[BLUG] Democratux / OpenOfficeholders

[Steven Black]

I'm currently using Debian 3.1 (sarge, and currently "stable") on
servers. Even though Debian's getting ready to move to a new revision
I'm still thinking of moving from Debian to Ubuntu 6.06 LTS.

The big thing here is that Ubuntu has a regular release schedule and
they keep to it. If a product isn't ready, they simply don't ship that
product. You know that the LTS version will be available for a
particular period of time, and you know how long it will have support.
This allows you to understand and plan for when you'll need to upgrade,
as well as it gives you a chance to plan for the future hardware
upgrades that may be required at that time.

Debian has been a great distribution in the past. They still have some
very interesting things going for them. (Such as the wide variety of
architectures supported and their non-Linux projects.) However, they
have some serious problems. Their problems are less technical than they
are social.

Debian produces a distribution close to once every 5 years or so.
Sometimes more frequently, sometimes less frequently. However, they do
it so infrequently that people ignore the stable branch, and frequently
ignore the testing branch. They have a massive user community using
their unstable repository -- this causes problems as it hinders
development in that repository, as well as it hinders testing of their
upcoming distributions.

Even for servers, Debian is known to get to a point where in an effort
to have the versions of software that you require you need to compile it
yourself -- or you need to start pulling stuff in from backports.org or
the Debian unstable branch. If it only works like you want if you
install replacements for a large number of packages in the stable
repository, then you are not using a stable release.

Something of note: Only Debian's stable repository gets security updates
applied to it. The testing and unstable branches do not get security
updates. They get updates which may or may not include security fixes in
a timely manner.

As I mentioned, Debian's currently in a push to get out a new revision.
This means that (1) the existing stable distribution's lifespan is
limited, and (2) the testing distribution isn't ready for production
deployment. (I must note that Debian has a history of keeping their
'oldstable' repository around until they're ready for a new 'testing'
repository, but then you're accepting that you're running an obsolete OS
which may well never see another security update.)

For servers there are two things going on:
1. You don't want to need to upgrade the software until you're ready to
upgrade the hardware.
2. You want to be able to properly plan for upgrades without pressure
from products being end-of-lifed.

Point 1 makes slow release cycles better. Point 2 makes a predictable
release cycle better. Ubuntu LTS has both of these things going for it.

For Debian Stable, if you buy a new machine when the next version comes
out, the hardware will likely be end-of-lifed before the next revision
of Debian is available.

Just my two cents.

Cheers,
Steven Black

On Sun, 2007-02-25 at 21:42 -0500, Simon Ruiz wrote:
> Ubuntu has an interesting release cycle. There's a new release every 6 months or so, and the newest version I've always found to be a nice improvement over the last. Ubuntu Dapper (released in June of 2006) is the first LTS (Long-Term Support) release, which means that it will be supported for three years (normal releases are supported for 18 months) on the desktop, five on the server (3 for normal releases).
>  
> If your target upgrade date is mid 2009, though, even going for Edgy (which is at least as stable as Dapper) would be supported until then on the server.
>  
> I don't know much about Debian on the server, so I'm not trying to say Ubuntu is better than Debian, it's just what I know.
>  
> HTH,
>  
> Simon
>  
> 
> ________________________________
> 
> From: blug-admin_at_cs.indiana.edu on behalf of Rick Dietz
> Sent: Sun 2/25/2007 7:54 PM
> To: blug_at_cs.indiana.edu
> Subject: Re: [BLUG] Democratux / OpenOfficeholders
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Feb 25, 2007, at 7:46 PM, Michel Salim wrote:
> 
> > They're moving to a 2n+1 cycle -- starting from Fedora 7, IIRC, every
> > release will be supported until one month after the release of 
> > (version
> > number+2), which means >= 13 months. But yes, unless you plan to 
> > upgrade
> > every year I'd go with CentOS.
> 
> If at all possible I would like to avoid upgrading until mid-2009. -R
> 
> 
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