[Gllug] Cost of RedHat vs Ubuntu desktop support

[John Edwards]

On Tue, Jul 07, 2009 at 03:58:10PM +0100, Hari Sekhon wrote:
> - Tethys wrote:
>> On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 3:31 PM, Sean Burlington<sean at practicalweb.co.uk> wrote:
>> <snip>
>> I'm sure you can find plenty of similar cases that saw
>> daylight just as an Ubuntu LTS or Debian Stable release was about
>> to be frozen.
> 
> You've just reminded me of something, checking Ubuntu LTS, which is what 
> I installed for one server at developer insistence:
> 
> root at myserver:~# cat /etc/lsb-release
> DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
> DISTRIB_RELEASE=8.10
> DISTRIB_CODENAME=intrepid
> DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 8.10"
> root at myserver:~# cat /etc/debian_version
> lenny/sid
> 
> SID! hmmm... and this was Ubuntu "server" edition and LTS as well. So 
> Ubuntu *is* less stable and has more updates than Debian Stable? (and 
> Rhel/CentOS)

A few things:

1) You are running Ubuntu 8.10, and the LTS (Long Term Support)
release is 8.04. So it looks like either you installed the wrong
version, or someone has upgraded it.

2) There is not really a separate "server" edition of Ubuntu,
just a "server" default install which does not include the GUI
desktop tools and instead offers some groups of server packages.

3) The debian_version file is included for compatibility with
*Debian* packages. Ubuntu 8.10 was released in October 2008,
and the Debian packages would be taken from testing or unstable,
which at the time was lenny and sid.

If they used only used packages from Debian etch then the
distribution would *be* Debian etch and not Ubuntu.


Having said that there is one annoying thing about Ubuntu, and
that is the lack of quality of packages in the (un-supported)
universe/multiverse sections.

Here the packages are often just imported from Debian, repackaged but
not tested. Bug fixes are left to the Debian maintainer and sometimes
not applied. Example is the cfengine2 packages, which are have several
bugs in 8.04 and 8.10.

Of course Ubuntu might say that the point of the universe/multiverse
sections is that they are un-supported, not part of the main
distribution, and only provided for convenience.

But this does mean that a simple count of packages does not mean
that the quality levels are the same between distributions.


-- 
#---------------------------------------------------------#
|    John Edwards   Email: john at cornerstonelinux.co.uk    |
#---------------------------------------------------------#
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