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20 years as a Debian maintainer

suihkulokki.blogspot.com

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Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#11

Post by grhmc »

bostand wrote: post #7

Thanks Riku, debian has become an excellent distro thanks to the hard work of people like you. At the same time, it is sad to see how much work you guys need to do for things that should have been automated or done by the original developers... Let's hope AppImage changes that Edit: Changed flatpak to appimage

Packaging is a complicated task and isn't as automatable as you'd think, It is important to consider how changes impact other tools. AppImage depends on maintainers too. Consider for example how appimage recipes depend on wget and bash and thusly openssl and libidn and glibc and libdl and git too, which brings with it libz and, and, and ...

PS: Thank you, Riku. I never understood the sheer amount of effort involved in being a packager / maintainer until I started doing the same task for NixOS. I regularly depend on Debian's excellent patches and CVE details to do my work. May you not be bogged down by nirvana fallacies :)

Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#14

Post by ausjke »

Even though I use ubuntu on my desktop, it is from Debian, and I ran Debian on my servers for years. Debian is the most important software for me for decades. For that I thank you, Riku, and everybody else contributes to Debian!

Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#15

Post by posterboy »

bostand wrote: post #7

Thanks Riku, debian has become an excellent distro thanks to the hard work of people like you. At the same time, it is sad to see how much work you guys need to do for things that should have been automated or done by the original developers... Let's hope AppImage changes that Edit: Changed flatpak to appimage

I am always hoping there are enough people who take up maintanance as a sort of hobby, ,because I don't have the time and skill and want a just works (tm) solution.

Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#16

Post by irl_ »

deadbunny wrote: post #9
bostand wrote: post #7

Thanks Riku, debian has become an excellent distro thanks to the hard work of people like you. At the same time, it is sad to see how much work you guys need to do for things that should have been automated or done by the original developers... Let's hope AppImage changes that Edit: Changed flatpak to appimage

If they can't make good packages then I can't see them making good containers.

As a Debian Developer I often find myself throwing away the upstream Debian packaging and starting from scratch. It's not that it doesn't work but that it doesn't fit with Debian policy and so is not easily included or modified without basically starting from scratch anyway.

In the cases (which happens more than you might think) where an upstream developer has actually got really good packaging, I've usually taken the approach of tidying up the last few details and committing back and then mentoring them for a while with them doing the majority of the work and I just double check and upload it.

The level to which people are willing to work on it varies from accepting patches that affect the distribution package version (e.g. hardcoded paths or porting issues) to actually doing the packaging.

If you're interested in helping out with Debian: https://www.debian.org/intro/help

If you're an upstream developer and you'd like your package to be in Debian: https://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamGuide

Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#17

Post by VLM »

bostand wrote: post #7

Thanks Riku, debian has become an excellent distro thanks to the hard work of people like you. At the same time, it is sad to see how much work you guys need to do for things that should have been automated or done by the original developers... Let's hope AppImage changes that Edit: Changed flatpak to appimage

The problem with a distribution-agnostic approach is tossing distribution policy into /dev/null means instead of maintainers and admins and users and devs having to learn the one, probably fairly complicated, policy, or more likely numerous policies for various distros, instead msdos era anarchy is unleashed on the world.

https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/

Sections 6 thru 12 are what it means to be "a Debian" rather than say freebsd packaged into .deb files.

For some very end user applications that don't interact in any way with anything else, games perhaps, that works pretty well, until something is run into that does need to interact with other components also operating under the same anarchy.

The problem with not having a closed system or standard or method of operating a system aka an operating system, is you end up with the deployed machines having an Apocalypse Now quote conversation "Are my methods unsound?" "I don't see any method at all, sir." If you're a system Administrator what does it mean to Administrate mere anarchy?

Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#19

Post by xorfish »

grhmc wrote: post #11
bostand wrote: post #7

Thanks Riku, debian has become an excellent distro thanks to the hard work of people like you. At the same time, it is sad to see how much work you guys need to do for things that should have been automated or done by the original developers... Let's hope AppImage changes that Edit: Changed flatpak to appimage

Packaging is a complicated task and isn't as automatable as you'd think, It is important to consider how changes impact other tools. AppImage depends on maintainers too. Consider for example how appimage recipes depend on wget and bash and thusly openssl and libidn and glibc and libdl and git too, which brings with it libz and, and, and ... PS: Thank you, Riku. I never understood the sheer amount of effort involved i…

> Packaging is a complicated task and isn't as automatable as you'd think

I think the Solus guys would have a word with you. Even with no packaging experience it is pretty simple to create a package for Solus Project.

Here a short intro:

https://wiki.solus-project.com/Packaging

Re: 20 years as a Debian maintainer

#20

Post by infinity0 »

xorfish wrote: post #19
grhmc wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Packaging is a complicated task and isn't as automatable as you'd think, It is important to consider how changes impact other tools. AppImage depends on maintainers too. Consider for example how appimage recipes depend on wget and bash and thusly openssl and libidn and glibc and libdl and git too, which brings with it libz and, and, and ... PS: Thank you, Riku. I never understood the sheer amount of effort involved i…

> Packaging is a complicated task and isn't as automatable as you'd think I think the Solus guys would have a word with you. Even with no packaging experience it is pretty simple to create a package for Solus Project. Here a short intro: https://wiki.solus-project.com/Packaging

Come back when they have done this for 24000 third-party packages.
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