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20 years as a Debian maintainer

suihkulokki.blogspot.com

111–120 of 126 posts

Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's another standard? Why couldn't the deb guys just support Flatpak... damnit

Debian supports Flatpak: https://packages.debian.org/flatpak

Aww yiss muthafucka

Thats very nice. Although I wonder what Debian's 'official' container format will be.. almost everyone else seems to be standardizing around Flatpak so it'd be nice if Debian did as well, especially since that will mean Ubuntu (hopefully) will switch to it in the future as well instead of Snappy, same as the whole Upstart -> SystemD story.

Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#112
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the connection. I didn't say that they have more packages, just that they have very good packaging tooling that makes it simple to make consistent packages.

When you package 24000 things, you find significant diversity in build systems, languages, source code, testing etc. It isn't easy to package all of that in simple ways.

I don't know exactly to what the 24000 number refers to. Solus Project does already have 5000 packages in the repos. I think that is quite an accomplishment for a pretty small team of 3-4 people with some help from the community.

Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian supports Flatpak: https://packages.debian.org/flatpak

Aww yiss muthafucka Thats very nice. Although I wonder what Debian's 'official' container format will be.. almost everyone else seems to be standardizing around Flatpak so it'd be nice if Debian did as well, especially since that will mean Ubuntu (hopefully) will switch to it in the future as well instead of Snappy, same as the whole Upstart -> SystemD story.

I think most Debian people think all these container things are a nightmare so none of them will be "official", just available to folks who want them.

Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#114
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to what rleigh said, you could package them for Debian :) https://mentors.debian.net/intro-maintainers

The amount of documentation there suggests it's not so easy. Especially when you're trying to get something unrelated done.

If you are doing something unrelated you probably aren't interested in packaging some dependency for Debian, so you may as well just manually compile and bundle your deps into a container format like docker/appimage.

Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#115
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience, you're also rolling the dice when you suspend Linux. My x99 workstation, z77 workstation, and XPS 13 have all failed to resume before. But Windows has done the same. I guess ACPI is a mess.

> But Windows has done the same. I guess ACPI is a mess.

Of course, you don't mention macOS. I never had issues with suspend on any of my MBPs. If I did, it turned out that was my battery got empty, and the few times this happened I did think about suspend failing. Turned out I was wrong.

Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aww yiss muthafucka Thats very nice. Although I wonder what Debian's 'official' container format will be.. almost everyone else seems to be standardizing around Flatpak so it'd be nice if Debian did as well, especially since that will mean Ubuntu (hopefully) will switch to it in the future as well instead of Snappy, same as the whole Upstart -> SystemD story.

I think most Debian people think all these container things are a nightmare so none of them will be "official", just available to folks who want them.

Frankly more and more it seems that whatever comes out of Gnome/Freedesktop these days do so to fix perceived problems with Fedora but end up being applied across the Linux ecosystem for "reasons"...

Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#117
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, you're also rolling the dice when you suspend Linux. My x99 workstation, z77 workstation, and XPS 13 have all failed to resume before. But Windows has done the same. I guess ACPI is a mess.

> But Windows has done the same. I guess ACPI is a mess. Of course, you don't mention macOS. I never had issues with suspend on any of my MBPs. If I did, it turned out that was my battery got empty, and the few times this happened I did think about suspend failing. Turned out I was wrong.

Thing is though it's an OS tied to a certain hardware since years. If Apple couldn't provide a seamless experience it'd be pure incompetence.

Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#118
post #109

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…

> 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 is in many scenarios. If I have a little app I want to package then it becomes my responsibility. For commercial software I make it always is and this is part of the reason that linux sucks…

>It is in many scenarios. If I have a little app I want to package then it becomes my responsibility. For commercial software I make it always is and this is part of the reason that linux sucks for commercial software.

You are talking about proprietary software, where developers have unjust power over users. If you want to distribute such software then yes, you have to do the work of making binaries for each distro you want to support by yourself. I would argue that it's not GNU/Linux that sucks here. If instead you gave your users freedom by using a free software license on the source code, then others may package the software for use on the system of their choosing.

Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#119
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, you're also rolling the dice when you suspend Linux. My x99 workstation, z77 workstation, and XPS 13 have all failed to resume before. But Windows has done the same. I guess ACPI is a mess.

> But Windows has done the same. I guess ACPI is a mess. Of course, you don't mention macOS. I never had issues with suspend on any of my MBPs. If I did, it turned out that was my battery got empty, and the few times this happened I did think about suspend failing. Turned out I was wrong.

Good for you. I've never owned a MBP, and this thread is about switching from Debian to FreeBSD.

Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't necessarily disagree. I think your third sentence still implies two styles, which is contradicting your first. Nix and Guix don't work on Windows, right? They're still not close to a solution until they do.

If you're on Windows, then fine use whatever is available. A language specific package manager is about as good as it gets there. There are no good package managers for Windows, and I don't think there can be. I don't even know if you can isolate builds in a container like you can on GNU/Linux. That's a crucial OS feature. Besides, I aim to liberate users, not enslave them, so I develop for the GNU system, not Window…

There are several package managers for Windows:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_package_manag...

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