Bruce Perens on the new Debian Common Core

StromPetroke writes "On August 9th, online Linuxzine Mad Penguin conducted an interview with veteran Open Source advocate Bruce Perens on the DCC (Debian Common Core) Alliance. According to Bruce, the DCC will provide a way to "be able to certify to a Linux distribution, and then there will be multiple support providers who can support that same platform and who differentiate themselves at a higher level up the stack.""

We're certifying Debian Distributions?

[bmetzler]

That's interesting. How many Debian Based Distributions are there?

Is this supposed to keep Debain Based Distributions up to date at least with Debian?

-Brent

Re:We're certifying Debian Distributions?

[thephotoman]

Well, using , Debian is the most popular base for distributions. In fact, they [distrowatch.com]list 129 distributions at this time that are based on Debian. [distrowatch.com] This includes some rather heavy hitting distributions like Knoppix, MEPIS/SimplyMEPIS, and Ubuntu, as well as some nonstandard Debian distros like Xandros and Linspire (both of which make me feel dirty just for even mentioning them in the same breath as Debian).

However, most of those distros are binary compatable with Debian, with the exceptions of Xandros and Linspire, which take a bit of work. Yeah, even Ubuntu is compatable, if you can work out the library dependencies.

I'm not sure I agree

[veganopolis]

with the way that some of these distros work. One of the things that really bugs me about the BSD variants is that they are "so stable", "so secure" that they are too out of date. And this is what happened with debian for me.

Not too long ago I was a Debian devotee. I wouldn't touch another distro. But my problem is that I am pretty busy, and if a problem occures, and you don't have the time to fix it, new problems just pop up and pretty soon cleaning up the mess seems too far out of reach.

These guys are talented and devoted to their distro, and they should be. But for a developer like me, who needs a machine running day and night and isn't willing to rejoin the darkside, debian got to be too much work for me to maintain as my desktop system. But for my existing server installations, I wouldn't change a thing. Debian is easy to maintain for standard things: web, print, ... server. So I would recommend it to anyone for those things. Anyway, this isn't a flame post, but my 2 cents. Thanks.