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Debian Packages That Need Lovin'

wnpp.debian.net

21–30 of 151 posts

Re: Debian Packages That Need Lovin'

#22

I have been using Debian on and off since the late 90s, including some time creating packages. It was wonderful to be able to install a recent, working version of pretty much anything you wanted for the vast majority of that time. More recently, so many things I want to use are not available as a reasonably up-to-date package. Some examples are hugo and eclipse, where the versions provided are unusably ancient. https…

I have the same problem. While setting up home stuff recently. I was doing everything through ansible on LXC containers and found myself doing a lot of building from source. I still continue to use it but will explore other distros in the future.

Re: Debian Packages That Need Lovin'

#23

I have been using Debian on and off since the late 90s, including some time creating packages. It was wonderful to be able to install a recent, working version of pretty much anything you wanted for the vast majority of that time. More recently, so many things I want to use are not available as a reasonably up-to-date package. Some examples are hugo and eclipse, where the versions provided are unusably ancient. https…

Packaging Eclipse is something that _any_ distro will have a hard time with, and for good reasons, given the number of jars involved here.

Re: Debian Packages That Need Lovin'

#24
post #18

I have been using Debian on and off since the late 90s, including some time creating packages. It was wonderful to be able to install a recent, working version of pretty much anything you wanted for the vast majority of that time. More recently, so many things I want to use are not available as a reasonably up-to-date package. Some examples are hugo and eclipse, where the versions provided are unusably ancient. https…

I think the future is probably something more NixOS-like. Now, personally, I've tried it and found it a bit wanting UX-wise (and for really niche stuff), but for providing cutting edge and the ability to roll back safely I don't think it can be beaten. If you have databases, etc. that might need to be rolled back things get more complicated, ofc. Right now, I'm running Arch Linux with a small smattering of self-compi…

With zfs and boot environments the whole rollback issue is solved. No need for nixos for that.

Re: Debian Packages That Need Lovin'

#25

If you sort by Installs this is kind of disturbing. A lot of well known packages (Apache2 / OpenSSL / LibreOffice etc.) have no owner? https://wnpp.debian.net/?sort=installs%2Fdesc&page=1

Column "owner" is the owner of the related issue (bug tracker ticket), not the owner of the package.

Re: Debian Packages That Need Lovin'

#26

I have been using Debian on and off since the late 90s, including some time creating packages. It was wonderful to be able to install a recent, working version of pretty much anything you wanted for the vast majority of that time. More recently, so many things I want to use are not available as a reasonably up-to-date package. Some examples are hugo and eclipse, where the versions provided are unusably ancient. https…

Maybe FreeBSD is an option?

Their packages repo has a “latest” which is very up to date. One can also use ports for more control and custom options etc

Re: Debian Packages That Need Lovin'

#27

If you sort by Installs this is kind of disturbing. A lot of well known packages (Apache2 / OpenSSL / LibreOffice etc.) have no owner? https://wnpp.debian.net/?sort=installs%2Fdesc&page=1

Maintainers come and go over time and these things don't just package themselves.

Re: Debian Packages That Need Lovin'

#28
post #11

Isn't it worrisome that something like openssl is listed as having no owner? Wouldn't a sneaky patch in something as low-level and widely-used as that have devastating consequences? Is there another Linux distro that gets multiple eyeballs on (core) package changes and proper security reviews that you folks would recommend for daily driver?

Column "owner" is the owner of the related issue (bug tracker ticket), not the owner of the package.

Re: Debian Packages That Need Lovin'

#29

I have been using Debian on and off since the late 90s, including some time creating packages. It was wonderful to be able to install a recent, working version of pretty much anything you wanted for the vast majority of that time. More recently, so many things I want to use are not available as a reasonably up-to-date package. Some examples are hugo and eclipse, where the versions provided are unusably ancient. https…

After using Ubuntu for over a decade, I switched to Arch Linux. If you exclude the duplicated architecture packages in the Ubuntu repos and include the community-maintained packages, Arch has more packages new packages seem to commonly available within 24 hours of an upstream release. For example, I use some utilities based on "rofi". A search for Ubuntu packages containing "rofi-" contains just no results, but a sea…

Yes. However, Arch Linux means you need to spend time, probably several times per year, to fix stuff that worked yesterday but doesn't work anymore.

Arch Linux is just an entirely different thing compared to Ubuntu. I'd like someone who isn't me to make sure stuff works. Only very rarely will I be bothered to do actual work to upgrade to a new breaking version on my daily driver. Randomly breaking my shit on a Tuesday will make me install something more stable. On the rare occasion that I'd like to try something unstable, I can usually find a PPA or something. I don't like edges that make me bleed on my base OS.

Re: Debian Packages That Need Lovin'

#30
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the future is probably something more NixOS-like. Now, personally, I've tried it and found it a bit wanting UX-wise (and for really niche stuff), but for providing cutting edge and the ability to roll back safely I don't think it can be beaten. If you have databases, etc. that might need to be rolled back things get more complicated, ofc. Right now, I'm running Arch Linux with a small smattering of self-compi…

With zfs and boot environments the whole rollback issue is solved. No need for nixos for that.

Definitely for most cases, yes... but 'data' is still an issue (if you care about the data). NixOS has an interesting mechnanism for separating "package" upgrades from "data" upgrades, tho, so that's a slight advantage. (They basically keep around old binaries to be able to run and back up an old database and restore it on a newer version. Straightforward file system snapshots don't really do that.)

EDIT: Sorry, I feel I didn't explain this very well. The main point is: You can have multiple versions of all the software on your system, including stuff like PostgreSQL. That's actually very powerful.

Another potential problem is the licensing and root-on-ZFS.

Personally, I'm really looking forward to an in-upstream-kernel FS like bcachefs. (I'm actually a fan of ZFS, we use it on our servers, etc. I still feel a bit uneasy about the licensing issues and the fact that it's not in-kernel.)

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