13 ms·

20 years as a Debian maintainer

262 points by BuuQu9hu 10y ago

jwilk 10y ago
Version that can be read without JS enabled: https://suihkulokki.blogspot.com/2017/01/20-years-of-being-debian-maintainer.html?m=1 https://suihkulokki.blogspot.com/2017/01/20-years-of-being-d...
- rxlim 10y ago
  I cannot comprehend why on earth Javascript is required just to show some text. This must be the height of web design silliness.
  - suihkulokki 10y ago
    I just switched to a simpler theme, I didn't realize the one I had chosen was so dependant on javascript.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
cixin 10y ago
In case the author reads this, and as I can't comment there: Thank you. Debian is an awesome and somewhat under-rated distribution. Being a maintainer always seems like a thankless and slightly forgotten role. Thanks for having the persistence to keep going so long.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- hsusbwh 10y ago
  Under what metric is Debian underrated?
- suihkulokki 10y ago
  Had I known the text would end up shared here, I'd surely spent more than 15min writing it! I'm hardly the most active contributor in Debian, but I guess that's part of how one can manage so long.
- elsurudo 10y ago
  Is it under-rated? Perhaps its marketing isn't as strong, but it's the "father" of a lot of distros today. Personally when I want a server distro, I still go with Debian. Simple and solid. No nonsense.
  - new299 10y ago
    Personally, I feel like Ubuntu gets a lot more attention, perhaps more on the client-side. Sometimes, the foundational work Debian provides isn't fully acknowledged.
    - elsurudo 10y ago
      Yeah, Ubuntu probably is the best-marketed distro today. And I agree that Debian probably doesn't get the praise it deserves – IMO the nicest things about Ubuntu come from Debian.
  - brazzledazzle 10y ago
    I think Debian and its children are so much nicer to use from a server perspective. RHEL and its derivatives have definitely improved over the years but it seemed like Debian had the right idea early on. Things like how they managed Apache modules and an out of the box emphasis on 'conf.d'-style configuration directories are just a couple of things that come to mind. The modular thinking lends itself well to learning because changes are easy to back out and automation because it's easier to compose configuration.
bostand 10y ago
Thanks Riku, debian has become an excellent distro thanks to the hard work of people like you. At the same time, it is sad to see how much work you guys need to do for things that should have been automated or done by the original developers... Let's hope AppImage changes that Edit: Changed flatpak to appimage
- dvfjsdhgfv 10y ago
  How should Flatpak change that? These two (DEB and Flatpak) are, at least currently, entirely parallel, each with its own set of advantages and problems. I don't think it would make any sense to migrate a distribution such as Debian to Flatpak entirely.
  - bostand 10y ago
    Sorry, I meant to write AppImage not flatpak. The point was that a lot of packaging would be done by the devs, allowing minutes maintainers to so more important stuff.
    - davexunit 10y ago
      I don't think having developers doing the packaging is an ideal situation. I often hear developers complaining about the multitude of GNU/Linux distros because they think it's somehow their responsibility to provide binaries. It's not. The role of the upstream developer is to make their build system easy to use so that other people (like distro maintainers, but also just "regular" users) can compile from source without feeling like they're pulling teeth. If your software is easy to build, it will naturally flow into the distros when its users want it. I package a lot of software and a lot of software is difficult to build without tons of hacks. For interested readers, here's some best practices for being a good upstream: - Just use the GNU autotools. Users expect `./configure && make && make install` to work. Too often people roll their own configure scripts and Makefiles and they always miss something important. Distros expect there to be certain knobs to tweak, and configure scripts and Makefiles generated by the autotools have all of them. - Don't bundle third-party dependencies. For security (and for better documentation of the true dependency graph) distros often must go through extra trouble to unbundle third-party libraries when present. Some project even add their own custom patches to their bundled source. Resist the urge to do this. - Include accurate copyright information. Put a license header at the top of every source file. Any serious distro will need to do at least a cursory inspection of licensing info to make sure it meets requirements. - Make proper source release tarballs. Do not depend on your version control tool being available at build-time. Do not depend on the autotools being available build time. Use 'make distcheck' to make a fully bootstrapped tarball to distribute. - Do not make any use of the Internet during a build. That means no downloading third-party libraries, pre-built binaries, etc. It's imperative that a build can succeed without network access, and some distributions isolate builds from the network to ensure they don't misbehave. - Do not hardcode absolute paths to binaries. No /usr/bin/bash or etc. Your assumption will surely fail on a non-trivial number of systems. Find the location of a binary at configure time by inspecting $PATH. GNU autoconf can do that and substitute the absolute file name where it's needed, such as in a script's shebang. The same advice can be applied for anything else you need an absolute file name for. - Do not assume /usr exists. The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard is not as popular as it used to be. This is a more generalized form of the previous point. Again, if you use the Autotools you will be doing the right thing by default. There's surely more, but that's what I can think of right now. Surely a Debian developer or someone else has compiled a more thorough list. Anyone know of one? I think that today's software being so difficult to build is making practices that are frowned upon by distributions (for very good reason) seem like acceptable solutions, which leads us to the growing popularity of Docker, Snappy, and Flatpak. "This software is nearly impossible to build, so just use my {Docker,Snappy,Flatpak} bundle!" tl;dr - Make your software easy to build, don't just package up a mess.
isopickle 10y ago
Thank you Riku! I used fte as my primary editor on OS/2, and when I started using Debian I was happy to find it available there as well.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ausjke 10y ago
Even though I use ubuntu on my desktop, it is from Debian, and I ran Debian on my servers for years. Debian is the most important software for me for decades. For that I thank you, Riku, and everybody else contributes to Debian!
- shmerl 10y ago
  What prevents you from using Debian on the desktop? I'm using Debian testing for quite a while already, and it works rather well. The only annoyance is the the freeze period, but it got shorter lately.
  - ausjke 10y ago
    Too many software development environments are using ubuntu out-of-the-box these days, I thus follow that to save some setup time. If I use desktop for simply surfing or office needs then yes Debian will be my preference.
    - dromen 10y ago
      Are there specific things you had issues with? Debian Testing still feels more stable and as feature-filled as Ubuntu Xenial to me.
    - shmerl 10y ago
      I never had such kind of problems when using Debian, but if you need to target a specific distro, you can always add a VM or chroot / container to target it. There is no need to replace the desktop OS to do it. Linux is quite good for such kind of thing.
zitterbewegung 10y ago
Thank you for your service to the Debian community. I have only run Debian based distributions on all of my installs of Linux.
epynonymous 10y ago
thank you much for your work on debian, i love the stability of debian linux, 20 years is a lifetime!
rxlim 10y ago
Thank you for all your work. I installed Debian for the first time almost 13 years ago and have enjoyed the "Debian way" every second. But as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. Due to various decisions by the Debian community, Debian Wheezy will be the last version I'm going to install and for the last few years I have been in the proccess of migrating thousands of servers away from Debian.
- neuromute 10y ago
  What are you migrating to, if you don't mind my asking?
  - rxlim 10y ago
    FreeBSD, so the migration is not just away from Debian but also Linux. Of course problems always arise in such operations, but in general we have been very happy with the change, and I'm just as excited about FreeBSD as I was with Debian before.
    - gkya 10y ago
      Do you migrate you workstation to FreeBSD too, or your servers and the like only? In any case I want to take this opportunity to note that FreeBSD is quite nice as a daily driver on your workstation. The only missing thing is bug-free suspend/hibernate, which works for some and for some doesn't. edit: added missing adverbs.
      - nerflad 10y ago
        In my experience, you're also rolling the dice when you suspend Linux. My x99 workstation, z77 workstation, and XPS 13 have all failed to resume before. But Windows has done the same. I guess ACPI is a mess.
        Fnoord 10y ago
        > But Windows has done the same. I guess ACPI is a mess. Of course, you don't mention macOS. I never had issues with suspend on any of my MBPs. If I did, it turned out that was my battery got empty, and the few times this happened I did think about suspend failing. Turned out I was wrong.
necessity 10y ago
The site doesn't even load without javascript.
lamby 10y ago
Riku is 10 years ahead of me! https://chris-lamb.co.uk/posts/10-years-of-debian https://chris-lamb.co.uk/posts/10-years-of-debian
Gusbenz 10y ago
Thanks. Debian is all I've ever really known in regards to Linux distros.
AceJohnny2 10y ago
A couple of weeks before they got accepted? Wow! I considered become a DD about 10 years ago, but a friend was going through the process and it took them over a year with at least one restart-from-scratch because the bureaucracy had been lost or something. > Regis NM did start somewhere in 2003. There was a period of him being on hold, in 2006 we did continue the process, which used some time, but most of the delay up to now is, again, my fault. Seems like all the few NMs left in my AM queue do have some huge level of patience available somewhere... https://lists.debian.org/debian-newmaint/2007/08/msg00046.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-newmaint/2007/08/msg00046.ht... I wonder if Debian has improved their process or replaced the ineffective people since. Do they still have the second-class-citizen system (whose name I can't remember offhand)?
- rleigh 10y ago
  While such delay is frustrating, do bear in mind that these "inefficient" people are entirely unpaid volunteers doing this on their own time and at their own expense. Which is not to say that the process could not be improved, of course. They did introduce the "maintainer" status, which makes it simpler to get some level of privileges, which removed some of the blockers.
- opk 10y ago
  I went through a similar experience with the NM process some ten years ago except I ended up giving up on the whole thing. After being told I absolutely had to answer a load of questions within a week for a week that happened to be very inconvenient, my answers then got completely ignored. I carried on maintaining the one package until a few years ago when I gave up because nobody would sponsor an upload until the freeze at which point I was being told I had to backport bug fixes to the old release. I actually ended up jumping to FreeBSD before the whole systemd mess hit and I've found it to have a friendlier community.
  - BuuQu9hu 10y ago
    These days the questions thing has been replaced by a more streamlined process, basically if you have been contributing for a while you'll be accepted.
faragon 10y ago
Thank you very much, Riku! Kudos and glory! :-) Debian muscle is behind many other Linux distributions, and Debian maintainer work is fundamental.

262 points by BuuQu9hu 10y ago

jwilk 10y ago

Version that can be read without JS enabled: https://suihkulokki.blogspot.com/2017/01/20-years-of-being-debian-maintainer.html?m=1 https://suihkulokki.blogspot.com/2017/01/20-years-of-being-d...

rxlim 10y ago
I cannot comprehend why on earth Javascript is required just to show some text. This must be the height of web design silliness.
- suihkulokki 10y ago
  I just switched to a simpler theme, I didn't realize the one I had chosen was so dependant on javascript.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

cixin 10y ago

In case the author reads this, and as I can't comment there: Thank you. Debian is an awesome and somewhat under-rated distribution. Being a maintainer always seems like a thankless and slightly forgotten role. Thanks for having the persistence to keep going so long.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
hsusbwh 10y ago
Under what metric is Debian underrated?
suihkulokki 10y ago
Had I known the text would end up shared here, I'd surely spent more than 15min writing it! I'm hardly the most active contributor in Debian, but I guess that's part of how one can manage so long.
elsurudo 10y ago
Is it under-rated? Perhaps its marketing isn't as strong, but it's the "father" of a lot of distros today. Personally when I want a server distro, I still go with Debian. Simple and solid. No nonsense.
- new299 10y ago
  Personally, I feel like Ubuntu gets a lot more attention, perhaps more on the client-side. Sometimes, the foundational work Debian provides isn't fully acknowledged.
  - elsurudo 10y ago
    Yeah, Ubuntu probably is the best-marketed distro today. And I agree that Debian probably doesn't get the praise it deserves – IMO the nicest things about Ubuntu come from Debian.
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  I think Debian and its children are so much nicer to use from a server perspective. RHEL and its derivatives have definitely improved over the years but it seemed like Debian had the right idea early on. Things like how they managed Apache modules and an out of the box emphasis on 'conf.d'-style configuration directories are just a couple of things that come to mind. The modular thinking lends itself well to learning because changes are easy to back out and automation because it's easier to compose configuration.

bostand 10y ago

Thanks Riku, debian has become an excellent distro thanks to the hard work of people like you. At the same time, it is sad to see how much work you guys need to do for things that should have been automated or done by the original developers... Let's hope AppImage changes that Edit: Changed flatpak to appimage

dvfjsdhgfv 10y ago
How should Flatpak change that? These two (DEB and Flatpak) are, at least currently, entirely parallel, each with its own set of advantages and problems. I don't think it would make any sense to migrate a distribution such as Debian to Flatpak entirely.
- bostand 10y ago
  Sorry, I meant to write AppImage not flatpak. The point was that a lot of packaging would be done by the devs, allowing minutes maintainers to so more important stuff.
  - davexunit 10y ago
    I don't think having developers doing the packaging is an ideal situation. I often hear developers complaining about the multitude of GNU/Linux distros because they think it's somehow their responsibility to provide binaries. It's not. The role of the upstream developer is to make their build system easy to use so that other people (like distro maintainers, but also just "regular" users) can compile from source without feeling like they're pulling teeth. If your software is easy to build, it will naturally flow into the distros when its users want it. I package a lot of software and a lot of software is difficult to build without tons of hacks. For interested readers, here's some best practices for being a good upstream: - Just use the GNU autotools. Users expect `./configure && make && make install` to work. Too often people roll their own configure scripts and Makefiles and they always miss something important. Distros expect there to be certain knobs to tweak, and configure scripts and Makefiles generated by the autotools have all of them. - Don't bundle third-party dependencies. For security (and for better documentation of the true dependency graph) distros often must go through extra trouble to unbundle third-party libraries when present. Some project even add their own custom patches to their bundled source. Resist the urge to do this. - Include accurate copyright information. Put a license header at the top of every source file. Any serious distro will need to do at least a cursory inspection of licensing info to make sure it meets requirements. - Make proper source release tarballs. Do not depend on your version control tool being available at build-time. Do not depend on the autotools being available build time. Use 'make distcheck' to make a fully bootstrapped tarball to distribute. - Do not make any use of the Internet during a build. That means no downloading third-party libraries, pre-built binaries, etc. It's imperative that a build can succeed without network access, and some distributions isolate builds from the network to ensure they don't misbehave. - Do not hardcode absolute paths to binaries. No /usr/bin/bash or etc. Your assumption will surely fail on a non-trivial number of systems. Find the location of a binary at configure time by inspecting $PATH. GNU autoconf can do that and substitute the absolute file name where it's needed, such as in a script's shebang. The same advice can be applied for anything else you need an absolute file name for. - Do not assume /usr exists. The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard is not as popular as it used to be. This is a more generalized form of the previous point. Again, if you use the Autotools you will be doing the right thing by default. There's surely more, but that's what I can think of right now. Surely a Debian developer or someone else has compiled a more thorough list. Anyone know of one? I think that today's software being so difficult to build is making practices that are frowned upon by distributions (for very good reason) seem like acceptable solutions, which leads us to the growing popularity of Docker, Snappy, and Flatpak. "This software is nearly impossible to build, so just use my {Docker,Snappy,Flatpak} bundle!" tl;dr - Make your software easy to build, don't just package up a mess.

isopickle 10y ago

Thank you Riku! I used fte as my primary editor on OS/2, and when I started using Debian I was happy to find it available there as well.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

ausjke 10y ago

Even though I use ubuntu on my desktop, it is from Debian, and I ran Debian on my servers for years. Debian is the most important software for me for decades. For that I thank you, Riku, and everybody else contributes to Debian!

shmerl 10y ago
What prevents you from using Debian on the desktop? I'm using Debian testing for quite a while already, and it works rather well. The only annoyance is the the freeze period, but it got shorter lately.
- ausjke 10y ago
  Too many software development environments are using ubuntu out-of-the-box these days, I thus follow that to save some setup time. If I use desktop for simply surfing or office needs then yes Debian will be my preference.
  - dromen 10y ago
    Are there specific things you had issues with? Debian Testing still feels more stable and as feature-filled as Ubuntu Xenial to me.
  - shmerl 10y ago
    I never had such kind of problems when using Debian, but if you need to target a specific distro, you can always add a VM or chroot / container to target it. There is no need to replace the desktop OS to do it. Linux is quite good for such kind of thing.

zitterbewegung 10y ago

Thank you for your service to the Debian community. I have only run Debian based distributions on all of my installs of Linux.

epynonymous 10y ago

thank you much for your work on debian, i love the stability of debian linux, 20 years is a lifetime!

rxlim 10y ago

Thank you for all your work. I installed Debian for the first time almost 13 years ago and have enjoyed the "Debian way" every second. But as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. Due to various decisions by the Debian community, Debian Wheezy will be the last version I'm going to install and for the last few years I have been in the proccess of migrating thousands of servers away from Debian.

neuromute 10y ago
What are you migrating to, if you don't mind my asking?
- rxlim 10y ago
  FreeBSD, so the migration is not just away from Debian but also Linux. Of course problems always arise in such operations, but in general we have been very happy with the change, and I'm just as excited about FreeBSD as I was with Debian before.
  - gkya 10y ago
    Do you migrate you workstation to FreeBSD too, or your servers and the like only? In any case I want to take this opportunity to note that FreeBSD is quite nice as a daily driver on your workstation. The only missing thing is bug-free suspend/hibernate, which works for some and for some doesn't. edit: added missing adverbs.
    - nerflad 10y ago
      In my experience, you're also rolling the dice when you suspend Linux. My x99 workstation, z77 workstation, and XPS 13 have all failed to resume before. But Windows has done the same. I guess ACPI is a mess.
      - Fnoord 10y ago
        > But Windows has done the same. I guess ACPI is a mess. Of course, you don't mention macOS. I never had issues with suspend on any of my MBPs. If I did, it turned out that was my battery got empty, and the few times this happened I did think about suspend failing. Turned out I was wrong.

necessity 10y ago

The site doesn't even load without javascript.

lamby 10y ago

Riku is 10 years ahead of me! https://chris-lamb.co.uk/posts/10-years-of-debian https://chris-lamb.co.uk/posts/10-years-of-debian

Gusbenz 10y ago

Thanks. Debian is all I've ever really known in regards to Linux distros.

AceJohnny2 10y ago

A couple of weeks before they got accepted? Wow! I considered become a DD about 10 years ago, but a friend was going through the process and it took them over a year with at least one restart-from-scratch because the bureaucracy had been lost or something. > Regis NM did start somewhere in 2003. There was a period of him being on hold, in 2006 we did continue the process, which used some time, but most of the delay up to now is, again, my fault. Seems like all the few NMs left in my AM queue do have some huge level of patience available somewhere... https://lists.debian.org/debian-newmaint/2007/08/msg00046.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-newmaint/2007/08/msg00046.ht... I wonder if Debian has improved their process or replaced the ineffective people since. Do they still have the second-class-citizen system (whose name I can't remember offhand)?

rleigh 10y ago
While such delay is frustrating, do bear in mind that these "inefficient" people are entirely unpaid volunteers doing this on their own time and at their own expense. Which is not to say that the process could not be improved, of course. They did introduce the "maintainer" status, which makes it simpler to get some level of privileges, which removed some of the blockers.
opk 10y ago
I went through a similar experience with the NM process some ten years ago except I ended up giving up on the whole thing. After being told I absolutely had to answer a load of questions within a week for a week that happened to be very inconvenient, my answers then got completely ignored. I carried on maintaining the one package until a few years ago when I gave up because nobody would sponsor an upload until the freeze at which point I was being told I had to backport bug fixes to the old release. I actually ended up jumping to FreeBSD before the whole systemd mess hit and I've found it to have a friendlier community.
- BuuQu9hu 10y ago
  These days the questions thing has been replaced by a more streamlined process, basically if you have been contributing for a while you'll be accepted.

faragon 10y ago

Thank you very much, Riku! Kudos and glory! :-) Debian muscle is behind many other Linux distributions, and Debian maintainer work is fundamental.