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Why is Debian the way it is?

blog.liw.fi

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Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#31

Post by switch007 »

bfrog wrote: post #3

Well certainly part of it is much of the .deb ecosystem still feels like its stuck in the late 90s linux era to me. But maybe I'm alone on that gut feel.

Deb packages just need reinventing by some younger people.

I’m thinking: implemented in nodejs with a cli with emojis and animations.

The GitHub read me should have a minimum of 80 emojis and a meme or two.

The core dependency of the cli should be a 6 month old framework with 92 commits. When that library reaches 1 year old, it should be swapped out for something newer as the sole maintainer will have left their job and/or got bored with the project having spent so long on it

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#33

Post by Maken »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #11

I worked with Ian Murdock at Purdue in the days of the very first release. He was a sysadmin and devloper while I was a web designer for the libraries. The guy truly believed in the GNU/Linux 'way' and 'free as in speech' software. His initial drive was from the difficulty of packaging and package management and that is probably his biggest contribution. Network-of-Workstations (NOW... think peer-to-peer infratsructu…

The hell happened with Murdock after Debian? His trajectory since he stepped down until his death seems quite erratic.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#34

Post by nolist_policy »

VancouverMan wrote: post #26
cf100clunk wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Left out another major chunk: the conflict that arose over the eventual systemd adoption. To me that conflict altered the concept of ''What is Debian'' permanently, for better or worse (depending on who you listen to).

Regardless of whether one likes or dislikes systemd itself, I think that unfortunate debacle can only be seen as causing harm to the entire Debian project. The politics of it certainly generated a lot of distrust and resentment among the users and contributors. The project's reputation was undoubtedly hurt. Perhaps most importantly where the technological impacts. It's one thing when a user can generally ignore the p…

Sigh.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#35

Post by larme »

Sometimes I daydream about getting a fuck-it amount of money.

During this thought process I always make a plan of what open source software project I should donate, and debian is always one of the first several candidates.

Now I just need the money! (meanwhile I donate to debian anyway)

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#36

Post by lionkor »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #11

I worked with Ian Murdock at Purdue in the days of the very first release. He was a sysadmin and devloper while I was a web designer for the libraries. The guy truly believed in the GNU/Linux 'way' and 'free as in speech' software. His initial drive was from the difficulty of packaging and package management and that is probably his biggest contribution. Network-of-Workstations (NOW... think peer-to-peer infratsructu…

Its rare that we read a piece of content on the internet from 1994! Thanks for sharing this, its older than me.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#37

Post by g232089 »

dsr_ wrote: post #4

LIW left out one major chunk: because Debian is a volunteer organization, and nobody can make a volunteer do anything that they don't want to do.

Your comment makes it sound like volunteers have a great degree of freedom and that's not the case because, obviously, in these organisations you will be shown the door if you don't do what others tell you to do.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#38

Post by talent_deprived »

Debian could be great except for driver support which they only tacitly acknowledge:

https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/paxj85/why_debian_w...

"We acknowledge that some of our users require the use of programs that don't conform to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. We have created "contrib" and "non-free" areas in our FTP archive for this software."

I had it running on a couple of my machines about 1 or 2 years ago and an update came in for WiFi that bricked them. I started looking into rolling back or whatever and just decided to switch those to Ubuntu (or Kubuntu actually) and they work great and have has no issues.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#39

Post by dietrichepp »

chubot wrote: post #24

I just switched to Debian this year after ~13 years of Ubuntu, and I really appreciate it It grew on me after a long time. I always thought it was not the most "technically sound" way of doing things i.e. I don't really like the packaging model of global updates where you don't know what's going on, and sometimes there are version conflicts But I have come to appreciate the stability and good intentions of the Debian…

Yeah. I keep coming back to Debian after trying out another distro for a while.

There are some specific complaints I have about technical choices for Debian, like the way daemons autostart post install. But these complaints are outweighed by the benefits of using a distro with coherence across packages and upgrades.

Apt is also just such a phenomenal package manager. It is fast out of the box, and supports some relatively tricky scenarios—like using stable for your system, but a newer Nginx from backports. Feels like I can get the newer features for the one or two packages that I really care about, and then use something stable and boring for everything else.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#40

Post by RetroTechie »

cswhnjidd wrote: post #21

TIL Debian is mostly packaging. Love it, Debian is amazing.

Packaging, and more importantly: package dependencies, are (imho) the essence of building a successful distro.

Get this wrong, stuff breaks regularly, and one ad-hoc fix follows another, forever.

Get this right, and everything Just Works™ (generally).

Debian is very good in this regard (along with the BSDs, I'd say).

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