[kwlug-disc] What's the best desktop distribution?

[Lori Paniak]

On Thu, 2010-02-04 at 16:48 -0500, Chris Frey wrote:

> > Yes, but Paul's point is that we have a myriad of them for each language.
> > Even though it is fairly easy to pull stuff from the respective repository
> > for that language, it bypasses APT's dependency checking mechanism.
> 
> I'm a little confused by this.  Why would they make deb packages
> that don't have the right dependencies?  Apt just provides what the deb's
> themselves ask for.
> 
> Unless...
> 
> > The issue here is release cycles. Debian is very slow to come with
> > stable releases compared ot other stuff. For example, Drupal used
> > to have a 6-8 month release cycle for core, and several hundred
> > modules. Now the cycle is more like 2 years for core, but there
> > are 3,000 or more modules out there, with various maintainers.
> > They tend to move at their own pace, often very quick, and hence
> > does not fit into the Debian repositories. We had really old stuff
> > in Debian as far as Drupal is concerned.
> 
> ... the dependencies of the manual deb packages mean that you
> have to run Debian unstable all the time?
> 
> - Chris

The question is why are the Debian Drupal packages so far out of date?
Again, this is another example where some kind of automated packaging
could be useful.  So long as the dependencies could be tracked in an
automated way as well.

You don't have to run Debian unstable for your whole system in order to
keep up with unstable packages and their dependencies.  When in that
situation, I manually update the unstable packages I have installed.
PITA.  I'm sure there is a way to specify certain packages to update
from unstable (or some other repository) with files
in /etc/apt/preferences.d.  I've never taken the time to investigate
that option.
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