This is my lost message to Brian Proffitt. I published it so it won’t get lost. (My original message was marked as spam š )
Hello Brian,
I think linux.com should provide more meta data about the different distros. I mentioned my idea in the comment section of the recent Distrowatch Weekly ( http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20090608 ). Caitlyn Martin liked the idea. I’ll cut&paste&edit to safe time š
–snip comment #18–
Please provide more indepth comparison data for distros. For example I would like to know how long CentOS takes to provide the RHEL updates (I heard it sometimes takes months.) Or how fast distros patch security bugs. For how long distros provide updates and how many have been shipped. And maybe have an activity index for distros. Maybe just how many releases a year or how many releases so far etc. Those infos would really help to weed out the show offs from the hard workers IMNSHO. I think if somebody would be able to pull this off, then it’s Ladislav (of DW fame) or the Linux Foundation (they employ gods). How about some nifty yum, apt, zypper,etc grabber/analyzer thingie? Encourage competition & quality! That would be really a great service and contribution to the distro world and FOSS. — snip — Caitlyn Martin liked the idea. — snip comment #24 unedited– #18: I like your suggestions. There is material for a number of articles there, some of which I don’t exactly feel qualified to write. Maybe you’ll inspire Ladislav or Chris to write an article or two on those topics. The only problem I see with comparisons is that with 500+ distros you have to be very selective in what you include and someone is always going to feel left out.
—- snip —-
I think this is a worthy long term goal and I think your supporting members would greatly benefit from such a comparison, because a lot of those 500 distros don’t really support them with (security) updates and they do. So maybe they would even encourage this level of transparency and competition. If a hacked solution (grep apt, yum, zypper, security announces whatever) isn’t desirable then maybe an open data format for publishing update/security/version data on the web so that it can be freely aggregated and analyzed would be a worthy goal. That would solve the problem with people feeling left out.
What do you think?
Cheers,
– Udo –
