Cart before the horse

[Paul Heinlein]

On Tue, 11 Nov 2003, Bill Gradwohl wrote:

> Today we have Novell acquiring SUSE and Bruce Perins is also
> announcing a rival distro:

>From the cheap seats where I sit, it seems that Novell still has a
long way to go -- both in terms of quality of work and sheer market
persistence -- before current or prospective Red Hat customers will
jump ship.

Same thing with Debian: its testing branch has been around for quite a
while and it still requires near-expert level ability to install it.
My hunch is that it'll be a while before the Debian folks devise a
stable distro with current package versions and an installer that
works for mere mortals.

> I just believe that its prudent to wait a few months and see what
> shakes out before wasting a lot of effort, especially when industry
> behemoths are maneuvering.

I have a hard time seeing that "a few months" is all it'll take.
Novell still has a need to make a profit for its shareholders, so it
can't just throw endless developer hours at the project. Nor will
Bruce's announcement change life for the vast majority of Debian
developers.

Oh, and there's all the effort that current Red Hat admins have
invested in installation/upgrade infrastructure and configuration
management.  Press releases from Novell and Debian don't inspire me to
say, "Gee, what neat press releases! I think I'll ditch my
infrastructure on the strength of their promises." :-)

It's not that either Novell or Debian can't achieve their goals. I
hope they bring to Linux even more excellence. It's just that there
are, and will continue to be, lots of Red Hat and Fedore legacy
systems out there in need of long-term support.

--Paul Heinlein <heinlein at cse.ogi.edu>