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Debian's packaging system wasn't designed for third parties to ship their own packages. It has become the norm, but it isn't in Debian's philosophy to obstruct
by rlpb 8y ago
Debian's packaging system wasn't designed for third parties to ship their own packages. It has become the norm, but it isn't in Debian's philosophy to obstruct users from doing what they want.
Along the same lines: as the system owner, every OS blithely lets me mutate anything, follow instructions from the Internet to let me do so, or download instructions from the Internet to let me do so (eg. "setup.exe"). The exception is locked down hardware such as iOS devices.
- jancsika 8y agoI'm saying that this article would have been a lot more forceful and compelling if Microsoft wasn't able to completely bork the author's favorite OS by installing a single third-party package on that OS. Compare: "Holy crap, Foo's web IDE pulls in 20 megs of frameworks and is made up almost exclusively of eval functions! It takes like 10 seconds to switch to another tab where I have open a probably still secure online banking session. LOL" "Holy crap, installing Foo's sloppy third-party package on my OS could completely bork my OS-- like any other third-party package! LOL" > The exception is locked down hardware such as iOS devices. Or a Chromebook, which has an escape hatch for installing whatever less secure system you want on it, including Debian. Or Qubes. Or possibly GuixSD which-- while I'm sure it's not resistant to a bad faith package-- has user-level installs and transactional updates to recover from an accidentally borked or sloppy package. I'm not even dogging Debian. I love and use Debian. And no doubt most other OSes have similarly brittle system-wide package installers. But the members of those other OS projects didn't write an arrogant and condescending critique of a third-party package. A Debian member did. So here we are.