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With respect to PPAs, I'm not speaking from a user perspective, but from that of a sysadmin having to maintain mirrors. PPAs are just easier than setting up al
by mcpherrinm 14y ago
With respect to PPAs, I'm not speaking from a user perspective, but from that of a sysadmin having to maintain mirrors. PPAs are just easier than setting up all the key signing and mirror infrastructure.
Yeah, apt and dpkg are great compared to what else was available a decade ago. But that doesn't mean that Ubuntu's additions, however incremental, are worthless or somehow inferior to Debian. Incremental gains are still gains.
- dfc 14y agoI'm confused about PPAs and setting up a mirror infrastructure. What mirror infrastructure? What key signing is involved in a mirror that is not involved in signing packages for a PPA? Ubuntu's additions are nice. But they are minor improvements to apt/dpkg. Without them apt and dpkg would still be phenomenal.
- mcpherrinm 14y agoI administer a small number of systems and deploy custom packages to all of those. Running a custom mirror, signing packages, managing keyrings on the mirror, and getting them on all systems is nontrivially harder than using a PPA and associated scripts. Now, I run a mix of Ubuntu and Debian systems. I don't use PPAs that much, but when I do they're just plain easier. Yes, it's an incremental gain, but that's a gain. It makes them better. They weren't first, but they're innovating. Sometimes, the "innovations" aren't fantastic especially some of the more harebrained stuff on desktop (PulseAudio, avahi). But no longer is Ubuntu just a Debian rip-off: They're producing new and useful additions. The relative merits are debatable, and so I'm not going to continue that thread. In the end, it boils down to X + epsilon > X, for any epsilon > 0.