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The Delusions of Debian

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Re: The Delusions of Debian

#21

Post by Koiwai »

At least I agree to some of his points, let's look at an example:

https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/samba

current stable at 4.13.13, accepted 2022-02-13

current testing/unstable at 4.13.14, accepted 2021-11-12

https://www.samba.org/samba/history/

current stable 4.16.0 released 21 March 2022

older stable 4.13.17 security release dated 31 January 2022

I don't want to point fingers at anyone but look at those version numbers and dates.

I'm pretty much an arch(and sometimes alpine) guy now, except some proxmox servers, which unfortunately is debian based.

Re: The Delusions of Debian

#22

Post by Annatar »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #13

The author of this blog doesn't seem to like anything that happened in Linux after 2010. Any time I see the domain, I know what I'm in for. But aside from "everything was fine the way it was", I've not seen the author ever present a better way forward when discussing how much they dislike systemd/Wayland/Gnome > some version, and now we can add Debian to the list. I get it, having a rant is fun, but for your rant to…

It is useful: it points out why one should stay away from Debian GNU/Linux. Sometimes, knowing what not to do is far more useful for making the correct choice.

Re: The Delusions of Debian

#23

Post by gullevek »

imrejonk wrote: post #8

> At the time when Debian 11 was about to be released, PHP 8.0 was 10 months old yet Debian's 11 was released with PHP 7.4. That makes PHP 7.4 the standard in Debian stable for at least 3 years after its release. But PHP 7.4 only gets upstream support until 28 Nov 2021 and security support is permanently ended at 28 Nov 2022, which is seven month from now. This means that unless Debian has some really good C develope…

PHP 8.0 would only have been able if for example Zabbix would have been dropped as the version that comes with Debian 11 does not work with PHP 8.0 anyway

Re: The Delusions of Debian

#24

Post by kasabali »

eternityforest wrote: post #3

I'm also worried about Debian's future. Most of the big names who have left seem like it's a win all around, they seem to be anti-systemd hacker/tinkerer types who will be much happier over at Arch, and never really agreed with what Debian was trying to do. But at a certain point, you just need more people for that many packages. Perhaps they should try to transition away from the volunteer model. I wouldn't want to…

> Either that, or the world should transition to Fedora.

So, instead of volunteering for Debian, volunteer for IBM?

Re: The Delusions of Debian

#25

Post by kasabali »

> As of writing the Debian stable release has 96.729 packages in stable and 149.976 packages in unstable

That's a meaningless number because every distribution has different way of packaging things.

What should be counted is the number of source packages, because curl would still be counted as one package regardless of whether your distro split it into 8 (https://packages.debian.org/source/buster/curl) or 3 (https://archlinux.org/packages/core/x86_64/curl/)

Even when not doing a comparison between distributions (like when author complains about # of packages per # of LTS maintainers ) this is still the more meaningful count because package maintainers don't deal with every binary package separately, they deal with source packages.

As of today, Debian has 31306 source packages in stable and 34179 in unstable:

    udd=> select count(source) from sources_uniq where release='sid';
     count 
    -------
     34179

    udd=> select count(source) from sources_uniq where release='bullseye';
     count 
    -------
     31306

Re: The Delusions of Debian

#26

Post by eternityforest »

kasabali wrote: post #24
eternityforest wrote: post #3

I'm also worried about Debian's future. Most of the big names who have left seem like it's a win all around, they seem to be anti-systemd hacker/tinkerer types who will be much happier over at Arch, and never really agreed with what Debian was trying to do. But at a certain point, you just need more people for that many packages. Perhaps they should try to transition away from the volunteer model. I wouldn't want to…

> Either that, or the world should transition to Fedora. So, instead of volunteering for Debian, volunteer for IBM?

I'm not sure anyone should volunteer for any of this at all, and most of these positions should be paid.

But that might be selection bias, maybe there's lots of happy distro maintainers that we just don't hear from.

Re: The Delusions of Debian

#27

Post by eternityforest »

faho wrote: post #15
eternityforest wrote: post #3

I'm also worried about Debian's future. Most of the big names who have left seem like it's a win all around, they seem to be anti-systemd hacker/tinkerer types who will be much happier over at Arch, and never really agreed with what Debian was trying to do. But at a certain point, you just need more people for that many packages. Perhaps they should try to transition away from the volunteer model. I wouldn't want to…

> anti-systemd hacker/tinkerer types who will be much happier over at Arch When you're anti-systemd, you won't be happier over at Arch, considering systemd is the only supported init system in Arch - in contrast to Debian, which supports alternatives.

I'm not exactly sure why Debian supports alternatives, that seems like a terrible idea when you're already stretched thin, but most everything else about it seems to be less tinkerer-friendly then Arch.

Seems like a lot more people can kind of grudgingly tolerate systemd, but they really seem to hate outdated packages, and anything "unnecessary"..

Some of them are pretty neutral on systemd itself, or have given up on fighting it.

They seem to mostly just want maximum ability to build their own system

Re: The Delusions of Debian

#28

Post by zozbot234 »

KronisLV wrote: post #20

To me, the tone of the article reads a bit dismissive and sometimes borders on a rant (e.g. i doubt that things related to inclusivity/social issues are to blame for the state of the OS), however it also feels like it concisely describes many important concerns. > The fact of the matter is that Debian has long been experiencing a decline in the amount of people willing to participate in the project. > Oh, I almost fo…

But OP is not blaming inclusivity or social issues for the state of the OS. They're simply questioning why inclusivity seems to get more space than e.g. efforts to try and bring more maintainers to Debian, or make the tooling and processes involved easier and less clunky.

Re: The Delusions of Debian

#29

Post by rascul »

eternityforest wrote: post #27
faho wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> anti-systemd hacker/tinkerer types who will be much happier over at Arch When you're anti-systemd, you won't be happier over at Arch, considering systemd is the only supported init system in Arch - in contrast to Debian, which supports alternatives.

I'm not exactly sure why Debian supports alternatives, that seems like a terrible idea when you're already stretched thin, but most everything else about it seems to be less tinkerer-friendly then Arch. Seems like a lot more people can kind of grudgingly tolerate systemd, but they really seem to hate outdated packages, and anything "unnecessary".. Some of them are pretty neutral on systemd itself, or have given up on…

> I'm not exactly sure why Debian supports alternatives

Debian has hurd and freebsd ports for which systemd is not available.

Re: The Delusions of Debian

#30

Post by ianai »

Annatar wrote: post #22
EdwardDiego wrote: post #13

The author of this blog doesn't seem to like anything that happened in Linux after 2010. Any time I see the domain, I know what I'm in for. But aside from "everything was fine the way it was", I've not seen the author ever present a better way forward when discussing how much they dislike systemd/Wayland/Gnome > some version, and now we can add Debian to the list. I get it, having a rant is fun, but for your rant to…

It is useful: it points out why one should stay away from Debian GNU/Linux. Sometimes, knowing what not to do is far more useful for making the correct choice.

Tearing down volunteer effort is fundamentally problematic. Yes, it’s important to not give anything flying under the banner of volunteer a free pass, but a huge project with decades of work and use like Debian is well beyond this. If you’re going to make criticism make it constructive or just move on with another distro.

Edit-The easiest way to make some points on the internet is just simple criticism. Doesn’t even have to be informed to come across as legitimate on the internet. Which is why internet blogs like this can do huge amounts of harm.

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