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7. Why use Debian for medical care?

  1. The Debian GNU/Linux distribution has a strong focus on security and stability, which is an evident precondition for medical care tasks.
  2. The powerful packaging tools allow sophisticated depends - conflicts - replaces combinations to make sure that all components will work together.
  3. Debian has strong quality assurance for the packages. One key feature of this quality management is the Bug Tracking System which is open for everybody to report bugs and search for certain known problems.
  4. Debian is carefully tested. Each package has to undergo an evaluation process in the so called unstable distribution. Once a package has not shown any important problem for a certain time period it goes into the testing distribution. This distribution is the release candidate for the future stable distribution which is released only when all release critical bugs are resolved. This careful testing process is the reason why Debian has a longer release cycle than other distributions. However, in terms of stability this is an advantage.
  5. Each package has to comply with strict rules, the so-called policy. The advantage of these rules is that they guarantee that different packages work together smoothly.
  6. Support of 11 hardware architectures (auto builders: alpha, arm, hppa, i386, ia64, m68k, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390, sparc)
  7. Debian is developed by about 1000 volunteers. That means that every developer is free to maintain programs he is interested in or he needs for his special tasks in real life. That's why Debian is able to cover different fields of specializations — its developers just want to solve their own special problems. This broad focus is different from commercial distributions which just try to cover mainstream tasks.
  8. Moreover Debian developers need not care about the advice of a boss. All developers can have the same influence on development — they just have to do it if they want a certain feature realized. We call it Do-O-Cracy and it ensures that a developer can realize his vision of a perfect operating system for the intended purpose. If the purpose is medical care he might like to join the Debian-Med effort.


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