Our focus is on writing and supporting software done right. We feel that to be "done right", software must be, in order of importance:
- Correct
- Reliable
- Manageable
- Well-documented
We think that once you've experienced software done right, you'll never want it any other way.
Software must meet the specification it has been designed against. It must be written so its functionality can be understood and so its behavior is predictible. Software that is not correct is fundamentally flawed and is of limited usefulness to its end-users.
End-users depend on their software being available when they need it, and they expect their software to run consistently and at an appropriate level of performance. Reliable software, like correct software, behaves predictibly and inspires confidence.
Manageable software is well-organized and comprehensible. It is easy to maintain, modify and enhance. The process of creating manageable software begins with a solid system architecture. Coding standards, code reviews, and good test coverage all play a part. However, keeping a product manageable for the long-term requires diligence and focus, and a recognition that time spent on manageability now pays huge dividends down the road.
Any software product, to be useful in the long-term, must be well-documented both from a software developer perspective and an end-user perspective. A working software product that no one but its developer understands is perhaps less useful than even an incorrect or unreliable software product that can be fixed because its workings are well-documented. In our experience, well-documented software products are almost always easier to make correct, reliable and manageable.
Cedar Solutions hosts a Debian package repository for pre-releases of some Debian packages. In a few cases, there are also backports of packages to the stable and oldstable distributions.
To use this repository, take a few steps as the root user.
First, get the signing keyring and install it for use:
wget --quiet -O /usr/share/keyrings/cedar-archive-keyring.gpg https://cedar-solutions.com/ftp/debian/cedar-archive-keyring.gpg
Then, add an appropriate source to /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/cedar-archive-keyring.gpg] https://cedar-solutions.com/debian unstable main
For the stable and oldstable distributions, use the correct codeword instead of
unstable, for instance bullseye.