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Why is Debian the way it is?

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Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#111

Post by guerby »

chrisandchris wrote: post #90
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…

Same here, switched to Debian for my servers as OS from Ubuntu. Main reason: uses (boring & old) working technology. No more netplan, snapd, systemd-resolver.

Note: debian cloud image use netplan.io

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#112

Post by alphager »

arun-mani-j wrote: post #52

I 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?

There's mainly three kinds of patches:

* make the software behave like Debian needs it (configuration is stored somewhere in /etc/, no additional downloads at runtime, use the system libraries instead of vendored ones) * security backports. Debian freezes the functionality at release and only provides security updates. Many software nowadays just includes security fixes in new releases bundled with new functionality.

In combination these two kinds of patches lead to growing differences between a Debian released version 1.2 and the "real" 1.2, making it harder to handle bug reports (e.g. you get a bug report for version 1.2-Debian, but only support the "real" version 1.4 with a whole set of updated libraries).

The third kind of patch has mostly gone out of style; it's when Debian thinks they can improve the software. That lead to things like removing randomness from SSH keys: https://github.com/g0tmi1k/debian-ssh

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#113

Post by abdullahkhalids »

kosherhurricane wrote: post #100
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the description, the Debian organization seems to be an anarchist one. A bunch of people, not coerced to be there, have created a diffuse rotating democracy for making decisions. Self-sufficiency is key to the organization, that emerges from thoughtful usage of resources.

Why would you consider an organization with a constitution anarchist?

Contrary to popular beliefs, anarchists have no problem with constitutions or laws or governments. Anarchy is ANti-hierARCHY, which in the extreme case extends to not accepting the hierarchy of the State (i.e. an organization with a license to exert force over all others in society). But,

1. Many anarchist movements do not demand this much change. They only demand removal of specific forms of hierarchies they think most problematic. The Occupy movement for instance was demanding the curtailment of the political power of the 1% over the 99%. Its always better to think of political movements as directions of evolution in political space, rather than specific destinations.

2. Then how do anarchists propose that laws/constitutions be imposed? By consensus and discussion. By making sure everyone is on board. Or by temporarily giving someone conflict resolving power (as in the Debian case). Plenty of societies and organizations operate this way, and work fine. Read The Dawn of Everything for some historical examples. See a region in Syria [1] as a modern example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_Administration_of_N...

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#114

Post by mfuzzey »

pjmlp wrote: post #61
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…

With many other non-copyleft alternatives shaping up, and systems like ChromeOS and Android, with the Linux kernel and completely unrelated userspace, I firmly believe when our generation is gone, Linux won't stay around on its present form for much longer.

But neither Android nor ChromeOS are self hosting, in the sense that you can't use Android to build Android nor ChromeOS to build ChromeOS (well for the later maybe you could with a Debian container...)

So I think traditional Linux distributions will remain, at least as development tools.

Of course it is true that many end users these days get by with just a phone or a tablet but this is a general thing and also results in less Windows users too.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#115

Post by gorgoiler »

klysm wrote: post #91
VancouverMan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m pretty convinced it was net positive in the long term. If Debian hadn’t gone with systemd, then where would it be today? Stuck in shell script hell?

We would have been forced to bite the bullet and implement a packaging extension that allowed debs to describe what to start at boot time, when, and how. The compatability layer would have allowed any init system to be used.

Instead we welded the systemd engine into the chassis and pray that when it comes to replacing it we aren’t the ones on the hook.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#116

Post by Aerbil313 »

bscphil wrote: post #108
asveikau wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think either approach makes sense depending on who you are. If your goal is to distribute software across multiple distros and operating systems, bundling dependencies makes sense. If your goal is to maintain a distro, shared libraries that you can apply a security patch to exactly once is obviously better. But these are two different people with either goal.

> If your goal is to distribute software across multiple distros and operating systems, bundling dependencies makes sense. Of course, an important "exception to the exception" is when you're making software that can easily be distributed by distributions, e.g. because it's end user software and open source. I think the optimal cases for bundled dependencies are (a) large closed source binaries that never change, like…

The endgame of dependency management is the Nix model. U believe manually packaged software repositories' era is coming to an end.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#117

Post by pjmlp »

mfuzzey wrote: post #114
pjmlp wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With many other non-copyleft alternatives shaping up, and systems like ChromeOS and Android, with the Linux kernel and completely unrelated userspace, I firmly believe when our generation is gone, Linux won't stay around on its present form for much longer.

But neither Android nor ChromeOS are self hosting, in the sense that you can't use Android to build Android nor ChromeOS to build ChromeOS (well for the later maybe you could with a Debian container...) So I think traditional Linux distributions will remain, at least as development tools. Of course it is true that many end users these days get by with just a phone or a tablet but this is a general thing and also resu…

A matter of improving existing toolchains.

Also my point is about Linux kernel, being as relevant as AT&T UNIX, after the generation that created it is no longer among us.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#118

Post by SSLy »

convolvatron wrote: post #87
talkingtab wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct. A better way to put it. And it is true that the IETF working groups are often from corporate vendors. So perhaps that part of my argument is completely wrong. And distracts from the main question: could other fundamental models of collaboration be significantly more productive (efficient) than corporate models?

not entirely. I was involved in the IETF in the early 90s. At that time the old guard were the sort of second wave of internet designers (Clark, Estrin, Zhang, Cerf, Deering, Jacobsen....not going to pretend to list everyone). They primary worked off of (D)ARPA grants, although some of them them did work at places like Parc, and certainly places like Cisco. during that time, alot more money was being dumped into this…

proto design has been killed by incompetent enterprise firewall vendors and administrators (or, well, their managers).

the stupid dance tls1.3 has to do is best case in point.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#119

Post by humanrebar »

samueloph wrote: post #81
tarruda wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article from 2020 says Debian doesn't need money: https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/10/debian_project_addres...

Debian can't really directly pay contributors (there are some rare few cases like lawyers, etc....), so that would be one of the reasons for what the article is talking about. The best thing someone could do in this scenario would to be hire someone to work on/improve Debian directly.

Someone could form a nonprofit org that funds packaging work in Debian. Or maybe even a for-profit one. I'm pretty sure a lot of big consumers would rather pay for expertise instead of having an in-house Debian "upstream" team.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#120

Post by jowea »

cswhnjidd wrote: post #21

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

Yeah, that's 90+% of what a Linux distro is, packaging software from a wide variety of projects and trying to make a coherent whole. In Windows/MacOS we have one company making the kernel, basic libraries, desktop manager and some applications, and separate independent software developers making and packaging their own applications (although that changed a bit in the last decade or so).
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