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The Delusions of Debian

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Re: The Delusions of Debian

#2

Post by jitl »

I worry about Debian’s future. The infrastructure of the project is slow moving and baroque. Not many people want to learn it to become maintainers. Michael Stapelberg’s blog post about leaving Debian describes the general issue of using tooling and process with 1994 leverage to tackle problems with 2022 scale, does not sound fun: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-windin...

I tried to get into Debian package ownership while a student, but came to realize I would need a substantial financial incentive to interact with Debian’s machinery. I spent a while running FreeBSD after that.

Re: The Delusions of Debian

#3

Post by eternityforest »

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 work at a distro if nobody was paying me, that seems like some of the very top unpleasant parts of tech work all it one job. And from what I hear, the Debian people are basically working a second full time job and some are not happy about the thankless drugery.

Either that, or the world should transition to Fedora. I'm sure they could get to Ubuntu's level of everything just works, if they had the whole Debian team helping!

Re: The Delusions of Debian

#4

Post by georgewsinger »

> As of writing the Debian stable release has 96.729 packages in stable and 149.976 packages in unstable. That is a massive amount of software packages.

Does anyone know how this compares to other distros? In particular NixOS/nixpkgs is of interest.

Re: The Delusions of Debian

#6

Post by yakubin »

georgewsinger wrote: post #4

> As of writing the Debian stable release has 96.729 packages in stable and 149.976 packages in unstable. That is a massive amount of software packages. Does anyone know how this compares to other distros? In particular NixOS/nixpkgs is of interest.

I'm not on NixOS, but I do use Nix as a package manager on Debian and this is what I got:

  $ nix-env -qa | wc -l
  39168
Of course, it's important to note that Nix doesn't lag behind upstream as much as Debian. Actually, it's usually one of the first places where new versions of packages appear. So you don't have the problem such as the one Debian has with maintaining PHP 7.4.

Re: The Delusions of Debian

#7

Post by deknos »

and in other news, some new opinions from the peanut gallery.

i am not involved in the debian project, but there seem to be quite a lot of people who know "what's best". Funnily most of them are not involved in building the stuff. and he shits on reddit comments but also does quite the same. i guess it's because they did not share his opinion.

Re: The Delusions of Debian

#8

Post by imrejonk »

> 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 developers, no one can provide any security fixes for PHP 7.4. Not only that, no one outside of Debian will be monitoring problems with PHP 7.4 because everyone else will long since have upgraded to PHP 8.

It’s a case of bad timing. Packages for PHP 8 were uploaded shortly before the bullseye freeze, which didn’t sit well with the release managers. See bug #976811 [1]. The maintainer also mentions in that bug thread that Microsoft will provide security fixes for PHP 7.4 after the EOL date.

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=976811

Re: The Delusions of Debian

#9

Post by ckastner »

This article is full of inaccuracies and errors.

> Due to the sheer size of the current Debian release it is infeasible for a small team to be able to audit all the packages, so there is a system of prioritizing packages which are more security sensitive.

This was, at best, poor communication. Of course nobody would ever audit all of 90,000 packages, easily billions of LOC. Especially not when the vast majority of these packages have a very small user base.

> 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.

The author is claiming an assertion of the fact. From a very recent thread "Is Debian sending people away" [1], there is no decline.

> Before that, Michael Larabel, the former leader had these ridicules points in focus for the future of Debian.

I don't know who they are, but they are not a former Debian Project Leader [2].

And so on.

[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2022/03/msg00037.htm...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Debian_project_leaders

Re: The Delusions of Debian

#10

Post by Asdrubalini »

georgewsinger wrote: post #4

> As of writing the Debian stable release has 96.729 packages in stable and 149.976 packages in unstable. That is a massive amount of software packages. Does anyone know how this compares to other distros? In particular NixOS/nixpkgs is of interest.

Official repo [0] says more than 80,000.

Edit: it seems to be the largest software repo according to this (2020) [1].

[0] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs [1] https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixpkgs-has-been-the-largest-r...

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