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Winding down my Debian involvement

michael.stapelberg.ch

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Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#32

Post by ams6110 »

Comes off to me as a guy who's just tired of the project after 10 years. Understandable that he finds annoyance and frustration in so many things. It's like a marriage that has reached the point where one or both partners have decided they don't want to be together anymore.

As an outsider, to me the list of complaints sounds kind of petty and whining. Better to just say "I'm moving on, I wish everyone the best" and be done with it.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#33

Post by chacha2 »

gjasny wrote: post #11
glennpratt wrote: post #2

The sidebar makes this barely readable on Pixel 2. The markdown is easy to read: https://github.com/stapelberg/hugo/blob/master/content/posts...

Reader mode in Firefox works like a charm.

You can also enable reader mode in Chrome if you turn on its flag in 'chrome://flags'.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#34

Post by shmerl »

xyzzyz wrote: post #21
shmerl wrote: post #7

Personally, I'm annoyed at Debian still not having a Web frontend for bug filing. Practically all other distros have some kind of issue tracker site that allows filing bugs through it. Using reportbug or e-mail feels way less comfortable in comparison.

Better have fewer high quality bug reports than more low quality reports. The latter just teaches you to ignore them.

I doubt making filing bug reports uncomfortable is increasing their quality.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#35

Post by glennpratt »

ams6110 wrote: post #32

Comes off to me as a guy who's just tired of the project after 10 years. Understandable that he finds annoyance and frustration in so many things. It's like a marriage that has reached the point where one or both partners have decided they don't want to be together anymore. As an outsider, to me the list of complaints sounds kind of petty and whining. Better to just say "I'm moving on, I wish everyone the best" and b…

You should try patching Debian packages. I too am an outsider, but I have had to modify Debian and it's brutal; every package is different and the number of entry points into the tooling is mind boggling. I have bugs I've never filed over years because I don't understand the particular packages process.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#38

Post by microtonal »

vertex-four wrote: post #23
wgjordan wrote: post #5

The 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…

NixOS/nixpkgs is exceptionally friendly and open to new developers, and even just a one-off patch is simple to do.

Indeed. I started using NixOS and Nix a bit more than six months ago and I was contributing patches within no-time. One can just submit a pull request on GitHub (with the proper format) and a lot of aspects are automated: e.g. the impact of the change (in terms of packages that are effected) is automatically determined and someone with the right privileges can request a build. Some PRs linger around for a longer time, but most of my PRs were merged within the day. Also, I received useful feedback if a PR needed more polish.

What helped me a lot with Nix is that you can easily make your own local derivations. Derivations are usually short [1] and bear little risk with sandboxed builds enabled. Basically, you do a nix-shell -p mypackage, you get dropped in a shell with your derivation, but it does not affect the rest of your system.

[1] Example of a C++ library: https://github.com/danieldk/nix-home/blob/master/overlays/30...

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#40

Post by bnegreve »

robocat wrote: post #17

I 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.

For next time:

    dpkg -S path/to/file
gives the the name of the package containing a file, and

    dpkg -s package-name
gives you the name of the maintainer.
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