Allow Me to Repeat the Same Complaint Everyone Makes About Debian
I've been using Debian PowerPC Woody on my Macintosh 8500 for a while now. I use it for my masquerading gateway, and usually do my web browsing and email there. For the most part it works OK. I like how easy it is to administrate a debian system. I like being able to install new software (with dependency management) and keeping up-to-date with security patches with apt. I especially like the wonderful community of users who are on the Debian mailing lists.
But there's one thing I can't stand about Debian. One very important thing. It just bit me in the ass:
I cannot get bug fixes to my programs, even if the bugs have already been fixed by the upstream developers.
Yes, Debian is very conscientious about staying up-to-date with security advisories. But the way they do this is by backporting security fixes from the upstream into the increasingly old and just as buggy old versions of the software that's running in stable.
I don't run any servers in my little office network that are exposed to the Internet, so as long as my basic firewall is working OK, I'm not too concerned about security. What I'd really like is to get a current version of Mozilla. Bugs in Mozilla effect me every day, sometimes dozens of times a day.
I'm running Mozilla 1.4 on my Windows box. I'm running 1.2 on my OS X Macintoshes, because I haven't got around to installing 1.4 yet (I will soon). They all work great. But I'm running 1.0 on my Debian PowerPC Macintosh. It's the web browser I use the most, because it's the one box that is turned on all the time and always runs the same OS. Most of my other boxes I switch OSes all the time, so I don't have my bookmarks or record of sent mail at hand.
I would love to install 1.4 on my Debian Mac, but I can't, because it's not available for PowerPC stable.
Yes, I could run unstable on my Mac, and I was doing that for a few months before Woody became stable, but now that I have a stable system I want it to be stable. The debian developers feel pretty free to make incompatible changes to unstable, because it's there for developer and testing use, and these changes need to be made, so that some day, several years down the road, unstable can become stable with what, for a few happy weeks, will be all up-to-date software.
When I first got the stable woody installed, I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread.
What happened to me today that made me gripe about Debian? I wrote an email addressed to a whole bunch of people. I had the email all written. I had all the addresses entered. It was something important I wanted to tell a bunch of people, but some of these people don't like each other so I decided I should BCC each of them so they couldn't start flaming each other.
So one by one I changed the To: popups to BCC:. And Mozilla suddenly quit, losing the letter that I'd typed. I've experienced this before. What I've learned to do is, if I'm going to BCC a lot of people, to write my letter on Mac OS X or Windows, where I have a newer browser. But I forgot.
There are some bugs I experience several times a day on 1.0, which don't happen on either 1.2 or 1.4 on my other platforms:
- After typing into an email for a little while, the window becomes unresponsive. A workaround is that I can save it as a draft, open the draft and continue. This happens for almost every email I type on my debian Mac.
- A browser window becomes unresponsive, and stops doing screen updates. If I'm scrolling while this happens, it continues to scroll, and I can't stop it. I have to close the window. Curiously, if this happens in a tab, I can close the tab and the other ones still work OK
- Double-clicking the text in the URL entry box doesn't select all the text in the box. It does at first, but then the text to the left of the cursor gets selected while the text to the right is not. This makes it hard to either delete or copy the URL that's in the box
- Opening the mail and newsgroups window makes the current browser window go to Find.com, then after the mail window first appears, the Find.com page is brought forward. I have to then click to get my mail window frontmost again. The Find.com people must think the Debian folks are a great bunch of friends to be sending them all this traffic
There are lots of other little bugs, but those are the ones that bother me the most - dozens of times a day.
Some people have tried to solve this problem. Somewhere I found a page of backports of the most current versions of many popular programs to Woody - but only for x86. I need them for PowerPC.
Another option that any developer can do would be to package their software for more distributions. Sourceforge and other facilities provide machines for building so you can make packages for distributions and architectures you don't run. Just building for all the architectures and package formats isn't the problem - testing the software is. I'm sure the Mozilla project wouldn't find it too difficult to add Debian PowerPC to their build, but there is also YellowDog and LinuxPPC. Debian supports eleven architectures, and some of the other distros have multiple architectures too. Even large projects like Mozilla have to draw the line somewhere on what architectures they'll provide binaries for.
(Developers could make things a lot easier for many users by at least providing build targets in their source code that will build all the major package types. There are lots of packages available for Debian, so I only rarely have to compile from source, but there aren't nearly so many available for Slackware, which I also use, and I hardly ever find either Slack packages or tarballs whose builds will make one.)
Now, I know what you're saying: "Use the Source, Luke". And that's probably what I will do, when I can finally find the time to do it. With almost any other package except Mozilla and GnuCash, I would just get the source out of unstable, and compile it on my Woody system, and then I'd get current software with Woody dependencies.
The problem is that my life has been very hectic for a long time, and doesn't show much prospect of getting any easier anytime soon. Building Mozilla myself is a daunting task. I actually did it once on my Slackware laptop, when I was thinking of helping to develop Mozilla. It requires a gigabyte of disk space to hold all the object files - I had to run all over my filesystem while the build was going on, frantically deleting stuff so the build could complete. I did get a working Mozilla out of it, but it's not something I would care to do again.
And I can't do it on my Mac, because it's an old machine from 1996, and only has 2 GB on its Linux hard drive. My /home and /var partitions have only about 20 MB of free disk space apiece. /usr only has about 2 MB - for quite some time now, if I wanted to install new software, I had to take something else off.
What I did when I wanted to compile a new kernel was mount an NFS filesystem from my Slackware x86 box, where I do have lots of space. And when the time comes, that's what I'll do, and if I get a good build I'll post the package on my website so others can benefit. I'm just not looking forward to it, and I don't know when I can find the time.
I can understand why Debian's policy got to be the way it is. Once a stable system has gone through all its integration and testing, you don't want to change too much or you risk opening up all kinds of problems. The thing is, there are bugs in software, that don't impact security, that are as important to fix as the security holes that Debian is very attentive to.
What I'd like to suggest is that Debian users get to vote on packages that they'd like to see updated, maybe provided in a separate backport archive, not part of the stable distribution. By keeping just a couple dozen software packages up-to-date and built with stable's dependencies so you don't have to break your box by installing unstable, the vast majority of Debian users could be kept much happier.
I've been running Slackware for many years, I think since about 3.0. I like slackware a lot, but Debian has the advantage of the better packaging system. One thing Debian has over Slackware is that the user community is friendly and helpful, unlike all those cranky old bastards on the Slackware newsgroup. But at least with Slackware I can get regular updates to my software. That's one of the reasons I still run it on both my x86 boxes.