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Winding down my Debian involvement

michael.stapelberg.ch

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Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#101

Post by rleigh »

stouset wrote: post #86
lazyjones wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You're misunderstanding the point of Debian. Debian's "stable" release is that. Stable. No updates are issued for packages except for critical security updates, which are backported to the released version. It's essentially an LTS release. This isn't what everyone wants or needs, but if you do, Debian does it very well.

Homebrew is effectively a "rolling release" with fast turnover of package versions. So in that sense it's not directly comparable to Debian stable (or even unstable). That rapid turnover has led to numerous breaking bugs over the last five years or so that I've been using it. It's a lot simpler, but it also lacks the sophisticated versioned dependencies which dpkg/apt provide. Both have their tradeoffs, but I wouldn't want to use Homebrew for anything serious; it can break at any moment, and can be very painful to manage. It's got better over the years, but still has some way to go to match up to Linux package management.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#102

Post by secure »

jdub wrote: post #88

Improving the distribution developer experience was one of the early objectives of Ubuntu, and where it had the least amount of success. It's a pity, because perhaps the only useful thing you could get out of essentially forking Debian (in itself not a great idea, but say you wanted to...) is independence from its technical and social processes. Ubuntu's processes are different, but not wildly improved... primarily b…

Thanks for the perspective! Ubuntu’s founding was before my time.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#103

Post by secure »

coleifer wrote: post #93

So some guy realizes that the vast resources and top-down direction available at large corporations don't translate to a huge open-source project (which itself is compromised of tons of open-source projects)? And it took him 10 years to realize this? Seriously though, I'm amazed at how well Debian just works. And I know it's because enough people are willing to put up with these types of frustrations. Thanks for the…

I’m fully aware of how spoilt one can be as a developer at a large corporation, but I believe I have toned down my expectations reasonably, and still felt compelled to write this article and step down.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#104

Post by monocasa »

icebraining wrote: post #80
hkt wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had this exact same problem and also gave up. It was absurd. The amount of friction in contributing to Debian is enormous. And, at the risk of upsetting people.. it is time to move away from mailing lists, especially for submitting bugs and managing packages.

Debian hasn't used mailing lists for reporting bugs since the 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debbugs

Debbugs is basically a mailing list.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#105

Post by rmk2 »

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…

openSUSE uses the Open Build Service[0] to build, well, openSUSE. OBS also supports other distributions etc., but it makes it fairly easy to put up a package.[1]

For RPM-based distros (e.g. openSUSE), you write a .spec-file, check it in via OBS's version control alongside your sources, and off you go. OBS builds the package (and pulls in dependencies as needed etc.) and publishes the result as a repository with GPG keys and all the jazz, which you can just add to your own distro, and which is openly visible, so everybody else can use your package(s), too.

OBS also supports forking existing packages, and you can merge them back together, which means you can fix something in an existing package (whether a distro-package or something somebody else put up) and if they accept the changes, congratulations, you just fixed something in the distribution.

This means a lot of building, compilation, versioning etc. is out in the open, and you always have the sources available on top of it.

As an aside: I doubt people will "flock" to openSUSE, since many people sneer at them for no good reason (YaST, still?!), but they do a lot of good work, are good upstream contributors (like RedHat and unlike Ubuntu) and some of the tooling is absolutely amazing, except that nobody really knows about it.

[0]: https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Build_Service

[1]: https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/distribution_build_de...

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#107

Post by rmk2 »

mongol wrote: post #26
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…

I am surprised OpenSuse does not get more attention. I feel its infrastructure, with the open build service etc, should be aťtractive to many?

Ugh, just saw your comment now. I wrote a bit more in a sibling comment about openSUSE. For some reason, people seem to either sneer at openSUSE (probably people who go way back?) or are simply unaware of anything it does and/or its existence. I briefly asked the people at the openSUSE stand at FOSDEM 2019 why they don't advertise things such as OBS more, and the answer suggested that some people basically don't see a point in it? It's a pity.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#108

Post by jerf »

switz wrote: post #60
secure wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Put that in a media query to only target phones/small devices."

Tone: Honest question. What's that, exactly?

I've been trying to figure that out off and on for the last, oh, 5 or 6 years, and I keep bouncing off the problem as being too complicated to be worth it for my personal site. If there's a clean answer that has developed in the time since I basically gave up, I'd (again, no sarcasm) love to hear it. But I'd probably need a link to something; Google is clogged with old stuff here.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#109

Post by noir_lord »

josteink wrote: post #92
asveikau wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's become too slow and bureaucratic. When I first used Debian in the 90s it had a reputation for being slow and bureaucratic.

And unlike most distros which were around back then, Debian is still here today, so it must be good for something . That said, I agree anything Debian (and thus Ubuntu too) and FSF feels awkwardly baroque to work with these days. Old email-based systems, bickering over politics and minor issues rather than the subject at hand, for weeks or months... and no standard CI?!? With all that I too find myself spending my ti…

> Debian is still here today, so it must be good for something.

It’s stable and I know they’ll still be around 5 years from now.

They also very rarely break anything on updates.

There are only three Linux distress I’d run in production, RHEL, Debian or Ubuntu (depending.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#110

Post by wbl »

rleigh wrote: post #101
stouset wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're misunderstanding the point of Debian. Debian's "stable" release is that. Stable. No updates are issued for packages except for critical security updates, which are backported to the released version. It's essentially an LTS release. This isn't what everyone wants or needs, but if you do, Debian does it very well.

Homebrew is effectively a "rolling release" with fast turnover of package versions. So in that sense it's not directly comparable to Debian stable (or even unstable). That rapid turnover has led to numerous breaking bugs over the last five years or so that I've been using it. It's a lot simpler, but it also lacks the sophisticated versioned dependencies which dpkg/apt provide. Both have their tradeoffs, but I wouldn'…

Try macports for a BSD style packaging for the mac.
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