpenLDAP, PostgreSQL, Exim, Apache... a fully working and configured system without touching a single configuration file.

For admin/dev stuff, Debian is remarkable. For the Desktop, you have to do some fiddling to get the final 1% functionality, but that's no problem for me. If a noob doesn't want to remember to install nm-applet to get a nice WLAN configuration applet, or which xmodmap commands will make his/her multimedia keys work - then Ubuntu is great.

Re:The solution....

[BlackCreek]

Yes, Debian is great for dev/admin work.

My point when saying that the system ships naked is not only package configuration but also package installation, and no, I don't mean that running "aptitude|apt-get install foo" is a problem (BTW, use aptitude); but that knowing which packages to install can be a problem.

Out of the top of my head I can only think of libpam-devperm and dash as /bin/sh. Another case is when there are 4 or 5 different choices of packages and no indication of which one you should try first.

The problem IMHO being that people assume that whoever is running/installing Debian is a trained sysadmin or developer with time to tinker, not realizing (1) how difficult the system is to untrained people, and (2) how the lack of worry with this issue leads to a system that is more complex than what it should, making it a more time consuming system (to administrate) than what it has to be.