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Why is Debian the way it is?

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Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#161

Post by bsder »

rlpb wrote: post #97

"Self-contained" and "No bundled libraries" are two very important concepts that a subset of our ecosystem decided was too much work. Then they re-discovered all the problems that result, and have now coined terms like "software supply chain" to describe them. Meanwhile Debian doesn't suffer from any of this because it's been doing things so as to avoid these issues all along.

> Meanwhile Debian doesn't suffer from any of this because it's been doing things so as to avoid these issues all along.

Except that it's clear that Debian is suffering from a manpower problem and has run into fundamental scaling limits with its current architecture.

Thus, we're seeing things like Nix and Silverblue at the OS level with Snaps and Flatpak at the application level.

I don't know what the solution is, but it seems to me like Debian is going to need to do something shortly.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#162

Post by totetsu »

asveikau wrote: post #101
rlpb wrote: post #97

"Self-contained" and "No bundled libraries" are two very important concepts that a subset of our ecosystem decided was too much work. Then they re-discovered all the problems that result, and have now coined terms like "software supply chain" to describe them. Meanwhile Debian doesn't suffer from any of this because it's been doing things so as to avoid these issues all along.

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.

This is how I ended up with three separate the Gimp installs on my system. A deb a snap and a flatpack. And I still can’t get plugins to work.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#163

Post by c-hendricks »

rlpb wrote: post #150
alphager wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Another kind of patch is when a common dependency library is being updated, and laggard upstreams need patching to make their current releases work against the newer library; it's either that or a Debian release with those packages missing. This type is actually really common. Debian packages something like 30k upstreams, and so some are always behind.

Do they just patch the package in Debian or do they submit them upstream?

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#164

Post by qaisjp »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #25
aiunboxed wrote: post #7

> The historic background for this is that the first Debian project leaders were implicitly all-powerful dictators until they chose to step down What was this about ?

It simply means what it says. The first few leaders were simply in charge of everything like an owner, they made all major decisions themselves and told everyone else what the plan was, and each one did that job until they decided they didn't want to do it any longer and handed it off to the next leader. They were a dictator only in the literal sense that they dictated, not that they were tyrants. They weren't litera…

Benevolent dictators

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#165

Post by rstuart4133 »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #89
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.

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.

> From the description, the Debian organization seems to be an anarchist one.

Then it mislead you. Anarchist organisations aren't typically characterised by large, long and complex sets of policies, constantly evolving, that are strongly policed. Often by bots.

This is the reaction from one software engineer that stumbled into Debian infrastructure: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/09/msg00334.html

To quote one part of that email:

    I've been maintaining free software for 30 years so I've got a lot of experience with a lot of different tools, and I've rarely encountered anything that is as comprehensive and well-documented as all this stuff is.
This style of organisation is characteristic found in engineering organisations try to deliver high quality products, not anarchist organisations.

And while it's a flat(ish) style hierarchy, it has leaders (the DPL), a judiciary (the technical committee) and even behaviour police (whoever polices the conduct - it is policed).

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#166

Post by dietrichepp »

SoftTalker wrote: post #85
Aeolos wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is the systemd unit for comparison: [Unit] Description=OpenBSD Secure Shell server per-connection daemon After=auditd.service [Service] EnvironmentFile=/etc/default/ssh ExecStart=/usr/sbin/sshd -i $SSHD_OPTS StandardInput=socket I leave it to the reader to decide which of those two is easier to understand and maintain.

Debatable, but I was mainly reacting to "... rc.d / BSD style init scripts. It was awful. You had all these copy-pasted shell scripts with various gaps in functionality depending on who wrote them." Simply not true in (modern) BSDs, well at least OpenBSD; I'm not familiar with the others.

Yeah, maybe it’s not inconsistent any more. But meanwhile, systemd has gotten really nice, even a good version of rc.d seems awful by comparison.

I had the same feeling when Apple came out with launchd in 2005. It felt like such a massive improvement over the existing state of things. Systemd also feels like a massive improvement.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#167

Post by pabs3 »

_8j50 wrote: post #78
jwilk wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the leadership team There's no such thing in Debian.

Whether it was formal or not, since the decision was not made by a vote of contributors, there is such a thing, even if it is informal.

There was a vote about systemd in 2019:

https://www.debian.org/vote/2019/vote_002

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#168

Post by chubot »

sgarland wrote: post #148
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…

> version conflicts What are you getting conflicts on? Unless you’re pulling from Sid, and did something fun like upgrading libc6, you shouldn’t see version conflicts if everything was installed via apt.

It hasn't happened to me in a long time, but when I first started using Debian/Ubuntu I ran into it and was confused

Debian does have Conflicts package metadata - https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.ht...

So in theory I don't like it, but I now better understand the possible reasons for it, and I haven't run into it recently

I think there is room for other systems that don't have this problem, but Debian is good at what it does, and you can build other things on top of it

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#169

Post by pabs3 »

rlpb wrote: post #97

"Self-contained" and "No bundled libraries" are two very important concepts that a subset of our ecosystem decided was too much work. Then they re-discovered all the problems that result, and have now coined terms like "software supply chain" to describe them. Meanwhile Debian doesn't suffer from any of this because it's been doing things so as to avoid these issues all along.

Debian has a ton of embedded code copies, inherited from all our upstreams who bundle libraries for Windows/macOS/etc and also sometimes fork them etc.

https://wiki.debian.org/EmbeddedCopies

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#170

Post by pabs3 »

rlpb wrote: post #97

"Self-contained" and "No bundled libraries" are two very important concepts that a subset of our ecosystem decided was too much work. Then they re-discovered all the problems that result, and have now coined terms like "software supply chain" to describe them. Meanwhile Debian doesn't suffer from any of this because it's been doing things so as to avoid these issues all along.

The self-contained thing isn't always true either, for a long time the open firmware inherited from the linux-firmware repo wasn't built from source, we just shipped the binaries. I expect there are other cases in the archive too, Debian doesn't systematically strip generated files from all tarballs and regenerate them. Especially with more AI/ML stuff, where we probably can't even get the training data, let alone afford to train them.
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