From: Gregory Seidman <gsslist+ruby@...>
Date: 2006-09-03T13:04:15+09:00
Subject: Re: A better syntax highlighting color scheme for Ruby code on Vim?

On Sun, Sep 03, 2006 at 09:27:05AM +0900, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
[...]
} Curiously enough, when Red Hat dropped Red Hat 10 in favor of Fedora and
} some expensive "enterprise" distros, I switched to Debian. I really
} liked Debian, although it took them a long time to come out with "sarge"
} as a stable product. And I really liked being able to bring up "dselect"
} and be a kid in a candy store. Darn near anything I could use or wanted
} to learn how to use was in there.

I don't think there will ever be a good, coherent message about what Debian
"stable" means. From my perspective, stable is something to run on an
internet-facing server that doesn't need to be behind a hardware firewall.
I use a mix of testing and unstable on all of my Debian machines.

} The fly in Debian's ointment was their disdain for Java. A lot of the
} things I wanted to run were written in Java. So I went looking around
} for another distro and settled on Gentoo, about six months after
} switching from Red Hat to Debian.

Whatever floats your boat. I've had good success with Java on Debian, even
using IBM's Java on PowerPC. It was a pain for a while, I'll grant you, but 
it's gotten better. Eventually someone scratched that itch and created
java-package, which takes the various downloadable Java installs and turns
them into .deb files.

} I don't personally code in Java, nor do I hack on the open-source tools
} I use that are written in Java. But in certain application areas
} (workstation, not server, in my case) the really good packages are
} written in Java.

Many are, true. As I said, it took a while but Debian folks realized that,
too. I've installed, for example, Azureus with apt-get. It just kind of
works now, like all the other packages always did.

Oh, and just to dig at Gentoo for kicks (and all in good fun), have you
seen http://www.funroll-loops.org/?

--Greg