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Winding down my Debian involvement

michael.stapelberg.ch

51–60 of 238 posts

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#51
post #37

Not really a fan of "I'm leaving X because of free time and also this 20-point list of why you suck."

I’m sorry you got that impression from the article. I’m not leaving over less free time, I’m leaving because of the issues I describe. Reduced free time amplified some issues, though.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#52
post #29
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think ubuntu has done a decent job with universe by and large. I find it in much better shape overall than epel. A good way to judge the health of these auxiliary repos is to look at the age of chromium. Ubuntu is generally good with patching at least security issues in universe. epel is still running behind by a month or two despite the security disclosures. So RH ought to take a page from Canonical's book when it comes to epel and make it a more official thing than the entirely community driven thing it is right now.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#53
post #46

Instead, currently, all packages become lint-unclean, all maintainers need to read up on what the new thing is, how it might break, whether/how it affects them, manually run some tests, and finally decide to opt in. This causes a lot of overhead and manually executed mechanical changes across packages. I always wondered if Debian/Ubuntu could benefit from a "monorepo". It seems to work for other distributions, e.g. A…

I don't think it necessarily needs a monorepo, but having every package on Salsa (Debian's GitLab installation) would help.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#54
post #46

Instead, currently, all packages become lint-unclean, all maintainers need to read up on what the new thing is, how it might break, whether/how it affects them, manually run some tests, and finally decide to opt in. This causes a lot of overhead and manually executed mechanical changes across packages. I always wondered if Debian/Ubuntu could benefit from a "monorepo". It seems to work for other distributions, e.g. A…

Nix / NixOS[1], and Gentoo[2] also use monorepos with some provision for overlays.

1: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs

2: https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#55
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But it probably does have a better chance of motivating change and maybe you are still trying to help. Obviously there are different ways to air your grievances, privately might be better, sure. I'm not sure if you are advocating for leaving without even giving some reasons in private. That to me would be an actively unhelpful way to leave.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#56
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, it assumes that quality ratio varies by reporting mechanism. 9 good reports and 1 bad report are better than 18 good reports and 82 bad reports.

That's subjective - I would much rather spend a few minutes sorting out the 82 bad ones than miss 9 good reports. (Actually, I would much rather have 18 good reports and spend several minutes trying to see if there's anything of value in the 82 bad ones: see for instance the high-school kid who found the Apple FaceTime vulnerability and who couldn't figure out how to report it.)

One of the principles of the Debian Social Contract reads:

We will not hide problems. We will keep our entire bug report database open for public view at all times. Reports that people file online will promptly become visible to others.

Dissuading people from filing bug reports feels like it's not in the spirit of this principle. You're basically hiding problems because you don't think the problem reporter is worthy.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#57
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the tone of the article was pretty stoic and so I didn't take it as "whining". I believe he just sees no future in an ever growing Debian bureaucracy and decided to voice the reason he is moving on. I've been with Debian since it's inception and can relate to what he is seeing.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#58
While this is sad and painful to read, I can't say I'm surprised.

The problems listed are precisely the kind of problems that Redhat strategically supports fedora with, in terms of investment of resources. For all the hate Redhat receives it has consistently been a good community member by being willing to help fedora in areas that it knows are hard and yet not 'cool' enough to attract volunteer contributions.

What has Ubuntu done for the debian community along the same lines?

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#60
post #24

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

Sorry about that! I’m not great with Web Design, as you can tell. If anyone wants to contribute a CSS fix, or just a pointer to a good article on how to fix this, I’d be very grateful!

You could add the following CSS to the container (`.row` here but you should make the class name a bit more specific) which will stack the sidebar and your content into a backwards column (so the sidebar shows up after scrolling past the content, which looks and feels ok for a quick & scrappy mobile fix.

    display: flex;
    flex-direction: reverse-column;
Put that in a media query to only target phones/small devices.

Feel free to message me if you're confused and would prefer a fast PR, but you strike me as someone who wouldn't mind learning a bit & I'm in Morocco with limited internet.

edit: I would also move the branding (name & logo) above the content so people know who they're reading. And adjust the margins a bit. Frontend is Fun.

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