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Winding down my Debian involvement
11–20 of 238 posts
Re: Winding down my Debian involvement
#12The post shares several pain points with Debian's slow, aging change-process and integration-infrastructure. Open question: If Debian contributors feel the need to drop out and move on due to these pain points, are there less-painful Linux-distribution projects out there that are getting more of these pain points right they can flock to? Is this a sign that Debian needs to reform, or that other, newer distributions a…
I switched all my servers to Ubuntu years ago when people were telling me "Ubuntu is no server distribution". I honestly never looked back.
Ubuntu LTS distributions have been the perfect mix of new-ish packages and stability for us.
Re: Winding down my Debian involvement
#13The post shares several pain points with Debian's slow, aging change-process and integration-infrastructure. Open question: If Debian contributors feel the need to drop out and move on due to these pain points, are there less-painful Linux-distribution projects out there that are getting more of these pain points right they can flock to? Is this a sign that Debian needs to reform, or that other, newer distributions a…
I switched all my servers to Ubuntu years ago when people were telling me "Ubuntu is no server distribution". I honestly never looked back.
I think Ubuntu suffers equally from every single pain point that Michael describes in his post.
Re: Winding down my Debian involvement
#14I used debian for over 10 years and never managed to contribute anything. 10 Minutes after using homebrew for the first time I sent in a PR to update a package to the latest version and update the built dependencies.
Honestly, as both a Mac and a Debian user, I’m not sure which one I prefer. I understand your frustration, but random strangers not being allowed to push updates to my operating system in 5.34 seconds doesn’t sound all bad. To me.
(Obviously not that TFA paints a rosy picture..)
Re: Winding down my Debian involvement
#15The post shares several pain points with Debian's slow, aging change-process and integration-infrastructure. Open question: If Debian contributors feel the need to drop out and move on due to these pain points, are there less-painful Linux-distribution projects out there that are getting more of these pain points right they can flock to? Is this a sign that Debian needs to reform, or that other, newer distributions a…
I switched all my servers to Ubuntu years ago when people were telling me "Ubuntu is no server distribution". I honestly never looked back.
Given that ubuntu depends heavily on debian maintainers and governance, what exactly does this improve?
Re: Winding down my Debian involvement
#16I've been using Debian / Ubuntu for many years, as much due to inertia and familiarity as anything else. And I have a lot of respect for the project.
If I wanted to start being a contributor to a distribution, which one would be the best to dive in to?
Re: Winding down my Debian involvement
#17I noticed a mistake in a comment in a default file in the /etc/ directory - pretty certain the file is part of Debian (although this was on Ubuntu).
I thought I would try to fix it.
Two hours googling later and I couldn't even work out who the maintainer was. I don't like eating other people's time, but I even tried using IRC.
Re: Winding down my Debian involvement
#18I used debian for over 10 years and never managed to contribute anything. 10 Minutes after using homebrew for the first time I sent in a PR to update a package to the latest version and update the built dependencies.
Honestly, as both a Mac and a Debian user, I’m not sure which one I prefer. I understand your frustration, but random strangers not being allowed to push updates to my operating system in 5.34 seconds doesn’t sound all bad. To me. (Obviously not that TFA paints a rosy picture..)
Those changes are reviewed by maintainers. The fact that a random stranger is able to push a change and get it reviewed, approved, merged, and available in minutes should be the goal of most open source projects. On the contrary, older projects tend to be too reactionary when it comes to infrastructure tools, so in turn they get very slow interactions. This becomes a demotivator for anybody who is used to more efficient workflows.
It is not a coincidence that the author became demotivated after doing some professional experience.
Re: Winding down my Debian involvement
#19For me this is the telling part::
"""When I joined Debian, I was still studying, i.e. I had luxurious amounts of spare time."""
OSS has stopped (if it ever truly was) being a part time endeavour. I know from bitter personal experience one cannout up with a lot of bureaucracy and process of it is your day job - you have time to get through the rubbish in order to find the diamonds.
How we (as a society now utterly dependent on OSS) manage this problem is on a par with how we manage journalism - they are bigger questions than I have easy answers to