LILUG General Meeting - Tuesday, 10 April, 2007
From Lilug
Meeting Summary
Speaker
- Jaldhar H. Vyas, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Debian GNU/Linux (but were afraid to ask)
- Jaldhar has been a developer working on Debian for the last ten years or so. He began his talk describing the three pillars of the Debian Project:
- Freedom
- Technical Excellence
- Community
- He briefly reviewed the history of how Debian came to be, including the name "Debian", which comes from the person who started the project, Ian Murdock, and his wife Debra (Deb + Ian). He emphasized the Debian Social Contract and the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
- The Debian Social Contract encompasses the following ideals:
- Will remain 100% free software
- Will give back to the free software community
- Will not hide problems
- Priorities are users and free software
- Will support software that doesn't meet their standards
- The Debian Free Software Guidelines:
- Must allow unhindered redistribution
- Must include all source code
- Must allow derivation
- No discrimination against people or groups
- Must not discriminate against fields of endeavor
- License must not be Debian specific
- Must not be "viral"
- Jaldhar then went over the features of what gives Debian its high technical excellence:
- The Debian package manager is sophisticated
- Strict policies = well integrated
- Non-commercial means Debian can take the time to do it right
- A brief explanation of the Debian Package format followed. The Debian Package (.deb) is a copule of tarballs wrapped up in an ar archive. It contains metadata, can be architecture specific or independent, and contains all or part of a piece of software. The basic packaging tool is dpkg, which is a low-level command line tool, that lets you add, remove, etc., packages. Essential configuration is handled via debconf, but it's not a registry!
- Apt-get is Debian's "killer app" - it was the first distribution to offer this kind of feature. It adds dependency checking and can fetch packages from local media or over the network. The command-line text-mode front end is called aptitude and one of the more popular GUI front-ends is called synaptic.
- Jaldhar reviewed the release cycle philosophy, which follows the cycle of unstable, testing and stable (as well as "old stable"). Currently, "etch" is stable, "lenny" is testing, and "sid" is, and always is, unstable.
- The Debian release management process is overseen by a select team. Testing is frozen prior to release. The new release must be free of major bugs and meet any special goals the project team has set.
- Jaldhar mentioned a special release called "experimental". This is for software that is too unstable for unstable!
- Copies of Jaldhar's talk, in both PDF and ODP format, can be downloaded from http://people.debian.org/~jaldhar/talks/
Discussions/Announcements
Raffles
- Linux System Administration book: Jared Binder
- Web Application Security book: Walter Rosenblatt
Msurico 00:11, 11 April 2007 (EDT)