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I would say the key reasons are: 1) They nailed package management early on. Apt doesn't feel revolutionary today, but in the 90s it was WAY better than what R
by lftl 15y ago
I would say the key reasons are:
1) They nailed package management early on. Apt doesn't feel revolutionary today, but in the 90s it was WAY better than what Redhat was using as it's package management core.
2) Debian's staunch adherence to their free software guidelines drives forks in two ways. First, you can fork without any worry you're violating a license on some component. Secondly, it encourages people to fork because some people will want to include some of those missing components in out of the box installs, and that simply won't happen with Debian.
3) Ubuntu. If you look at derivatives, about half of them forked off of Ubuntu, so Debian gets to count them as descendants because Ubuntu is based off Debian.
- ars 15y ago> so Debian gets to count them as descendants because Ubuntu is based off Debian. Ubuntu is not only based on Debian, it still regularly merges in packages from Debian. They should make some kind of distinction between a release that is based off of the parent, but then goes its own way, vs a release that IS the parent + additions. The relationship is much closer. And actually it goes the other way too - debian tries to merge changes from ubunto back into it. (They have a tool that automatically compares them and suggests merges.)
- dredmorbius 15y agoDebian Policy. It makes for an exceptionally predictable system. A bunch of other bits and pieces which derive from this, open BTS among them. And APT (with policy) still blows RPM out of the water. Lack of policy is a big part. I'd like to play with Mandriva, which uses APT tools but the RPM format just for comparison, but the fact that I can pull apart archives using ar, tar, and gzip, as opposed to relying on an inconstant binary format, has proven invaluable more than once.