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Why is Debian the way it is?

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Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#171

Post by pabs3 »

c-hendricks wrote: post #163
rlpb wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Usually both, submit upstream and add the patch to Debian while waiting for upstream to accept the patch.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#172

Post by pabs3 »

FpUser wrote: post #32

>"Self-contained" I love that whole paragraph. And in general prefer their philosophy.

Debian doesn't go far enough on that point, the folks at GNU Guix and Bootstrappable Builds are getting to the point where they can build the entire distro from source starting with only ~500B of manually written machine code.

https://bootstrappable.org/ https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-...

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#173

Post by pabs3 »

klysm wrote: post #98
hyperman1 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like you to explain this a bit deeper. As a user from the '90s I am quite happy with it, but I might be stuck in my ways, who knows? So not saying you're wrong, but what are we missing exactly?

A few of my gripes: * creating Debian packages is a difficult process to learn. There’s a bunch of tools and wrappers around those tools to handle inadequacies and it’s not clear how to do it “right”. For example, if I just have a binary and want to put it into a Debian package without pulling in some random shell scripts that aren’t part of Debian proper, it’s not immediately clear how to do that. * Non-atomic and i…

The spec for .deb packages is in the deb(5) manual page:

https://manpages.debian.org/bookworm/dpkg-dev/deb.5.en.html

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#174

Post by pabs3 »

klysm wrote: post #98
hyperman1 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like you to explain this a bit deeper. As a user from the '90s I am quite happy with it, but I might be stuck in my ways, who knows? So not saying you're wrong, but what are we missing exactly?

A few of my gripes: * creating Debian packages is a difficult process to learn. There’s a bunch of tools and wrappers around those tools to handle inadequacies and it’s not clear how to do it “right”. For example, if I just have a binary and want to put it into a Debian package without pulling in some random shell scripts that aren’t part of Debian proper, it’s not immediately clear how to do that. * Non-atomic and i…

If you "just have a binary" then you aren't compiling from source, which means you can't make modifications to that binary easily, which Debian wants to be able to do to fix security issues and other bugs.

There is a large range of documentation, everything from the simple to the more advanced to different packaging niches. The large amount of docs makes that harder to navigate though, and a lot of stuff is moving towards automated packaging these days anyway.

https://wiki.debian.org/AutomaticPackagingTools

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#175

Post by pabs3 »

em-bee wrote: post #71
hyperman1 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like you to explain this a bit deeper. As a user from the '90s I am quite happy with it, but I might be stuck in my ways, who knows? So not saying you're wrong, but what are we missing exactly?

what deb and rpm and any similar packaging are missing is true version control of the whole packaging ecosystem. at present it is difficult to track which combination of package versions has been tested, and you can't easily roll back to a tested combination. the current systems assume that versioning is linear and that a newer version of any package is always better than an older version. downgrading any package so…

With snapshot.debian.org you can roll back to any version of any package that has been saved. Using that you can even bisect where issues started.

https://manpages.debian.org/testing/devscripts/debbisect.1.e... https://wiki.debian.org/BisectDebian

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#176

Post by pabs3 »

em-bee wrote: post #71
hyperman1 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like you to explain this a bit deeper. As a user from the '90s I am quite happy with it, but I might be stuck in my ways, who knows? So not saying you're wrong, but what are we missing exactly?

what deb and rpm and any similar packaging are missing is true version control of the whole packaging ecosystem. at present it is difficult to track which combination of package versions has been tested, and you can't easily roll back to a tested combination. the current systems assume that versioning is linear and that a newer version of any package is always better than an older version. downgrading any package so…

You can use pinning to achieve what you want with 3rd-party repos, using the origin feature.

https://wiki.debian.org/AptConfiguration#apt_preferences_.28...

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#177

Post by happymellon »

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 are two main ways of developing your software.

1. Incremental versions. Think like Chrome, there are not bug fixes, just new versions that may contain bug fixes.

2. Major versions, where you'll end up with semver style versioning. You'll have version 1 and version 2, but you'll also get version 1.1 released after 2 as it is the same as version 1, but with just a bugfix applied.

Debian essentially will only work with the second methodology, as they are API stable, which makes software developed by the first method incompatible.

To work around this Debian will backport "fixes" from version 3 to version 1, and create their own version 1.debian-2. The problem here is that people will now raise bugs with upstream on behaviour that was never released.

Yes Debian is allowed to do this, but upstream is also allowed to be unhappy with the additional workload that Debian puts on them.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#178

Post by kefyras »

dietrichepp wrote: post #39
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 relat…

> like the way daemons autostart post install

This can be configured with service-policy.d(5), see https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/policy-rcd-declarative-... for example.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#179

Post by shiroiuma »

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.

But what improvement does Debian really need, beyond the capabilities it already has?

Linux in general could use various improvements, if some billionaire decided to fund people to work on it. But I don't really see how any distro could use the lion's share of that funding. Instead, much of it probably needs to go to infrastructure things like drivers, Wayland, etc., so that Linux works better on people's computers. Other things that could use development funding are various applications. But these are things that all distros share.

Re: Why is Debian the way it is?

#180

Post by codedokode »

mdwalters wrote: post #153
codedokode wrote: post #121

What I don't like in Debian: - 3rd-party software is not welcome; there is no mechanism for installing it securely because you are supposed to either install software from official repository or compile what you have written yourself. For example, if you want to install Sublime Text, or VS Code, there is no way to do it securely, without giving untrusted software access to your browser history and SSH keys. Of course…

> if a system component like Gnome is crashing, there will be neither log records or crash dumps and you will never figure out why it crashed On Fedora you can use ABRT (AKA Problem Reporting) to view logs and tracebacks of a component that has crashed, and report the problem via Bugzilla. Also, GNOME isn't a system component, Fedora would still work without it, but it would use a TTY terminal instead.

Abrt (problem reporting window) shows no information about that type of crash.
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