On Sunday 16 Mar 2008, Justin Moore wrote:

Why are you using Ubuntu for production servers? Look how many major releases they have had vs. Debian, or RHEL. They push out the latest version of the software as fast as possible because that is what their user base wants. That's why I use Ubuntu on my desktops. But they can't possibly keep the same quality control on such a release cyle. For production servers I use Debian, except when a client requires enterprise support, then I use RHEL. I suggest the same.

It's possible that Ubuntu isn't meant to be a server distribution (but in that case they shouldn't have a Ubuntu server version). Regardless, it is completely irresponsible to make a package available for download that did not get even one command's worth of testing after packaging.

A simple

/etc/init.d/mailman restart

after installing the new package would have shown that mailman wasn't working. Please note that this is not some error condition that only surfaces under some weird combination of environments or events. Whatever your hardware or software configuration, whatever applications you are running, whatever network connectivity (or lack) you have, merely starting up the newly-installed mailman would have failed. Whether desktop or server, a distribution that permits the release of an Internet-service package without even that one, basic command is broken beyond repair IMNSHO.

Ubuntu needs to make a package testing and release policy real quick. The next time it could be a security patch to Firefox that gets messed up, and then we'll have millions of cracked Ubuntu systems merrily spamming away. Before something like that happens, it would be better if Ubuntu just withdrew gracefully from the list of Linux distributions.

Regards,

-- Raju