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Winding down my Debian involvement

michael.stapelberg.ch

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Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#111

Post by Foxboron »

chungy wrote: post #73

The Arch User Repository ( https://aur.archlinux.org/ ) seems to solve a lot of the collaboration issues. It is pretty painless to create PKGBUILD files to make a package and to upload a new one to the AUR. Most maintainers read the comments and accept patches on a timely manner, and there's even a way to forcibly relinquish a package if a maintainer is AWOL for significant time. On the other side of the spectrum, I'…

Yo! Trusted user from Arch Linux.

>On the other side of the spectrum, I've found that the official binary repositories for Arch Linux suffer many of the same issues described in the article for Debian. Patches being ignored and collaboration or involvement being near impossible.

Well, we still relay on svn internally so things are complicated to say the least. Even if we had things on git (which we are working on), I'm unsure if opening stuff up for outside collaborations like gentoo, alpine, void and nixos does is a good way. You need the proper tooling setup to make sure this isn't a burden on the maintainers.

>Even worse, the few people in charge of the official repositories are allowed to basically remove packages from the AUR with no interaction with the AUR maintainer, for the purpose of "promoting" them to the official repositories.

Which is true. Some people email maintainers of complicated packages before inclusion, and some also gives a headsup in the comments of the AUR. However, this is all done if the packager want to. There is no rules here. The removal is on the grounds that AUR packages shouldn't overlap with official ones.

>This has happened to me twice, and it resulted in what I think is a worse package in one of those cases.

I'm interested taking a look at this if you want :) foxboron@archlinux.org or just type in the comments.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#112

Post by wbl »

rleigh wrote: post #77
chubot wrote: 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…

Likewise for the BSD ports. There are advantages to both ways. However, a single repository permits changes to multiple packages in a single change. In Debian, simple transitions which affect multiple packages can take months or even years to fully propagate through the entire system. Not due to technical difficulty, but the logistics of coordinating the change. Debian's approach made sense at the time. Developers wh…

We've had CVS for years.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#113

Post by nextos »

bamboozled wrote: post #94
billsix wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, I've tried and failed to make Debian packages, and have no idea how to proceed. In contrast, with Gentoo and their documentation, it was straightforward for me to make my own additional, separate repo, look at other ebuilds to see how packaging works, and have everything just work. https://github.com/billsix/billsix-portage I submit ebuilds to Gentoo itself if I think others would benefit. As far as I can tel…

NixOS was also easy to get started with, I really like it !

NixOS (Nixpkgs actually) is indeed incredibly simple to contribute to.

It's a monorepo, and packages are declarative. So for most usecases, its just 5-10 LOC describing the source location, dependencies and build process.

After that, if it builds on your local copy of Nixpkgs, it will build on the same Nixpkgs commit as everything is purely functional. A simple PR is all you need.

For updates, there's super low burden too. Thanks to packages being declarative, everything is quite explicit. So a bot can check for source updates upstream, update your package and rebuild it. All it requires is simple maintainer approval.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#114

Post by arendtio »

Arkanosis wrote: post #91
jcoffland wrote: post #66

I've been using Debian for over 10 years and I still love it as a user. But as a developer, I find it extremely frustrating. I've several times attempted to figure out how to package my open-source projects [1] [2] for Debian but the process is a nightmare. As I understand it, I first have to find someone with appropriate privileges to mentor me. I should be able to just submit a potential package for review. Then th…

> there is a ton of documentation on creating packages but which 300 page guide is the right one to use is unclear So true. There seems like there are competing packaging approaches, some claiming others are outdated while themselves say the opposite. I've been willing to package a few of my open-source projects as well for almost a year, and out of frustration, I've ended up building my .deb packages manually and ho…

I like the Arch/AUR approach too as you don't even have to host your own repo. With a good AUR helper that system is quite convenient for maintainers as well as users.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#115

Post by kryptiskt »

jerf wrote: post #108
switz wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Media queries are ways to only apply a bunch of CSS on clients that fulfill some conditions.

If I write:

     @media (max-width: 500px) {
        p {
           font-style: italic;
        }
     }
It will turn the text in p tags italic on small screens.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#116

Post by perlgeek »

jcoffland wrote: post #66

I've been using Debian for over 10 years and I still love it as a user. But as a developer, I find it extremely frustrating. I've several times attempted to figure out how to package my open-source projects [1] [2] for Debian but the process is a nightmare. As I understand it, I first have to find someone with appropriate privileges to mentor me. I should be able to just submit a potential package for review. Then th…

> Then there is a ton of documentation on creating packages but which 300 page guide is the right one to use is unclear. And which set of packaging tools should I use?

I've run into the same problems, though I've only wanted to build packages for my own use, or company-internal use.

I think I've understood now how packaging is supposed to work, and have written a guide, shameless plug: http://leanpub.com/debian/c/hn (coupon link to get a free copy; feedback would be appreciated).

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#117

Post by perlgeek »

bnegreve wrote: post #40
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.

> dpkg -S path/to/file

In the case of config files, this only seems to work sometimes -- maybe if it wasn't modified by the user? Or if it came from a package directly, and wasn't generated from its {pre,post}inst scripts?

    $ dpkg -S /etc/hosts
    dpkg-query: no path found matching pattern /etc/hosts
    $ dpkg -S /etc/resolv.conf
    dpkg-query: no path found matching pattern /etc/resolv.conf
    $ dpkg -S /etc/bash_completion
    bash-completion: /etc/bash_completion

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#118

Post by Shoue »

bamboozled wrote: post #94
billsix wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, I've tried and failed to make Debian packages, and have no idea how to proceed. In contrast, with Gentoo and their documentation, it was straightforward for me to make my own additional, separate repo, look at other ebuilds to see how packaging works, and have everything just work. https://github.com/billsix/billsix-portage I submit ebuilds to Gentoo itself if I think others would benefit. As far as I can tel…

NixOS was also easy to get started with, I really like it !

Yeah the packaging part of NixOS/Nixpkgs is very pleasant. You write a "config" in the Nix language (example[1] of vorbis-tools, it's [1]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/fce8f26af6ef8209c7d282...

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#119

Post by shmerl »

rleigh wrote: post #79
xyzzyz wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's not just about "low quality" bug reports. The entire system is baroque and messy to use even for experts. I've been using it for 2+ decades now. As a maintainer, I frequently needed to change bug tickets. Tags, versions, dependencies, and other details. All need doing through the control@ email interface. Changes can take over half an hour to be processed and acknowledged. It's inefficient and tedious, and prone…

So why didn't it switch to a better system yet?

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#120

Post by immernerstheime »

Arkanosis wrote: post #91
jcoffland wrote: post #66

I've been using Debian for over 10 years and I still love it as a user. But as a developer, I find it extremely frustrating. I've several times attempted to figure out how to package my open-source projects [1] [2] for Debian but the process is a nightmare. As I understand it, I first have to find someone with appropriate privileges to mentor me. I should be able to just submit a potential package for review. Then th…

> there is a ton of documentation on creating packages but which 300 page guide is the right one to use is unclear So true. There seems like there are competing packaging approaches, some claiming others are outdated while themselves say the opposite. I've been willing to package a few of my open-source projects as well for almost a year, and out of frustration, I've ended up building my .deb packages manually and ho…

but which 300 page guide is the right one to use

I think every one of the 300 page is the right one to use and every page has an use and 300 pages make a ocean of users and casual users and well if you have 300 sailors you will not say a comment in an unpolite manner not unpolite! towards any of the sailor because with 300 hundred sailor everyOne watches his surfboard or standup pad or cayak or bamboo made jangade or little row a boat sail small boat you sail it you say it or you dont sail it free will always everyone

but a small row a boat is not a bot

is a boat and a row and a One who rows and One who sails

And is not a Ship nor a 33 times 3 sailor of the Ship nor A Land Support Sailor even...

Clear as clear water revial by Creedence rain whatever, Clear!

thanks

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