On Wed, 2006-07-05 at 03:49 -0300, Rodrigo Barbosa wrote:
> Ok, this is a very sensitive topic for me, so I tent to rant a lot.
> But anyone who was ever involved on real distro work will agree with
> me.
Yeah. I worked for a small commercial Debian-based distributor
(Libranet). Our primary focus was to provide a graphical installer and a
configuration tool for Debian, and to combine this in a distribution
with an extensive package set. This wasn't even remotely possible if we
didn't all work far more hours than our paid hours. To get an idea what
had to be done:
- Maintaining a sane kernel tree, smashing bugs that beta testers
encounter.
- Maintaining a package repository, with a collection of customized
packages.
- Developing and maintaining an installer and configuration tools.
- Fixing bugs in various tools and libraries that are used as a part of
the installer and configuration tools. Don't be surprised to encounter
plenty of memory leaks, incorrect assumptions, incorrectly handled file
descriptors, etc.
- Writing a lot of documentation, users want/need that.
- Handling user support requests.
Even in such a VAR-ish business you will need a bunch of full-time paid
employees, good cash flow, and be lucky to get the right people.
Yes, there are a gazillion of distributions. But, there are only about
five or ten distributions that I would call quality distributions. And
even most of these systems have their share of problems. One of the
reasons I moved over to CentOS/RHEL is that it is virtually the only
distribution that I have found to be mostly flaw-free for my uses.
-- Daniel
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