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Winding down my Debian involvement

michael.stapelberg.ch

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Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#201

Post by Conan_Kudo »

crehn wrote: post #181
billsix wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, I've tried and failed to make Debian packages, and have no idea how to proceed. In contrast, with Gentoo and their documentation, it was straightforward for me to make my own additional, separate repo, look at other ebuilds to see how packaging works, and have everything just work. https://github.com/billsix/billsix-portage I submit ebuilds to Gentoo itself if I think others would benefit. As far as I can tel…

Shameless plug: https://github.com/hoffa/debpack It won't pass all lintian tests due to the ridiculous requirements and useless ceremony "correct" Debian packages need. Still working on it.

If we're plugging tools we use to make Debian packages without dealing with the insanity of Debian tooling, I use debbuild[1] with OBS[2] for the bulk of my packaging at work for Debian/Ubuntu systems.

As it turns out, it doesn't take that much effort to make packages that comply with Fedora/openSUSE Packaging Guidelines and Debian Policy with this tool, and it has drastically simplified my ability to maintain software across distributions in a way that still cleanly integrates with the distribution platform.

This is how the Spacewalk Debian/Ubuntu client packages are built[3][4], among many other things. There's also a few other examples out in the wild[5][6][7].

At least for the stuff I make for myself, I haven't made packages that fully pass lintian, but it's not terribly difficult to do if you want to.

[1]: https://github.com/ascherer/debbuild

[2]: https://openbuildservice.org/

[3]: https://gitlab.com/datto/engineering/spacewalk-debian-client...

[4]: https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/systemsmanagement:sp...

[5]: https://pagure.io/python36-flatpkg-deb

[6]: https://pagure.io/rpmdevtools-deb

[7]: https://build.opensuse.org/package/view_file/Virtualization:...

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#202

Post by bregma »

chubot wrote: post #46

Instead, currently, all packages become lint-unclean, all maintainers need to read up on what the new thing is, how it might break, whether/how it affects them, manually run some tests, and finally decide to opt in. This causes a lot of overhead and manually executed mechanical changes across packages. I always wondered if Debian/Ubuntu could benefit from a "monorepo". It seems to work for other distributions, e.g. A…

Yes, a monorepo for all software with a single soviet to oversee it with a good five-year plan for rollout. We have plenty of historic examples of such centralized control.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#203

Post by infinity0 »

This developer is largely responsible for the Go ecosystem in Debian where they develop against HEAD. That's pretty hard and results in a lot of breakages. Go developers don't give a shit and push a lot of the externalities onto distro packages like Debian packagers (volunteers) or else Google developers (who get paid a huge amount to do bullshit engineering that nobody else cares about).

We're making a lot of progress with Debian Rust packages and have automated away 90% of the ordinary Debian crap - which is needed in the general case but not for Rust where the constraints are very well-defined by Cargo - you only have to maintain two files (d/changelog and d/copyright) for the vast majority of Debian Rust crates.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#204

Post by passthejoe »

Conan_Kudo wrote: post #151

So I've been involved in Fedora for as long as Michael has been involved in Debian, and I have attempted branching out into other distribution communities over the years. To this day, the Debian community is the only community where I have not been able to get past the initial stages to get involved. And you don't have to look too hard to see that I'm in quite a few communities... There's a lot of parallels to Debian…

The Fedora Project really encourages participation from its community. They can definitely steer the ship a lot more quickly.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#205

Post by perlgeek »

logifail wrote: post #179
perlgeek wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then there is a ton of documentation on creating packages but which 300 page guide is the right one to use is unclear. And which set of packaging tools should I use? I've run into the same problems, though I've only wanted to build packages for my own use, or company-internal use. I think I've understood now how packaging is supposed to work, and have written a guide, shameless plug: http://leanpub.com/debian/c/hn…

> feedback would be appreciated I'm just looking through it, for me looking through the epub version the layout is broken (at least viewing using Adobe Digital Editions), apparently every time there's a yellow block with code. "1.1 Target Audience and Prerequisites" is the first example but I keep finding more.

Thanks, I'll have to bring that to leanpub's attention, the PDF looks fine.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#206

Post by sytse »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #135
chubot wrote: post #46

Instead, currently, all packages become lint-unclean, all maintainers need to read up on what the new thing is, how it might break, whether/how it affects them, manually run some tests, and finally decide to opt in. This causes a lot of overhead and manually executed mechanical changes across packages. I always wondered if Debian/Ubuntu could benefit from a "monorepo". It seems to work for other distributions, e.g. A…

Wouldn't even need to be a monorepo. As a first step, ensuring that all packages use the same system, e.g. git, and one authoritative repository (e.g. a debian-maintained gitlab) would be a great start.

https://salsa.debian.org/ is a Debian maintained GitLab

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#207

Post by switz »

secure wrote: post #170
switz wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could add the following CSS to the container (`.row` here but you should make the class name a bit more specific) which will stack the sidebar and your content into a backwards column (so the sidebar shows up after scrolling past the content, which looks and feels ok for a quick & scrappy mobile fix. display: flex; flex-direction: reverse-column; Put that in a media query to only target phones/small devices. Feel…

Thank you so much! Committed your suggestion in https://github.com/stapelberg/hugo/commit/3a7227fef47fc49550... . Let me know your Paypal, if you have any, and I’ll gladly invite you for a virtual coffee as a sign of my gratitude :)

All good! Feel free to shoot a small donation to the Internet Archive or we can grab a coffee if you ever find yourself in NYC.

Glad it worked for you!

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#208

Post by JohnFen »

jcoffland wrote: post #66

I've been using Debian for over 10 years and I still love it as a user. But as a developer, I find it extremely frustrating. I've several times attempted to figure out how to package my open-source projects [1] [2] for Debian but the process is a nightmare. As I understand it, I first have to find someone with appropriate privileges to mentor me. I should be able to just submit a potential package for review. Then th…

> I've been using Debian for over 10 years and I still love it as a user.

I've been using it for even longer than that, but I no longer love it. It has declined to being "just OK" in my eyes, which is why I've begun the effort to shift all of my machines to something better.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#209

Post by JohnFen »

ktjfi wrote: post #47
bnegreve wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For next time: dpkg -S path/to/file gives the the name of the package containing a file, and dpkg -s package-name gives you the name of the maintainer.

All mails I've sent to maintainers of packages regarding issues with them have been ignored. I think they prefer you to use the bug tracker. (Which sucks, so I always end up doing nothing about it.) In the end I switched all my servers to Ubuntu. It's been good and I love PPAs.

> I think they prefer you to use the bug tracker. (Which sucks, so I always end up doing nothing about it.)

Oh, so much this. The crappiness of bug reporting for Debian has meant that I stopped trying to report issues years ago.

Re: Winding down my Debian involvement

#210

Post by JohnFen »

josteink wrote: post #92
asveikau wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's become too slow and bureaucratic. When I first used Debian in the 90s it had a reputation for being slow and bureaucratic.

And unlike most distros which were around back then, Debian is still here today, so it must be good for something . That said, I agree anything Debian (and thus Ubuntu too) and FSF feels awkwardly baroque to work with these days. Old email-based systems, bickering over politics and minor issues rather than the subject at hand, for weeks or months... and no standard CI?!? With all that I too find myself spending my ti…

The thing that I think Debian does best (which is the same thing that has kept me using Debian since about 1996) is stability. I don't think any other Linux distro (that isn't Debian-based, anyway) even comes close.
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