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Winding down my Debian involvement

michael.stapelberg.ch

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Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#181

Post by crehn »

billsix wrote: post #69
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…

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…

Shameless plug: https://github.com/hoffa/debpack

It won't pass all lintian tests due to the ridiculous requirements and useless ceremony "correct" Debian packages need. Still working on it.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#182

Post by msh »

giovannibajo1 wrote: post #18
nothrabannosir wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..)

Those changes are reviewed by maintainers. The fact that a random stranger is able to push a change and get it reviewed, approved, merged, and available in minutes should be the goal of most open source projects. On the contrary, older projects tend to be too reactionary when it comes to infrastructure tools, so in turn they get very slow interactions. This becomes a demotivator for anybody who is used to more effici…

> The fact that a random stranger is able to push a change and get it reviewed, approved, merged, and available in minutes should be the goal of most open source projects.

That sounds like a security risk to me.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#183

Post by regularfry »

forty wrote: post #175

I have a naive question (I'm a long time Debian user, but never really tried to contribute): why isn't all the Debian in a single git repository? I'm not suggesting to vendor all the third party code but only all the packaging information, like, say, libreelec does (and I assume many others)

The simplest answer is that it predates repositories of that size being a practical idea, and it's not changed because of institutional inertia.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#184

Post by vthriller »

bhaak wrote: post #178

> Gmane used to paper over this issue, but Gmane’s availability over the last few years has been spotty, to say the least (it is down as I write this). The Gmane web interface is not just down but shut down for good: https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2016/07/28/the-end-of-gmane/com... So this issue won't get better without Debian doing something themselves.

It's a shame that the only thing Gmane v2 effort [0] yielded is just a couple of blog posts. Why did they stop so abruptly?..

[0] http://home.gmane.org

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#185

Post by dTal »

arendtio wrote: post #114
Arkanosis wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The problem with the AUR is its semi-official status takes the pressure off the 'community' binary repositories, while not being up to the same standards - many packages are out of date or don't build, and the complete lack of gatekeeping renders the user vulnerable to malicious packages. Note that "AUR helpers" are not officially condoned by Arch Linux, despite the system being unusable without them - officially you're supposed to examine all the PKGBUILDs of all dependencies manually to make sure they're safe.

I prefer the Void Linux approach - every "template" (equivalent to Arch's PKGBUILD) is kept in a single, monolithic git repository, and the barrier to contribution is kept low; just submit a pull request, and a core developer will review and accept it. This way all packages have binary builds and all packages have had at least nominal review, yet the repository is surprisingly broad. And if you need something that isn't in the repository, adapting an AUR PKGBUILD is trivial.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#186

Post by raverbashing »

liuw wrote: post #75

I love Debian as a user. I considered becoming a DM then DD -- I read all the relevant documents and tested water with maintaining a package I used -- but ultimately gave up due to the bureaucracy and politics involved. The last straw was this: https://lwn.net/Articles/704608/

Yeah that was painful to read. And all too typical.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#187

Post by dTal »

ktjfi wrote: post #47
bnegreve wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All mails I've sent to maintainers of packages regarding issues with them have been ignored. I think they prefer you to use the bug tracker. (Which sucks, so I always end up doing nothing about it.) In the end I switched all my servers to Ubuntu. It's been good and I love PPAs.

My experience: I submitted a bug once, with patch, using the official bug tracker and jumping through all the hoops. It was ignored completely. When I went on IRC, the response was "perhaps you'd like to become the package maintainer?".

The bug remains to this day.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#188

Post by pawelmurias »

msh wrote: post #182
giovannibajo1 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those changes are reviewed by maintainers. The fact that a random stranger is able to push a change and get it reviewed, approved, merged, and available in minutes should be the goal of most open source projects. On the contrary, older projects tend to be too reactionary when it comes to infrastructure tools, so in turn they get very slow interactions. This becomes a demotivator for anybody who is used to more effici…

> The fact that a random stranger is able to push a change and get it reviewed, approved, merged, and available in minutes should be the goal of most open source projects. That sounds like a security risk to me.

How much safer is it if pushing in a malicious change takes two months?

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#189

Post by Conan_Kudo »

vbernat wrote: post #169
Conan_Kudo wrote: post #151

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…

As a Debian Developer, I often point people to Fedora to show you can be a community distribution very similar to Debian and still be modern in your practice. Your post is insightful.

Heh, and I still forgot stuff. I forgot that we created HyperKitty[1], the Mailman 3 frontend that offers web forum style interaction workflows while still remaining a mailing list for people used to that model. This was precisely because mailing lists have historically been horrible for new people to interact with.

[1]: https://hyperkitty.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#190

Post by ckastner »

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…

My first upload will soon be 10 years ago. One thing that is definitely noticeable is that while creating a package is still by no means trivial, it has definitely become much, much easier.

10 years ago, you had a handful of very idiosyncratic build helpers to help you manage your package.

Today, effectively it's just one [1], debhelper, and it has become trivial to build packages with it. It's a very powerful framework that can be overridden do do basically anything you like, but usually automagically does the right thing. Gone are the days where you had to write an unwieldy debian/rules file.

3 years ago, you had X version control systems supported: git, svn, mercurial, cvs, and who nows what else. Sounds unreasonable, right? Well, when you rely on volunteer work, you need to live with the fact that volunteers will choose the particular tooling they like to work with.

Today, you have Salsa which is a GitLab instance, and people apparently just learned to deal with it, and the world hasn't come tumbling down.

I absolutely agree with the author that some things are just wrong within Debian. However, I believe these are inherent to the nature of an organization comprised entirely of volunteers; achieving consensus becomes really hard because nobody wants to be told how to spend their free time.

On the other hand, being involved in Debian has also been an incredibly formative experience. I believe Debian does some things right that others still fail at or trail after.

[1] https://anarc.at/blog/2019-02-05-debian-build-systems/

[2] https://salsa.debian.org

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