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.
Why is Debian the way it is?
51–60 of 198 posts
Re: Why is Debian the way it is?
#52I personally love and use Debian exactly for its principles and stability.
I have heard users of other distros and a few upstream complaint that Debian "modifies" their packages?
Is it so? If yes, there surely must be a good reason. Can someone tell me about it?
Re: Why is Debian the way it is?
#53I 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 relat…
I'm a Debian user since 1998 and have had it as my personal desktop since that time. I'd think that counts for something.
> Apt is also just such a phenomenal package manager. It is fast out of the box,
This wasn't always the case. There's a good reason almost all guides first written before 2015 specifically instructed everyone to use 'apt-get' directly. For quite some time the more uniform 'apt' frontend really wasn't intuitive or helpful. (Just to be clear: these days it is phenomenal in its simplicity and clarity.)
And as someone who has has to dive in to the package managers' code bases, the overall quality of libapt used to be .. questionable. Figuring out code and control flows back in 2010 was like trying to rub chili out of your eyes with an unsanded wooden spoon.
But the sheer bullheaded stubbornness Debian imposes on their package universe and its architecture means it's an absolute joy to work with if you're doing any kind of distro customisation work.
Re: Why is Debian the way it is?
#54> what was “free software” was defined by the Free Software Foundation, but in a way that left much to be interpreted I don't understand what the author means here. What is unclear about the four freedoms? To me, Debian's definition looks redundant.
It's like the US constitution and the bill of rights. Everything in the bill of rights is technically redundant and covered by principles already expressed in general form in the main constitution. And yet that isn't actually good enough. Those general principles, being general rather than specific, require the key word, interpretation, in each new specific context. And different people with different goals can and d…
Can you give any examples of software projects or licenses in which there's room for genuine disagreement in interpretation of these rules? I'm having trouble imagining it.
Re: Why is Debian the way it is?
#55Debian 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 ye…
They've now relaxed their (stupid) policy so at least the default ISO includes non-free drivers.
When it comes to an already installed system, enabling the non-free repos and installing linux-firmware (or more specific firmware-* package for your hardware) should fix it.
Re: Why is Debian the way it is?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hell happened with Murdock after Debian? His trajectory since he stepped down until his death seems quite erratic.
How so? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Murdock#Life_and_career
See the next section:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ian_Murdock&oldid...
Re: Why is Debian the way it is?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
How so? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Murdock#Life_and_career
See the next section: > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ian_Murdock&oldid...
I’m aware of the circumstances of his death. That doesn’t say anything about his trajectory since leaving Debian.
Re: Why is Debian the way it is?
#58LIW 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.
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).
For anyone who hasn't yet seen it, there was an interesting adaptation of the Debian systemd discussion into an Ace Attorney-style format: https://aaonline.fr/search.php?search&criteria[sequenceId-is...>
Re: Why is Debian the way it is?
#59[flagged]
I think it was why they got on the systemD train. It was the init system they thought they could maintain well.
Sounds like there were lots of hurt feeling in the whole situation. Did some major Debian maintainers actually leave Debian for Devuan? If Devuan’s contributors were originally just Debian users, it seems like no loss for Debian and a win for the community (more developers).
Re: Why is Debian the way it is?
#60Debian 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 ye…
How are they "only tacitly" acknowledging it? Looks like they have put in very tangible solutions in place already.
Debian 12 even made a dedicated non-free-firmware repo for free software purists who would like to concede having non-free drivers just so they can use their hardware.