A little blog for a restless mind

Debian

Never, never use the linux distribution called Debian. At least not the stable version. Just don't use it. Don't even think about it. It's old. OLD! OOOOoooooold! I'm supposed to make a web portal. I'm kind of fed up with PHP so I decided to use Python, which I'm still in the process of learning, to see what's so groovy and hippy about it. You see, Python is in nowadays and PHP is out, and perl is, well... perl is something nasty that modern mothers use to scare their newborn hackers with. (Did you notice those things all begin with the letter P? What's next? A language named pr0n?)

Of course I want to use a web framework to go with Python. No problem, pso comes to mind but it's a bit unmaintained I think, so I wanted to go with PyWork. "Naah, too much hassle," I thought, "I don't need all of this, it's just supposed to be a simplistic basic portal. mod_python for Apache shall suffice." Right. There I go, apt-get install libapache-mod-python and feel the first signs of grooviness. Yay! Then I sketched myself a basic picture of what I'll need to do. Of course, sessions are a must. But they're automatically available only on Apache 2.x! No go with Apache 1.3.26 that comes with Debian stable. Okay, I'll need an additional python module that implements sessions. PyWork comes back to mind. No go, it uses Apache's sessions. Hrmpf. Then I found Jon's Python modules. But it requires Python of version 2.2 at least! In fact I think nothing mentioned above works with Python 2.1.3 included with Debian stable. Argh!

I've no idea yet how I'm going to get out of this one, but one thing is for sure: I am very annoyed by the age of Debian packages! I get just very slightly mad whenever I hear I've got to do something on a Debian machine! I really don't like using the word hate, but this time I'll make an exception: I hate Debian!

Sure I could just (re)compile whatever, but that's not company policy. The company policy goes somewhere on the lines: "we use the original Debian packages, we try to abstain from compiling completely and compile something when there's absolutely no way around; the Debian packages maintainers are responsible people and they know what they are doing, we trust them. We want to have a framework where you can upgrade packages with the simple Debian interface (the apt-get command) and be sure of the fact that such an upgraded package has the assurance of the corresponding Debian package maintainer of its fitness and high security level." I'd really like to perform a lobotomy on my boss when I hit such obstacles. But perhaps soon I won't have to anymore. It seems this "age" phenomenon is ever-so slightly getting on his nerves also. Discontent seems to be growing. Yay. I can't wait for another 2 years to pass for my boss to switch to some other distro...

posted by AlesS @ 7/01/2004 04:49:00 PM