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At the risk of sounding provocative, Debian are a political effort first and a technical project second. They're much more of a target platform than a leader in

At the risk of sounding provocative, Debian are a political effort first and a technical project second. They're much more of a target platform than a leader in their own right. As such, I'm not surprised that there was significantly more interest in self-preservation and socializing than in any technical work. I don't recall Debian ever pushing boundaries.

teddyh 11y ago
Debian has plenty of technical work done within its boundaries. (Don’t forget the pioneering work that Debian did with its package format which was greatly superior to that of Red Hat’s RPM at the time.) A distribution is not created by simply downloading all software from the upstream authors, compiling them and burning a CD. Simply read the Debian Policy manual to get a feel for the vastness of an undertaking which creating a distribution really is: https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Of course they've done technical work, they're a distribution. Of course they have a distribution standard, they're a large committee-driven project. None of these are pushing the boundaries as such. I never said anything to the contrary, but rather that those are all secondary to the primary political goals. A distribution having a detailed technical policy does not refute any of this. I don't support Red Hat, either. dpkg's original conception was a tarball-based package management Perl script with rudimentary substring match dependency processing. It evolved as time went on. GNU is the same. Politics first, technology second. They've generally been much better at both, however.
  - jschwartzi 11y ago
    Any time you put more than two people in a room together and ask them to finish something, there will be politics. The only thing you can do is make sure everyone has some goals that are the same as the organization's. In a corporation, this is achieved by paying people to be responsible for certain aspects of the company's operations. In a volunteer organization, this is accomplished by having the people in the organization socialize around the organization. Everyone has their reasons. Some people are motivated by producing beautiful functional code. Others are motivated by the ideals of Free Software. Still others want to use the community to sell hardware. At the end of the day, as long as they're all moving in a similar direction, the movement is successful. Whether or not the movement is a good thing depends on your values and motives.
digi_owl 11y ago
> Debian are a political effort first and a technical project second. And that may well be what is wrong with the Linux ecosystem today. I keep seeing formerly technical "projects" go social over and over and over, with the inevitable result that it turns political and gets derailed from its technical efforts. This in large part because going social attracts people that end up using the name and reputation of the project to ride political hobby horses (potentially for social ladder climbing outside the project).

teddyh 11y ago

Debian has plenty of technical work done within its boundaries. (Don’t forget the pioneering work that Debian did with its package format which was greatly superior to that of Red Hat’s RPM at the time.) A distribution is not created by simply downloading all software from the upstream authors, compiling them and burning a CD. Simply read the Debian Policy manual to get a feel for the vastness of an undertaking which creating a distribution really is: https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Of course they've done technical work, they're a distribution. Of course they have a distribution standard, they're a large committee-driven project. None of these are pushing the boundaries as such. I never said anything to the contrary, but rather that those are all secondary to the primary political goals. A distribution having a detailed technical policy does not refute any of this. I don't support Red Hat, either. dpkg's original conception was a tarball-based package management Perl script with rudimentary substring match dependency processing. It evolved as time went on. GNU is the same. Politics first, technology second. They've generally been much better at both, however.
- jschwartzi 11y ago
  Any time you put more than two people in a room together and ask them to finish something, there will be politics. The only thing you can do is make sure everyone has some goals that are the same as the organization's. In a corporation, this is achieved by paying people to be responsible for certain aspects of the company's operations. In a volunteer organization, this is accomplished by having the people in the organization socialize around the organization. Everyone has their reasons. Some people are motivated by producing beautiful functional code. Others are motivated by the ideals of Free Software. Still others want to use the community to sell hardware. At the end of the day, as long as they're all moving in a similar direction, the movement is successful. Whether or not the movement is a good thing depends on your values and motives.

digi_owl 11y ago

> Debian are a political effort first and a technical project second. And that may well be what is wrong with the Linux ecosystem today. I keep seeing formerly technical "projects" go social over and over and over, with the inevitable result that it turns political and gets derailed from its technical efforts. This in large part because going social attracts people that end up using the name and reputation of the project to ride political hobby horses (potentially for social ladder climbing outside the project).