TIL Debian is mostly packaging.
Love it, Debian is amazing.
Why is Debian the way it is?
21–30 of 198 posts
Re: Why is Debian the way it is?
#22Well certainly part of it is much of the .deb ecosystem still feels like its stuck in the late 90s linux era to me. But maybe I'm alone on that gut feel.
Better being in the 90s than using snappacks or whatever.
Re: Why is Debian the way it is?
#23[flagged]
Because real diversity comes from people who look different.
Re: Why is Debian the way it is?
#24I 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 project
Sometimes it's not technical excellence that matters the most, but the purpose and goals of the project
Re: Why is Debian the way it is?
#25> 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 literally an owner. That's why the "implicitly". Everyone was still only volunteers. But everyone volunteerily let them call all the shots.
Then later they developed a formal democratic structure and the leader is more of a coordinator than boss.
Re: Why is Debian the way it is?
#26LIW 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.
Left out another major chunk: the conflict that arose over the eventual systemd adoption. To me that conflict altered the concept of ''What is Debian'' permanently, for better or worse (depending on who you listen to).
Regardless of whether one likes or dislikes systemd itself, I think that unfortunate debacle can only be seen as causing harm to the entire Debian project.
The politics of it certainly generated a lot of distrust and resentment among the users and contributors. The project's reputation was undoubtedly hurt.
Perhaps most importantly where the technological impacts. It's one thing when a user can generally ignore the politics surrounding a Linux distro, and the software still does what it needs to do. It's another matter when one routine update after another causes their computer(s) to no longer boot, among other serious problems, all thanks to systemd. Users definitely notice incidents like that, and it decreases, or even eliminates, their trust.
So much hard-earned and invaluable goodwill was unnecessarily lost during and after that period of time.
If any good did arise from that situation, it was that more people became aware of the BSDs, or tried them again if they'd used them in the past. FreeBSD and OpenBSD saved users who needed the reliability and trustworthiness that Debian used to offer, before systemd negatively affected the quality of Debian.
Re: Why is Debian the way it is?
#27Well certainly part of it is much of the .deb ecosystem still feels like its stuck in the late 90s linux era to me. But maybe I'm alone on that gut feel.
Yes but at least I don’t see ads on my Operating System for Viagra. I’ll take 90s boring linux over windoze everyday of the week.
Re: Why is Debian the way it is?
#28> what was “free software” was defined by the Free Software Foundation, but in a way that left much to be interpreted I don't understand what the author means here. What is unclear about the four freedoms? To me, Debian's definition looks redundant.
You would have to compare them at the time. Things have changed. At the time Ian felt it didn’t do enough. Revisions and decades later it’s basically parity.
Re: Why is Debian the way it is?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Left out another major chunk: the conflict that arose over the eventual systemd adoption. To me that conflict altered the concept of ''What is Debian'' permanently, for better or worse (depending on who you listen to).
Regardless of whether one likes or dislikes systemd itself, I think that unfortunate debacle can only be seen as causing harm to the entire Debian project. The politics of it certainly generated a lot of distrust and resentment among the users and contributors. The project's reputation was undoubtedly hurt. Perhaps most importantly where the technological impacts. It's one thing when a user can generally ignore the p…
> before systemd negatively affected the quality of Debian
Is there any publication quantifying this?
I followed the whole debacle with interest, and my personal experience with my servers was the exact opposite: adopting systemd improved reliability and made administration significantly easier. It's sad that this was politicized by a small part of the community, but the end result was worth it.
Re: Why is Debian the way it is?
#30> what was “free software” was defined by the Free Software Foundation, but in a way that left much to be interpreted I don't understand what the author means here. What is unclear about the four freedoms? To me, Debian's definition looks redundant.
It's like the US constitution and the bill of rights. Everything in the bill of rights is technically redundant and covered by principles already expressed in general form in the main constitution.
And yet that isn't actually good enough. Those general principles, being general rather than specific, require the key word, interpretation, in each new specific context. And different people with different goals can and do always ALWAYS warp interpretation in infinite ways that are all perfectly reasonable sounding on their face, and yet someone else can always produce a totally different interpretation, which also holds together.