6 ms·

Re: Making Debian Responsible For Its Actions

76 points by spahl 16y ago

hapless 16y ago
This significantly increases my respect for Zed Shaw. Yes, he wrote an offensive post crying for blood, but after he had a chance to cool down, he used his own fame and audience to exhibit a well-reasoned response from someone who disagreed. That's a very adult thing to do. In some ways, it's actually better than an apology.
- gjm11 16y ago
  That plus an apology would have been even better.
  - zedshaw 16y ago
    An apology to who? I spoke my mind and made what I thought were valid points and I still stand by them. Debian is abusive to developers who create the software they need. It's only a matter of time before the programmers making their supply chain of projects declare enough. As a good reference for the exact type of behavior I'm talking about, see this: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=380731 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=380731 This is what I'm talking about. You can't treat people that way and not expect them to rise up.
    - davidw 16y ago
      You spread mistruths about Debian with your various "business" comments. That in and of itself merits an apology. You can't just go making stuff up about people because they irritate you. Also, from everything I can tell about your original post, you had a (well known) problem with Ruby gems on Debian, not with something you wrote. I can understand being irritated about that (Debian is not blameless, obviously), but there are jerks everywhere, and also an awfully lot of nice people in Debian too. Your lynch-mob mentality (seo tricks, in-person confrontations, etc...) reflects very poorly on you and is extremely unlikely to produce anything approaching positive changes. If you don't like the freedom others have with open source licenses, why not just go back to making proprietary software where you won't have the problem. Freedom means that people sometimes do things you disagree with (even vehemently so), and if you can't handle it, then perhaps it is simply not worth it.
    - cmsj 16y ago
      Debian is not abusive, some DDs are unfriendly some of the time. Some mistakes have been made. This isn't some conspiracy to ruin your rep. How about users/sysadmins "rise up" against ruby/python/php for having module distribution/loading systems which in no way try actively to be easy to package well? Tell us about the changes you are going to make such that all gems/eggs are automatically packaged for RHEL/Debian/etc so the overhead for DDs, and consequently their opportunity to confuse things, is near zero. That's the outcome we need. Are the languages prepared to make the changes necessary?
      - blasdel 16y ago
        We're not going to cripple our modern programming language environments to suit an outdated system designed around mutually-exclusive soname dependencies, and we sure as hell aren't going to prostrate ourselves as a community before your baroque unnecessary social process. It's not just us affected whippersnappers causing problems — even the enterprisiest Java communities have given up on your packaging model.
        cmsj 16y ago
        So you're not prepared to change anything? Even if distros make changes as well? Why are these two groups not working together to enable magic for their users? Why would it be so bad, for example, to have something like this in a python script: import awesomelib >= 2.10 import specialsauce == 1.58 Of course this immediately opens up a veritable hydra of questions and corner cases and other considerations that need to be made in designing such a facility, but that's why there are smart programmers and smart distro makers out there :) I think it's fairly clear that there are grumpy, recalcitrant, belligerent people on all sides of this argument, and the people who lose most are the users that everyone claims to care about. As a user I feel that is deeply tragic and I feel like we have all failed.
        blasdel 16y ago
        import awesomelib >= 2.10 import specialsauce == 1.58 Is precisely the feature I love most about rubygems, and would love to have in Python. It's also a feature that Debian goes out of their way to eliminate because it violates their precious FHS, apt can't handle it at all (they get around that for important packages by mangling the names), and superficially overlaps with their 'alternatives' system. Where did you get the idea that I didn't want it? Unfortunately there's no implementation path to make it possible on Debian's side, no matter what the language communities do to compromise. apt can't handle it technically, and their release cycle process can't handle it socially.
    - loewenskind 16y ago
      Personally, I don't have a fundamental problem with a distribution (even a popular one) refusing to package something for their systems that they think is awful. Sometimes the easy choice is the wrong choice. If you just step back and say "well, they want to eat every meal at a fast food restaurant I guess I better make it easy for them to do that" then you are an enabler. All that said, they should get off the fence about it. If they don't want PHP development beyond the web on Debian they should put that in a policy somewhere and direct people to it.
- adambyrtek 16y ago
  He reacted in the right way, but on the whole my impression is negative. I'm a bit disappointed, because most of Zed's previous rants were humorous, amusing and well researched. But in this case he didn't put any effort neither in research nor writing. He'd stumbled upon a dependency bug and, instead of reporting it, he for some reason concluded that it means that Debian is evil and everybody should boycott it. Weird. PS. Excuse me, there was one amusing paragraph in the rant. The one in which he equaled Debian, the most independent and free software obsessed distribution out there, to Microsoft.
  - blasdel 16y ago
    He didn't just stumble upon an overlooked dependency bug — the Debian maintainers intentionally broke their Ruby package years ago because of the legal problems they imagine to exist with using OpenSSL. I don't think it's so out of bounds to compare Debian, the most copyright-license-obsessed distribution out there, to Microsoft.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      Maybe it's a name problem. It was said ruby-full provides the full Ruby language, while ruby provides the export-restricted version Debian has to distribute in order not to have police officers knocking down doors. In Python's case (sorry, I am more familiar with Python) there are python and python-minimal packages. They may or may not mean the same as ruby and ruby-full, but their names communicate a similar intention.
      - rue 16y ago
        "ruby-full" did not exist for a long time, nor does it still provide everything in the normal distro. So far as I know, that is, I may be wrong since I stopped paying any attention to what Debian does a few years ago.
      - blasdel 16y ago
        While "police officers knocking down doors" over crypto export restrictions do not exist, that's not what Debian's wankfest over OpenSSL is about. They think that the advertising clause in the OpenSSL license makes it impossible to use with any GPL programs — despite the fact that the OpenSSL developers think it's fine as a platform library and tons of upstream developers of GPL software choose to link against it. In Debian's world, they'll only allow you to use it if you get every contributor to agree to a special exemption clause appended to the GPL. Through their absolute fealty to the most draconian interpretation of the letter of the law, Debian does more to further the cause of software patents and non-free licensing than any other organization. They choose to demonstrate how idiotic such ideas about IP are by implementing them to their fullest — by being idiots.
- zedshaw 16y ago
  I didn't write it, Ersek, Laszlo did. That's how sheddingbikes works. Rather than comments, people can send responses as a post and if it's good I post it. Sadly, it's not frequently that people send in a good response.
ars 16y ago
This is a reply to http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1285659877.html http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1285659877.html which was discussed here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1734936 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1734936
sradu 16y ago
I am Debian Developer with upload rights. If HN people want to get involved with Debian, packaging and so on email me and I'll do my best to help you. Probably the best way to fix whatever you believe is wrong is by getting involved.
kilian 16y ago
This is a good, levelheaded response. But it makes it seem as if the process of becoming a sponsored maintainer was straightforward. It's not. A number of months ago, I tried getting trimage (a gui image optimizer, http://trimage.org http://trimage.org) into debian. Since I already had a working Ubuntu PPA, I figured it wouldn't be too hard. Packaging instructions for debian are available at various official websites, but contradictionary and they all seem to presume you have packaged for Debian before. Jargon like RFP (request for packaging) and ITP (intent to package) is thrown around frequently without explanation. Luckily, there is debian-mentors, meant to help upstream developers with becoming a sponsored maintainer. Most of the debian-mentors site links to outdated packaging instructions, using which will mean you will be ridiculed on the way-too-hostile mailinglist. Trying to do 'the right thing' is almost impossible, as most of the feedback will depend on the personal opinion of the person responding. I suspect this is because they, too, don't know which packaging instructions to use or point to. Trying to get my application into debian has been nothing but a massive, timesinking frustration, and I wish that wasn't the case.
- zedshaw 16y ago
  I've also brought up a counter question that people seem to not be able to answer: How do you get a bad Debian Developer fired? It seems once they get in they're in for life. Yet, some of the worst DDs who crap on programmers seem to somehow get in charge of projects they actually hate. If they hate it, and they're breaking the software because of this, then why can't I, the original author, get them fired. At an even simpler level, why can't you report bad DDs and have them reprimanded or taken off the project? That alone would bring out some better responses.
  - davidw 16y ago
    > How do you get a bad Debian Developer fired? http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution#item-3 http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution#item-3 "The Project Leader's Delegate(s) may choose not to admit new Developers, or expel existing Developers. If the Developers feel that the Delegates are abusing their authority they can of course override the decision by way of General Resolution - see §4.1(3), §4.2." Although my guess is that they're not going to kick anyone out because of your ranting.
btilly 16y ago
I still think my point at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1735344 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1735344 is important. If Debian didn't throw away unit tests, a lot of these integration errors could get caught automatically.
- zedshaw 16y ago
  Actually, I really agree with you here. In fact, it got me thinking about sort of a protection clause in licenses along these lines. Where you can say, "This software is BSD licensed, providing you follow the guidelines in the PACKAGING file." Then, any OS distribution would be required to follow your wishes or not include your software. If you want unit tests, they include them. If you want all of it, or parts of it, they do it. If they don't want to or can't then they don't adopt your project. I'm currently just figuring out how to word the license that way so it'd still work.
  - jacobolus 16y ago
    That license would not be "BSD", and what it was likely wouldn't be blessed by FSF/OSI/etc. (it doesn't meet the Open Source Definition, http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd and it’s probably not GPL-compatible), instantly making it suspect to lots of people.... Crockford got flak for adding a “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil” clause, after all.[1] That would make it impossible for your code to be used by many open source projects. [1] The FSF says “This is a restriction on usage and thus conflicts with freedom 0. The restriction might be unenforcible, but we cannot presume that. Thus, the license is nonfree.”
  - _delirium 16y ago
    Sounds like you want a license where you get to dictate exactly how any downstream user reuses your software, down to the details of the packaging, and prohibit modifications/forks/removals/etc.? But that's not really an open-source license at all, then. The whole point of open-source software is that I can take a thing, decide that I only want 50% of it, rip out the other 50%, add on a bunch of new stuff, totally change some of the remaining stuff, use it for a new purpose, package it in a new way, undo a decision the maintainer made that I disagree with, etc. If you don't like people having that freedom, open-source just doesn't seem like the way to go. It sounds like you want a "freeware for verbatim distribution" proprietary-but-no-cost license.
nkurz 16y ago
Coincidentally, I just happened to see a link on Reddit leading to a post by the same Ersek: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/msg/22e3473f80eec512 http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/msg/22e3473f80eec... Like his message to Zed, it's clear, concise, and seemingly accurate. It also includes a wonderful and well commented example program in expert idiomatic C showing signal handling. I hadn't even known comp.lang.c was a going concern! It's exactly the sort of quality code I'd expect from someone who writes such good prose. While I'm sure there are some examples of good prose writers who can't code, are there any definitive examples of good C programmers who can't write? Or is this just a "true Scotsman" problem?
cmsj 16y ago
I guess this discussion is dead, with essentially no useful outcomes :(

76 points by spahl 16y ago

This significantly increases my respect for Zed Shaw. Yes, he wrote an offensive post crying for blood, but after he had a chance to cool down, he used his own fame and audience to exhibit a well-reasoned response from someone who disagreed. That's a very adult thing to do. In some ways, it's actually better than an apology.

gjm11 16y ago
That plus an apology would have been even better.
- zedshaw 16y ago
  An apology to who? I spoke my mind and made what I thought were valid points and I still stand by them. Debian is abusive to developers who create the software they need. It's only a matter of time before the programmers making their supply chain of projects declare enough. As a good reference for the exact type of behavior I'm talking about, see this: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=380731 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=380731 This is what I'm talking about. You can't treat people that way and not expect them to rise up.
  - davidw 16y ago
    You spread mistruths about Debian with your various "business" comments. That in and of itself merits an apology. You can't just go making stuff up about people because they irritate you. Also, from everything I can tell about your original post, you had a (well known) problem with Ruby gems on Debian, not with something you wrote. I can understand being irritated about that (Debian is not blameless, obviously), but there are jerks everywhere, and also an awfully lot of nice people in Debian too. Your lynch-mob mentality (seo tricks, in-person confrontations, etc...) reflects very poorly on you and is extremely unlikely to produce anything approaching positive changes. If you don't like the freedom others have with open source licenses, why not just go back to making proprietary software where you won't have the problem. Freedom means that people sometimes do things you disagree with (even vehemently so), and if you can't handle it, then perhaps it is simply not worth it.
  - cmsj 16y ago
    Debian is not abusive, some DDs are unfriendly some of the time. Some mistakes have been made. This isn't some conspiracy to ruin your rep. How about users/sysadmins "rise up" against ruby/python/php for having module distribution/loading systems which in no way try actively to be easy to package well? Tell us about the changes you are going to make such that all gems/eggs are automatically packaged for RHEL/Debian/etc so the overhead for DDs, and consequently their opportunity to confuse things, is near zero. That's the outcome we need. Are the languages prepared to make the changes necessary?
    - blasdel 16y ago
      We're not going to cripple our modern programming language environments to suit an outdated system designed around mutually-exclusive soname dependencies, and we sure as hell aren't going to prostrate ourselves as a community before your baroque unnecessary social process. It's not just us affected whippersnappers causing problems — even the enterprisiest Java communities have given up on your packaging model.
      - cmsj 16y ago
        So you're not prepared to change anything? Even if distros make changes as well? Why are these two groups not working together to enable magic for their users? Why would it be so bad, for example, to have something like this in a python script: import awesomelib >= 2.10 import specialsauce == 1.58 Of course this immediately opens up a veritable hydra of questions and corner cases and other considerations that need to be made in designing such a facility, but that's why there are smart programmers and smart distro makers out there :) I think it's fairly clear that there are grumpy, recalcitrant, belligerent people on all sides of this argument, and the people who lose most are the users that everyone claims to care about. As a user I feel that is deeply tragic and I feel like we have all failed.
        blasdel 16y ago
        import awesomelib >= 2.10 import specialsauce == 1.58 Is precisely the feature I love most about rubygems, and would love to have in Python. It's also a feature that Debian goes out of their way to eliminate because it violates their precious FHS, apt can't handle it at all (they get around that for important packages by mangling the names), and superficially overlaps with their 'alternatives' system. Where did you get the idea that I didn't want it? Unfortunately there's no implementation path to make it possible on Debian's side, no matter what the language communities do to compromise. apt can't handle it technically, and their release cycle process can't handle it socially.
  - loewenskind 16y ago
    Personally, I don't have a fundamental problem with a distribution (even a popular one) refusing to package something for their systems that they think is awful. Sometimes the easy choice is the wrong choice. If you just step back and say "well, they want to eat every meal at a fast food restaurant I guess I better make it easy for them to do that" then you are an enabler. All that said, they should get off the fence about it. If they don't want PHP development beyond the web on Debian they should put that in a policy somewhere and direct people to it.
adambyrtek 16y ago
He reacted in the right way, but on the whole my impression is negative. I'm a bit disappointed, because most of Zed's previous rants were humorous, amusing and well researched. But in this case he didn't put any effort neither in research nor writing. He'd stumbled upon a dependency bug and, instead of reporting it, he for some reason concluded that it means that Debian is evil and everybody should boycott it. Weird. PS. Excuse me, there was one amusing paragraph in the rant. The one in which he equaled Debian, the most independent and free software obsessed distribution out there, to Microsoft.
- blasdel 16y ago
  He didn't just stumble upon an overlooked dependency bug — the Debian maintainers intentionally broke their Ruby package years ago because of the legal problems they imagine to exist with using OpenSSL. I don't think it's so out of bounds to compare Debian, the most copyright-license-obsessed distribution out there, to Microsoft.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    Maybe it's a name problem. It was said ruby-full provides the full Ruby language, while ruby provides the export-restricted version Debian has to distribute in order not to have police officers knocking down doors. In Python's case (sorry, I am more familiar with Python) there are python and python-minimal packages. They may or may not mean the same as ruby and ruby-full, but their names communicate a similar intention.
    - rue 16y ago
      "ruby-full" did not exist for a long time, nor does it still provide everything in the normal distro. So far as I know, that is, I may be wrong since I stopped paying any attention to what Debian does a few years ago.
    - blasdel 16y ago
      While "police officers knocking down doors" over crypto export restrictions do not exist, that's not what Debian's wankfest over OpenSSL is about. They think that the advertising clause in the OpenSSL license makes it impossible to use with any GPL programs — despite the fact that the OpenSSL developers think it's fine as a platform library and tons of upstream developers of GPL software choose to link against it. In Debian's world, they'll only allow you to use it if you get every contributor to agree to a special exemption clause appended to the GPL. Through their absolute fealty to the most draconian interpretation of the letter of the law, Debian does more to further the cause of software patents and non-free licensing than any other organization. They choose to demonstrate how idiotic such ideas about IP are by implementing them to their fullest — by being idiots.
zedshaw 16y ago
I didn't write it, Ersek, Laszlo did. That's how sheddingbikes works. Rather than comments, people can send responses as a post and if it's good I post it. Sadly, it's not frequently that people send in a good response.

ars 16y ago

This is a reply to http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1285659877.html http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1285659877.html which was discussed here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1734936 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1734936

sradu 16y ago

I am Debian Developer with upload rights. If HN people want to get involved with Debian, packaging and so on email me and I'll do my best to help you. Probably the best way to fix whatever you believe is wrong is by getting involved.

kilian 16y ago

This is a good, levelheaded response. But it makes it seem as if the process of becoming a sponsored maintainer was straightforward. It's not. A number of months ago, I tried getting trimage (a gui image optimizer, http://trimage.org http://trimage.org) into debian. Since I already had a working Ubuntu PPA, I figured it wouldn't be too hard. Packaging instructions for debian are available at various official websites, but contradictionary and they all seem to presume you have packaged for Debian before. Jargon like RFP (request for packaging) and ITP (intent to package) is thrown around frequently without explanation. Luckily, there is debian-mentors, meant to help upstream developers with becoming a sponsored maintainer. Most of the debian-mentors site links to outdated packaging instructions, using which will mean you will be ridiculed on the way-too-hostile mailinglist. Trying to do 'the right thing' is almost impossible, as most of the feedback will depend on the personal opinion of the person responding. I suspect this is because they, too, don't know which packaging instructions to use or point to. Trying to get my application into debian has been nothing but a massive, timesinking frustration, and I wish that wasn't the case.

zedshaw 16y ago
I've also brought up a counter question that people seem to not be able to answer: How do you get a bad Debian Developer fired? It seems once they get in they're in for life. Yet, some of the worst DDs who crap on programmers seem to somehow get in charge of projects they actually hate. If they hate it, and they're breaking the software because of this, then why can't I, the original author, get them fired. At an even simpler level, why can't you report bad DDs and have them reprimanded or taken off the project? That alone would bring out some better responses.
- davidw 16y ago
  > How do you get a bad Debian Developer fired? http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution#item-3 http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution#item-3 "The Project Leader's Delegate(s) may choose not to admit new Developers, or expel existing Developers. If the Developers feel that the Delegates are abusing their authority they can of course override the decision by way of General Resolution - see §4.1(3), §4.2." Although my guess is that they're not going to kick anyone out because of your ranting.

btilly 16y ago

I still think my point at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1735344 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1735344 is important. If Debian didn't throw away unit tests, a lot of these integration errors could get caught automatically.

zedshaw 16y ago
Actually, I really agree with you here. In fact, it got me thinking about sort of a protection clause in licenses along these lines. Where you can say, "This software is BSD licensed, providing you follow the guidelines in the PACKAGING file." Then, any OS distribution would be required to follow your wishes or not include your software. If you want unit tests, they include them. If you want all of it, or parts of it, they do it. If they don't want to or can't then they don't adopt your project. I'm currently just figuring out how to word the license that way so it'd still work.
- jacobolus 16y ago
  That license would not be "BSD", and what it was likely wouldn't be blessed by FSF/OSI/etc. (it doesn't meet the Open Source Definition, http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd and it’s probably not GPL-compatible), instantly making it suspect to lots of people.... Crockford got flak for adding a “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil” clause, after all.[1] That would make it impossible for your code to be used by many open source projects. [1] The FSF says “This is a restriction on usage and thus conflicts with freedom 0. The restriction might be unenforcible, but we cannot presume that. Thus, the license is nonfree.”
- _delirium 16y ago
  Sounds like you want a license where you get to dictate exactly how any downstream user reuses your software, down to the details of the packaging, and prohibit modifications/forks/removals/etc.? But that's not really an open-source license at all, then. The whole point of open-source software is that I can take a thing, decide that I only want 50% of it, rip out the other 50%, add on a bunch of new stuff, totally change some of the remaining stuff, use it for a new purpose, package it in a new way, undo a decision the maintainer made that I disagree with, etc. If you don't like people having that freedom, open-source just doesn't seem like the way to go. It sounds like you want a "freeware for verbatim distribution" proprietary-but-no-cost license.

nkurz 16y ago

Coincidentally, I just happened to see a link on Reddit leading to a post by the same Ersek: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/msg/22e3473f80eec512 http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/msg/22e3473f80eec... Like his message to Zed, it's clear, concise, and seemingly accurate. It also includes a wonderful and well commented example program in expert idiomatic C showing signal handling. I hadn't even known comp.lang.c was a going concern! It's exactly the sort of quality code I'd expect from someone who writes such good prose. While I'm sure there are some examples of good prose writers who can't code, are there any definitive examples of good C programmers who can't write? Or is this just a "true Scotsman" problem?

cmsj 16y ago

I guess this discussion is dead, with essentially no useful outcomes :(