Fast forward to 1993. Jurassic Park smashes at the box office, UB40’s cover of Can’t Help Falling in Love hits the airwaves, and Purdue student Ian Murdock announces a new cast named Debian Liniux on the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.linux.development.
Murdock then wrote: “This is a build I created from scratch; in other words, I didn’t just make a few changes to SLS [Softlanding Linux System]. I created this version after using SLS and being dissatisfied with most of its elements. And after modifying SLS a lot, I decided it would be easier to start from scratch.”
The name Debian is the result of mixing the first name of Murdock’s girlfriend at the time, Debra, and his own first name. And each release – which today has reached Debian 12, Bookworm – is named after a Toy Story character.
Linux was still an operating system for hobbyists
It was another era. Git didn’t exist, Red Hat Linux didn’t exist, and IBM didn’t manage the evolution of Linux yet. Linux was still an operating system for hobbyists. It was mainly used by students and computer scientists. I had been using the OS since Linux 0.11 in November 1991, but by then I had been a Unix user for over ten years.
Murdock knew that not everyone could download, compile, install, and boot Linux from source code. He thought the early distributions, especially SLS, weren’t good enough. So he started building Debian with the goal of making a more elegant Linux distribution that you could install without needing to be watched while it was installed. In short, “Debian will make Linux easier for users who don’t have access to the Internet,” he said then.
And in fact, Debian was the first Linux distribution to make installation and deployment ease a priority. And at the same time, from its inception, Debian was the only distribution open to all developers and users to contribute to development. Today, it is still the largest community Linux distribution. All other distributions, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Ubuntu, and SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE), and their community branches, such as Fedora and openSUSE, are directly or indirectly related to commercial enterprises.
“The modern Linux distribution, both the paradigm and the architecture, came from Debian”
As blogger Cory Doctorow wrote after Murdock’s far too early death in 2015: “The Debian project fundamentally changed the way open source was done by merging engineering excellence with ethical nature. of free software development.
People who knew Murdock well agreed. Bruce Perens, creator of the Debian Social Contract and the Debian Free Software Principles, which define Debian’s ground rules, explains that Debian is more than just a Linux distribution: “Debian’s impact on the world is not is not limited to Debian. It’s the vast number of projects it spawned. For example, the modern Linux distribution, both the paradigm and the architecture, come from Debian.”
Bruce Perens adds “Murdock produced the entire Debian ‘base system’, the part needed to boot a system capable of installing other packages. When I was Debian Project Leader, I distributed each of the packages that make up the base system to different developers. No one had ever done anything like this before. And no one at the time knew the result – built by dozens of people who had never met and only corresponded via email – that was all we had – would work when all the pieces were put together.”
At the origin of the first embedded Linux system
According to Mr. Perens, Debian was the origin of the first embedded Linux system: “I created Busybox (the Swiss army knife of embedded Linux) to install Debian from floppy disks. At the time, you needed a floppy disk of 1.44 MB to load the kernel, then another for the root filesystem Busybox was designed to fit all the necessary command-line tools on this second floppy disk, and is found in countless routers today , smartphones, televisions and other in-vehicle devices”.
Additionally, Debian pioneered the dependency-based dpkg package system. Thanks to it, you can assemble programs and libraries into an easy-to-install package, even if they were developed separately. Of course, they are now commonplace.
Bdale Garbee, one of Debian’s early developers, adds: “Modern languages and the developer communities associated with them don’t always want to be faced with managing dependencies by version. This source of tension has led to a focus on things like Flatpaks, Docker, etc. But even today, most Debian users want the value proposition of a fully compliant binary package delivery model.”
At the origin of modern versioning
Additionally, Garbee notes that Ian Jackson, an early Debian programmer and creator of dpkg, explored the idea of ”Debian package releases as a rudimentary revision control system”. The idea that you can download (check out) the latest version of a package, modify it, and then download (check in) a new version to the archive is a kind of conceptual model. In a way, this could mean that Debian was one of the first big experiments in distributed version control.
At the time, Linux itself had yet to adopt its first version control system, Concurrent Version System (CVS), let alone BitKeeper. And Linus Torvalds hadn’t invented Git yet.
Garbee continues: “The roles and responsibilities [des développeurs et des responsables de la maintenance] are much more structured today than they were at the beginning. Even the concept of packages having defined maintainers is something I remember as a “time before”.
“He chose a set of core principles that resonated with the right kind of passionate people”
Garbee adds, “There’s a healthy tension between everyone working on what they want all the time and the ‘control functions’ that come with defining package maintainers.”
Looking back on Debian’s early days, Garbee explains, “Ian Murdock told me many times that he never had a clue that what he was starting would last this long or go this far. In my opinion, he chose a set of core principles that resonated with the right kind of passionate people.”
Murdock would have been amazed at Debian’s legacy. Apart from being a major Linux operating system, it has become the parent distribution of other very popular Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and MX Linux.
Debian’s influence is still present today. And it will continue in the future, notes Bdale Garbee: “There is still a lot of work to do, and the enthusiasm with which many members of the community are involved in the organization and participation in the developer conference. annual Debian (DebConf) assures me that the heart of the Debian community remains strong.”
It’s a good thing because we need Debian. We need a strong Linux community that reflects the needs of users and developers, not businesses. There is a place for enterprise-centric Linux. But as Murdock intended, there is also a need for a version of Linux by and for the people.
Source: “ZDNet.com”