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20 years as a Debian maintainer

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Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind if I ask what, in particular, is making you move?

I'm not rxlim, but considering that the release after Wheezy - Jessie - introduced systemd as the default init systemd, it's not hard to guess.

I went into systemd with an open mind, hoping the changes would be worthwhile to learn.

I've come out the other end looking for alternatives... In the meantime I'll stick to an OS that uses init, and hope systemd get's better given enough time.

Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#42
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think having developers doing the packaging is an ideal situation. I often hear developers complaining about the multitude of GNU/Linux distros because they think it's somehow their responsibility to provide binaries. It's not. The role of the upstream developer is to make their build system easy to use so that other people (like distro maintainers, but also just "regular" users) can compile from source witho…

> tl;dr - Make your software easy to build, don't just package up a mess. You've pretty much hit the nail on the head. You forgot one additional bit though, please for the love of god don't have a crazy web of dependencies. I see a lot of Node and Ruby apps online that I think would be incredibly useful in the Fedora package collection and have considered contributing them on more than once occasion. What always stop…

Yes, I should've mentioned that. I've been down the rubygems and npm rabbit hole a few times myself...

Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not rxlim, but considering that the release after Wheezy - Jessie - introduced systemd as the default init systemd, it's not hard to guess.

I went into systemd with an open mind, hoping the changes would be worthwhile to learn. I've come out the other end looking for alternatives... In the meantime I'll stick to an OS that uses init, and hope systemd get's better given enough time.

I know I pulled it in, but I was hoping to avoid another systemd discussion myself, just trying to answer vmateixeira :)

Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#44
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I meant to write AppImage not flatpak. The point was that a lot of packaging would be done by the devs, allowing minutes maintainers to so more important stuff.

I don't think having developers doing the packaging is an ideal situation. I often hear developers complaining about the multitude of GNU/Linux distros because they think it's somehow their responsibility to provide binaries. It's not. The role of the upstream developer is to make their build system easy to use so that other people (like distro maintainers, but also just "regular" users) can compile from source witho…

Got any advice for ways to bundle stuff written in Rust, Go, Ruby, or Node? All of these languages come with package-managers that encourage reusing packages from their respective ecosystems.

I packaged a Github clone called Gogs (written in Go) for Debian/Ubuntu, complete with Lintian support. But I had to compromise on the 'rules' file and add a "get-orig-source" target that uses Go's package manager to grab all of the dependencies. I used that rule to grab all of the source files required to create the source package (which can then be built in isolation).

But if I understand Debian's official packaging rules, this is verboten because it winds up including a bunch of interconnected third-party libraries. Since I didn't write Gogs or any of its dependencies, I can't exactly go through and eliminate all external dependencies. And even if I could, much of Go's standard library exists only in ecosystem form.

How should a prospective package maintainer handle these kinds of ecosystems? Trying to distro-package every library (Perl-style) would be a Herculean effort, and could conceivably be met with hostility by the upstreams.

There is so much software being written in Go/Rust/Ruby/Node/etc. How can we go about packaging it?

Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#46
A couple of weeks before they got accepted? Wow!

I considered become a DD about 10 years ago, but a friend was going through the process and it took them over a year with at least one restart-from-scratch because the bureaucracy had been lost or something.

> Regis NM did start somewhere in 2003. There was a period of him being on hold, in 2006 we did continue the process, which used some time, but most of the delay up to now is, again, my fault. Seems like all the few NMs left in my AM queue do have some huge level of patience available somewhere...

https://lists.debian.org/debian-newmaint/2007/08/msg00046.ht...

I wonder if Debian has improved their process or replaced the ineffective people since. Do they still have the second-class-citizen system (whose name I can't remember offhand)?

Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#47
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you migrating to, if you don't mind my asking?

FreeBSD, so the migration is not just away from Debian but also Linux. Of course problems always arise in such operations, but in general we have been very happy with the change, and I'm just as excited about FreeBSD as I was with Debian before.

Do you migrate you workstation to FreeBSD too, or your servers and the like only?

In any case I want to take this opportunity to note that FreeBSD is quite nice as a daily driver on your workstation. The only missing thing is bug-free suspend/hibernate, which works for some and for some doesn't.

edit: added missing adverbs.

Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#48
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they can't make good packages then I can't see them making good containers.

As a Debian Developer I often find myself throwing away the upstream Debian packaging and starting from scratch. It's not that it doesn't work but that it doesn't fit with Debian policy and so is not easily included or modified without basically starting from scratch anyway. In the cases (which happens more than you might think) where an upstream developer has actually got really good packaging, I've usually taken th…

MongoDB's Debian packaging is very different from Debian's own packaging. The MongoDB people decided almost a year ago that Debian users only get to use one init/rc system each for Debian 7 and Debian 8.

* http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/333195/5132

Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#49
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think having developers doing the packaging is an ideal situation. I often hear developers complaining about the multitude of GNU/Linux distros because they think it's somehow their responsibility to provide binaries. It's not. The role of the upstream developer is to make their build system easy to use so that other people (like distro maintainers, but also just "regular" users) can compile from source witho…

Got any advice for ways to bundle stuff written in Rust, Go, Ruby, or Node? All of these languages come with package-managers that encourage reusing packages from their respective ecosystems. I packaged a Github clone called Gogs (written in Go) for Debian/Ubuntu, complete with Lintian support. But I had to compromise on the 'rules' file and add a "get-orig-source" target that uses Go's package manager to grab all of…

Debian has a package for rustc and cargo in Stretch, specifically for helping package stuff written in Rust. They also have a way of converting crates.io packages to Debian packages for this purpose. Asking about this on http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-rust-maintainer... is probably the best way to get advice, that's where the people doing this work congregate.

Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not rxlim, but considering that the release after Wheezy - Jessie - introduced systemd as the default init systemd, it's not hard to guess.

I went into systemd with an open mind, hoping the changes would be worthwhile to learn. I've come out the other end looking for alternatives... In the meantime I'll stick to an OS that uses init, and hope systemd get's better given enough time.

Having just set up a Debian server this weekend (Windows dev diving into Linux for the first time), can I ask what the main difference between init and systemd are? Mostly from a operational/security stand point.
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