Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Leaderless Debian

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 119 posts

Re: Leaderless Debian

#21

Post by Steltek »

baldfat wrote: post #2

I know how loved Debian has been for the community and all that has been built on it but as a user I kind of always felt that Debian was always doing their own thing, at their own pace and their own requirements. Maybe this is a sign that that way of running a Linux community is over? We really have a fairly robust ecosystem and development has become much more refined? I might be missing the inner politics of the co…

Can you expand on your comment a bit? Maybe I've got rose colored glasses but I felt Linux had more of community feel ~10 years ago. When Ubuntu was ascendant but still had that scrappy feel, lots of Gentoo users were funrolling loops, and Red Hat wasn't owned by IBM.

There's also the problem (IMHO) of OSX having pulled otherwise Linux-first developers away. I feel an especially heavy effect on desktop efforts like Wayland and Systemd.

Some time since then, things went a bit "weird".

Re: Leaderless Debian

#22

Post by the_trapper »

flowless wrote: post #19
pulse7 wrote: post #17

I wonder how this will affect the Raspbian as default Raspberry Pi distro...

I wish it gets obsolete as it's an abomination.

How is it an abomination?

It seems to have served its purpose well so far. It is relatively easy to use and hasn't gotten in the way of anything I've wanted to use it for yet.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#24

Post by the_trapper »

kylek wrote: post #10
exabrial wrote: post #3

I would hope an Amazon, Google, Digital Ocean, Rackspace, or other major vps player could get someone involved for an oss project critical to their business. I guess as a user I frequently take this for granted.

I'd hope not. An organization like the Wikimedia Foundation or Apache would be a better fit.

I agree... Debian's corporate independence is a feature not a bug.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#25

Post by bloopernova »

devnonymous wrote: post #18
bloopernova wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't (to my knowledge) a large enterprise-supported version of Debian like Red Hat / CentOS. You could argue Ubuntu, but Ubuntu is significantly different in focus to Debian, while Red Hat is almost identical to CentOS. Debian also, unjustly, suffers from its non-corporate image/reputation. Most of my professional sysadmin career has been spent managing RPM-based Linux distributions. The time I was asked to ne…

The relationship between Debian and Ubuntu is more akin to that between fedora and RHEL. Having a different focus than fedora, in fact, one could say almost radically different[1] hasn't stopped Redhat from contributing people, hardware and support to fedora -- leaving the volunteers to focus on contributions -- be it by code or as you point out documentation. Help with 'administrative' or grunt-work tasks goes a lon…

Red Hat have been pretty smart with the whole Fedora/RHEL/CentOS progression. You get to mess with cutting edge stuff in Fedora (and Fedora Silverlight), and then take what works to fold into RHEL. Then you rebuild RHEL into CentOS so people use the free and binary compatible version of your product, which leads them to use the supported/sold version in production.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#26

Post by Tomte »

I've just browsed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Debian_project_leade...

There are quite a few names I've never heard of, and some that I've heard of, but not as DPL.

The last six (after Hocevar) are total blanks for me.

Have my interests changed so much, or did the recent DPLs keep a much lower profile?

Re: Leaderless Debian

#27

Post by joshstrange »

> Since Debian developers are famously an agreeable and non-argumentative bunch, there should be no problem with that aspect of things.

Is this sarcasm? I don't read LWN enough to know if they are dryly joking and I don't read Debian listserv's to know if it's true or not.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#28

Post by baldfat »

zzzcpan wrote: post #8
baldfat wrote: post #2

I know how loved Debian has been for the community and all that has been built on it but as a user I kind of always felt that Debian was always doing their own thing, at their own pace and their own requirements. Maybe this is a sign that that way of running a Linux community is over? We really have a fairly robust ecosystem and development has become much more refined? I might be missing the inner politics of the co…

Maybe this is an effect linux ecosystem fragmentation of recent years has on communities.

I would say the opposite. Things have been consolidating in companies and in technologies. It used to be that you had 10 options for everything. Now things are getting more and more standardized. I like to think we are much better today in Linux than when we were 10 years ago. You use to pick out what applications were important and see what version was supported by what distro. That isn't a thing anymore.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#29

Post by FerretFred »

pulse7 wrote: post #17

I wonder how this will affect the Raspbian as default Raspberry Pi distro...

I love Raspbian on my Raspberries, but I've also had success with Arch. It would be a pain to have to switch away from Debian but at least there's a "Plan B". As for more inexperienced Raspberry users, there are other OSes but undoubtedly without the wealth of libraries etc that Raspbian has.

Re: Leaderless Debian

#30

Post by magpi3 »

joshstrange wrote: post #27

> Since Debian developers are famously an agreeable and non-argumentative bunch, there should be no problem with that aspect of things. Is this sarcasm? I don't read LWN enough to know if they are dryly joking and I don't read Debian listserv's to know if it's true or not.

Yes it is sarcasm
Post reply on HN