Does Debian Deviate From Standards Or Upstream?

“Recently, I got into a discussion with a friend of mine that I
have a great deal of respect for. After having our discussion, my
respect for him has grown. The discussion was about whether or not
Debian and Ubuntu have deviated from standard practice regarding
Paul Vixie’s cron implementation.

“The idea is simple. On Fedora and SUSE based operating systems,
if /etc/cron.allow AND /etc/cron.deny do not exist on the system,
then only the super-user can install cron jobs using the crontab
command. However, on Debian and Ubuntu, both files are missing, yet
everyone on the system can install a cron job. So, the question
was: why does Debian and Ubuntu feel the need to be different from
everyone else? Why do they need to deviate from standard
practice?

“Now, for the record, I don’t care if Debian deviates…
much. Debian is an operating system. Sometimes, I think those in
the Free Software and GNU/Linux world forget that. Operating
systems are free to make the changes necessary for their platform
as they see fit. Those changes will likely either make users happy
and make the operating system popular, like Ubuntu, or they
won’t be good changes, and likely will lose users, like,
well, Gentoo (sorry guys, but you have seen better days). I’m
all for changes that are thought out and that bring obvious or
non-obvious benefits. For example, Debian Squeeze moving away from
System V Init to Upstart.”

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