[Hamara-devel] we should also take a look at freebsd.org specifically for infrastructure-related things.

[shirish]

Hi all,
I had been wanting to document this for quite sometime now. While there 
are lot of things to be admired about debian.org frugalness is not in 
their nature. They have been blessed by having some of the best smart 
people who work on the project almost 'free', I say almost as they also 
boast to have some of the best industry contacts where the devs. do get 
compensated for doing custom work which is outside debian.org domain.

Because of donations both in hardware and even official time being 
donated by different companies through DD's and DM's (one example being 
Canonical itself) debian.org can and does do things in style. You will 
see multiple levels of redundancies for critical pieces of 
infrastructure as well as constantly improving the leaf infrastructure 
as well. Over the last couple of years, debian has been constantly 
taking more and more services under the debian.org and making it better 
which were essentially third-party services. In effect, they are 
consolidating their presence and poised to take on even greater things.

Now contrast this with FreeBSD.org which is exactly opposite to this. 
Their releases are unknown, perennially understaffed and under-funded 
and they had to innovate in terms of look and infrastructure. We should 
also take a look at FreeBSD.org to see how they solved any problem apart 
from debian.org apart from other sources. We might hit solutions that 
they (FreeBSD.org folks) might have taken an unusual and interesting 
solution.

Sometimes, my debian fan-boyishness does get the better of me, so this 
is a sort of lesson for me as well as everyone else, we need to keep our 
eyes open as much as possible and see how others solved issues instead 
of reinventing the wheel as much as possible.

Feedback appreciated.

-- 
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal,
Community Lead,
Hamaralinux.org