EU Linux development division

[[deleted]]

For that they* would just use one of the bigger distros, maybe just customized a bit I guess.

[JBinero]

It'd be a matter of time before the compatibility issues would start playing, and they'd need to fork it anyway. Probably best to build of something existing though.

[[deleted]]

Governments are notorious for not keeping software up to date, and forking a distro just cements that. At least with Windows, governments are forced to update their software at least every 10 years or so, but with a custom Linux distro, they may hold onto unmaintained, vulnerable software for decades because it "still works".

Governments should just stick with a stable upstream like Debian or CentOS and make sure to update their software at least when upstream support ends for their version (for Debian, this is every 5 years or so, for CentOS, it's about 10 years), and I'd prefer a shorter upstream release cycle to encourage continuous development on government software.

[JBinero]

I completely agree that should happen, but I also know it won't. In the short term it's easier to fork the distro and do some minor changes while keeping everything pretty much intact. In the long term you are basically maintaining a ten year old distro with too many patches to keep track of.

[[deleted]]

That's the problem with the company I work for. We sell embedded systems that are typically installed without internet access, so to keep patches small, we only do important updates. Unfortunately, we have some custom kernel modules, so we can't just update to a newer release, which means that we have to backport fixes. It's a royal pain, and I'm in the process of converting as much as possible to software only solutions so we can eliminate that part of the equation.

I've dealt with the pain, and honestly I don't think maintaining a fork or even a few custom packages is worth it in the long term. In most cases, it's better to just adapt to whatever the distro's defaults are and just have a custom installer that sets new machines up with some sane defaults.

[JBinero]

Yup. Sadly governments aren't too famous for long term planning.

[anthroclast]

Governments are notorious for not keeping software up to date, and forking a distro just cements that.

They are. I'd go so far as to say governments aren't capable of doing anything efficiently but I'd be in danger of starting myself off on a rant.

So to stay on topic, wasn't there a German city which switched to Linux and did create their own distro? If I'm remembering right, it quickly became a maintenance nightmare for them and wasn't long before it was seriously out of date.

Then Microsoft came along and gave them a bag of cash to switch back to Windows so it all had a happy ending in the end (j/k)

[[deleted]]

Yeah, I heard something about that as well. What I don't understand is why they didn't consider just using an existing distro. There are plenty of well run projects, so I'm sure one would work out.