41–50 of 238 posts
I'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?
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.
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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 is... interesting. Watch out for what packages you rely on, and what repository those packages come from. If they're in universe, expect your bug reports on Launchpad to go unanswered or unresolved. The only way to get fixes in them is to go upstream to Debian. But note that not every bug in a universe package is actually fixable or broken in a Debian world, because the bug might be down to interactions betwee…
Ubuntu is currently divided into four components: main, restricted, universe and multiverse. All binary packages in main and restricted are supported by the Ubuntu Security team for the life of an Ubuntu release, while binary packages in universe and multiverse are supported by the Ubuntu community.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/FAQ
If you care about security, disable universe and multiverse on servers, or use Debian Stable if you want a Debian-based distribution.
It seems designed to address a lot of these issues?
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Better have fewer high quality bug reports than more low quality reports. The latter just teaches you to ignore them.
That falsely presupposes that only people with poor quality bug reports would be put off from reporting bugs due to the interface. I've known people who can provide high quality, detailed bugs, decide not to because the extra hassles in reporting to Debian just aren't worth it to them.
I always wondered if Debian/Ubuntu could benefit from a "monorepo". It seems to work for other distributions, e.g. Alpine Linux and Homebrew.
https://github.com/alpinelinux/aports/tree/master/main
Right now every Debian package lives in a separate repo, or it doesn't even have to live in a repo at all AFAIK.
I think Debian has the most packages because their process is very loose and decoupled (as well as it being one of the oldest distros). But having tighter integration does help move things forward faster.
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.
In the end I switched all my servers to Ubuntu. It's been good and I love PPAs.
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.
I suspect with that I can probably find the repository, so that I can check whether the comment has already been fixed, then I can work out how to submit a patch or bug.
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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..)
> but random strangers not being allowed to push updates to my operating system in 5.34 seconds doesn’t sound all bad. To me. So that's what the frustrating to maintainers crumbling infrastructure and crappy tooling are for. Now it all makes sense! Actually, I'd very much prefer quickly pushed updates in case of severe security issues. Debian had lots of really ancient packages with problems in "stable" last time I l…
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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.
I'm sure it's true, all I'm saying is that if you reach the point of walking away, just walk away. A list of grievances at that point is just going to be seen as a parting shot rather than having any real chance of motivating change.