This is another example

why I’m proud of Debian.

I sometimes have the impression, that some distributions try to package stuff with as little effort as possible. Debian however has to support tons of different architectures, build daemons and pbuilder that mostly ensure you’ve got the build dependencies complete, tons of users of unstable and testing that will send you bug reports when you don’t have the runtime dependencies right and so on. We have a really good quality assurance.

On the very first day my selinux-basics package entered unstable, I already received feedback about the udev integration.

So you might ask me, why I think this is really different from other distributions. There are of course distributions which have similar properties, but I think Debian has the biggest crowd. And Ubuntu is so closely tied to Debian that these things aren’t that separable. Most Ubuntu packages are largely unmodified Debian packages. And changes done by Ubuntu - which for example tracks Gnome closer than Debian - will often be fed back into Debian again.

For example fakeroot, or pbuilder are further examples on Debians best practises to do quality ensurance. Sane software shouldn’t require real root privileges for building.

The current Debian Vote on the GFDL is another example. I’m confident it will boil down to “Debian refuses the GFDL, because it contains too many restrictions for our users”.

Debian cares much for it’s users. And the users of our users. And the users of our users of our users. ;-) As a whole, not just the majority which will probably never even consider changing a GFDL-licensed document.

Of course, people are frequently annoyed by e.g. Debian not having the latest X.org betas in unstable, so they could try out Xgl, Aiglx and this other eye candy. Sorry about that, but I do think that the X task force knows how to set its priorities right, and you could probably just get these beta version from Ubuntu and run them on your Debian. Or build your own packages and offer them to others who want to try it, too. Or wait, like I do quite often (for example for ekiga, which is stuck in the NEW queue currently). It doesn’t really hurt much to not have the newest, fancies toys. In fact, you are likely to be more productive when you don’t care for these things.