Winding down my Debian involvement

So I've been involved in Fedora for as long as Michael has been involved in Debian, and I have attempted branching out into other distribution communities over the years.

To this day, the Debian community is the only community where I have not been able to get past the initial stages to get involved. And you don't have to look too hard to see that I'm in quite a few communities...

There's a lot of parallels to Debian and Fedora when I started in the project over a decade ago.

The clear divider in how the two projects evolved was that Fedora elected to implement a lazy consensus model for decision-making, and developed a culture with a bias for action and improvement. Debian requires full consensus (generally) and has a culture that favors inaction. This difference is what has kept me in the Fedora Project for over a decade, and I still enjoy working in that community and doing my part to improve the greater Linux community and ecosystem.

Over the years, Fedora shed a lot of its more complex processes and developed simpler tools and supporting infrastructure to make it easier to use and contribute to the development of the distribution and outlying projects. Over the years, I've seen us replace our buildsystem infrastructure[1][2][3], develop APIs and protocols for weaving tools together[4], migrate SCMs and create the first ever binary store system for Git[5][6][7], develop tools to simplify complex tasks[8][9][10], and build replacements to proprietary or overly-complex systems and support open standards and interoperable systems[11][12], all to benefit our users, our contributors, and our ecosystem. We've taken a similar hammer to our processes and structures so that we enable a wider range of people to be involved, representing their concerns and making our community healthier than before.

We're still continuing down this path of making it easier for people to leverage the Fedora Project resources for the benefit of the community with things like COPR[13], CI on packages with Koschei[14] and CentOS CI integration for projects and packages[15], etc.

That's not to say Fedora is perfect, mind you. It still has some technical and process warts. But I'm proud of the fact that our community is still actively trying to improve our processes, our tools, and our distribution. We're not afraid to make things better, and our community generally wants to make the Linux world a better place.

[1]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraSummit/NewBuildSystem

[2]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/CoreExtrasMerg...

[3]: http://koji.build/

[4]: https://fedmsg.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

[5]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Dist_Git_Proposal

[6]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Dist_Git_Project

[7]: https://github.com/release-engineering/dist-git

[8]: https://www.mankier.com/1/fedpkg

[9]: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/docs/

[10]: https://mirrormanager.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[11]: https://pagure.io/pagure

[12]: https://ipsilon-project.org/

[13]: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/

[14]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Koschei

[15]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CI/Pipeline

Look at some of the other examples people are bringing up to compare against, though. Gentoo definitely predates the modern dev culture, for example.

Been using Debian more or less exclusively since Potato. And I'm a bit surprised by the tone of these comments and even more by the content of the blog post. To me, Debian had become an irrelevant fossil not because of any technical factor such as those listed here or there (lack of powerful tools to go over packages silos, bug reporting tools, communication tools, packaging tools...) Indeed I tend to believe not following the industry /best/ practices is actually an asset in many cases, sometime even a Debian landmark that served them and their users well (for instance, refusing to stick to release dates and favouring rock-solid new releases instead); Indeed, "they still use X why everybody else is using Y by now" should sounds very suspicious to many ears.

To me as an outsider the obvious cause for Debian obsolescence is, and has been for more than a decade, the growing bureaucracy and consequently the lack of new blood and innovation. This opinion anchored the day when, participating to a Debian bug squashing party surrounded by similarly minded hackers, we were approached by a DD asking if he could check our identity papers in order to "simplify the process" of accepting our fixes.

Organisations, and companies too to some degree, can sometime be best described by what they stand against. Since the beginning Debian has been standing against a hostile environment: I mentioned already the industry bad practices, but also part of this hostile outer world were the negligent upstreams, the unaware users, the cheating corporations and the misguided FOSS enthusiasts. Some bureaucracy was certainly in order to protect against them all. But I'm afraid one of Debian legacy will be that the DD will personify the FOSS bureaucrat, with its 300 pages long packaging manual and 30 steps long contributor approval processes, in the cultural pantheon of the distributions of the future.

I like it.

    #!/bin/bash
    set -e
    set -u

    if ! [[ ${1:-} ]]; then
        echo please provide a file
    fi

    dpkg -s $(dpkg -S "$1" | cut -d: -f 1) | grep Maintainer

OBS is so good, Fedora (my distro of choice) has a clone of it called Copr: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/