Serious danger of being impressed

[John Joyce]

More true in theory than in practice. There was a lot more noise
about the fear that Ubuntu would be a fork back in 2005 when Debian
users were getting tired of waiting for Sarge and Ubuntu started to
appear on the horizon.

But the truth is, at least, more nuanced. And even guys like Ian
Murdoch pointed that out at the time:

http://ianmurdock.com/?p=167

And for a view from the Ubuntu "camp" at that time:
http://mako.cc/writing/to_fork_or_not_to_fork.html

Ubuntu takes packages from sid, stabilizes them before debian, but
feeds whatever changes they make back to the sid stream.

So it provides a stream of debian derived releases but instead of
using the traditional Debian model of "we'll ship the next stable
version when it's ready," Ubuntu has a time-box ship model. Ubuntu
makes the final decision on what's going to actually make the next
release based on which packages have achieved stability in time to
make it, instead of waiting until all of the packages which were
picked at the time the release was started get there. One way of
looking at this is that Debian has a more waterfall release cycle
while Ubuntu is managed using more of the agile project management
approach. Back when Ubuntu "Badger" was in the throes of being
released, Debian Woody was several years old, and Sarge looked to be
slipping almost faster than the release date was approaching,
something which Murdock alludes to in the post I quoted.

The tension is/was? between the needs of server administrators who
favor a stable platform with security maintainence, and developers who
want more recent versions of the upstream code. Back then Ubuntu was
better for the latter. Then they introduced 'long term support'
releases which are specific Ubuntu releases which will have committed
support for five years (or there abouts). This helps the server
users, since the downside of Debian's support policy is that they only
provided maintenance for an older stable release for a limited time
after a new stable release becomes available. The net is that Ubuntu
provides both newer code in the latest release for those who want it,
and more predictable support of older releases for those who need
stability.


I don't know enough about those distributions to make the comparison,
but from my experience, Ubuntu doesn't feel like a fork. Even if
Debian doesn't take ALL of ubuntu's packages as time goes on, I
predict that the bulk of the code will remain compatible.

That all said, while I'm a happy Ubuntu user, I don't use packaged
versions of some specific software, most notably Ruby. This isn't
because of Ubuntu but because of Debian. In the case of Ruby one
major reason is because, as far as I know unless it's changed
recently, Debian (and therefore Ubuntu) doesn't really support gems.
Now this may have changed recently, but I've been happy installing
Ruby and Gems from source, and gems as gems.

--
Rick DeNatale

My blog on Ruby
http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/

Uh, Debian does run gem and gems just fine.
Shared hosting provider DreamHost is proof of that.
Their servers are Debian, and they do have gems. I've installed my
own local gems on an account there.

 

[Dick Davies]

Uhh . . . what? I said it was a fork. I didn't say it was crap. I'm
not sure where you're coming from with the hostile tone.

I wasn't trying to be hostile, but that was your second post about Ubuntu and
Debian and the thread wasn't about either.

So . . . why does your statement read as though you thought I said
"Ubuntu is a *crappy Debian fork*!"?

That would be your first post, saying :

"Ubuntu is far more suited to the average MS Windows transplant, I suppose"

 

[Alex Young]

John Joyce wrote:

Uh, Debian does run gem and gems just fine.
Shared hosting provider DreamHost is proof of that.
Their servers are Debian, and they do have gems. I've installed my own
local gems on an account there.

I think the point is that a gem can't be installed as a .deb, so apt
can't have any knowledge of them.

 

[Neil Wilson]

The Rubygems package is now in Debian/Ubuntu, but it is mildly
crippled. However if you run

gem update --system

then it magically turns into the normal ruby gem system.

APT still doesn't know anything about gems, but it is less of a
problem than you'd think.

My approach with Ubuntu is to install from APT packages unless the APT
package is just a port of a gem.

 

[Chad Perrin]

On Tue, Jun 12, 2007 at 11:35:20AM +0900, Bill Guindon wrote:

[ snip a bunch of quoted detritus from the "fork" discussion ]

Is this the place, or the thread, to discuss this?

Probably not.

Forgive my ignorance, I"m a 'born again noob', and I always will be.

Your point is well taken. If anyone needs forgiveness, it's me and the
others involved in this tangent.

 

[Chad Perrin]

I wasn't trying to be hostile, but that was your second post about Ubuntu
and
Debian and the thread wasn't about either.


That would be your first post, saying :

"Ubuntu is far more suited to the average MS Windows transplant, I suppose"

At the time I typed that sentence, I meant that it provided a more
familiar face for the recent transplant, increasing comfort for people
not steeped in Linux wisdom. One might say that my statement only
implied that Ubuntu is more "user friendly" to recent MS Windows converts
than vanilla Debian.

Isn't "user friendly" supposed to be a good thing, all else being equal?

 

[Eleanor McHugh]

Well, as long as we're talking virtualization, has anyone managed
to get
a Xen system on one of the chips with the virtualization assist to run
OS X as a "guest?" Or does Xen not support the special hardware tweaks
in a Mac? Dual or triple booting is a pain.

I know of people running OS X as a guest inside VMWare so it should
be possible, but obviously Xen's approach is sufficiently different
that I wouldn't expect much (if anything) in the way of driver support.


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

I know of people running OS X as a guest inside VMWare so it should be
possible, but obviously Xen's approach is sufficiently different that I
wouldn't expect much (if anything) in the way of driver support.


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains

It's been a while since I looked, but IIRC there are two ways to run Xen:

1. You boot the Xen kernel, which is a modified Linux kernel. It does
all the I/O and driver stuff. Guest machines require a modified kernel,
which IIRC only exists for Linux.

2. If you have the Intel or AMD virtualization-enabled chips, you boot
the Xen kernel and it can then boot and OS with an unmodified kernel.
This works for at least Windows and Linux, but I don't know about MacOS.

In any event, the drivers in mode 2 are the guest OS drivers, so it
"should work".

 

[Eleanor McHugh]

It's been a while since I looked, but IIRC there are two ways to
run Xen:

1. You boot the Xen kernel, which is a modified Linux kernel. It does
all the I/O and driver stuff. Guest machines require a modified
kernel,
which IIRC only exists for Linux.

2. If you have the Intel or AMD virtualization-enabled chips, you boot
the Xen kernel and it can then boot and OS with an unmodified kernel.
This works for at least Windows and Linux, but I don't know about
MacOS.

In any event, the drivers in mode 2 are the guest OS drivers, so it
"should work".

Mode 1 would definitely not work with Apple's distribution, but given
that Darwin's kernel is open source (and already much abused in
various other ways) it should be possible to build a Xen-friendly
version. However I'm not aware of anyone currently working on this.

Ironically Mode 2 could be more problematic as OS X would expect Mac-
like hardware, so if Xen provides virtual hardware in the same way as
VMWare that could restrict functionality. However if it fully
supports Intel's Vanderpool technology and the host machine had
hardware supported by OS X natively then in theory it should just
work out of the box. If only I could justify the time to experiment...


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains

 

[Robert Dober]

On 6/11/07, Benjamin Kudria <[email protected]> wrote:

Is this the place, or the thread, to discuss this?

It depends. --note that I carefully have deleted your quote
I have no idea, but this community seems to be very tolerant and
interested in things orbiting around ruby.
On the rare occasions when people got upset with discussions and asked
politely to take a thread offlist that is just done.

Personally I think this topic is quite interesting, others of course
might not, please not that there is the not so slight possibility that
the choice of the distro intervenes with your ruby experience.

Forgive my ignorance, I"m a 'born again noob', and I always will be. You mean like eternal youth

Cheers
Robert

 

[Robert Dober]

Erratum
echo "quote" | sed /quote/sig/

Sorry
R.

 

[John Joyce]

Indeed, relying on apt is not always good. It's great for trying out
packages, but in the end, you will be better off in your
understanding of the tools you are using if you just install them
yourself. With Rails and Ruby you're eventually going to have to do
installs yourself anyway, unless somebody else is doing it for you.
The same goes for OS X and MacPorts' opt, it is nice and convenient,
but the paths are going to be non-standard and you'll have to still
customize a lot of things to get things working, so you'll still need
to know the how/what/where/why.

If you can write the code, you can definitely install the stuff. It's
worth it for your Ruby points.