5 ms·

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

by 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  We're not going to cripple our modern programming language environments to suit an outdated system designed around mutually-exclusive soname dependencies, and we sure as hell aren't going to prostrate ourselves as a community before your baroque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.
    - cmsj 16y ago
      I got the idea because you seemed to react in a way that suggested you thought any language changes to support better/easier packaging was "crippling". I'm not a skilled packager, so I can't get into a deep discussion of the parts that are missing on both sides, but it seems fairly clear that parts are missing on both sides. Perhaps it will take the work of, say, the ruby and ubuntu communities to demonstrate the change is possible and hugely beneficial for users, and encourage its adoption in Debian?
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.

by zedshaw 16y ago

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.
  - cmsj 16y ago
    I got the idea because you seemed to react in a way that suggested you thought any language changes to support better/easier packaging was "crippling". I'm not a skilled packager, so I can't get into a deep discussion of the parts that are missing on both sides, but it seems fairly clear that parts are missing on both sides. Perhaps it will take the work of, say, the ruby and ubuntu communities to demonstrate the change is possible and hugely beneficial for users, and encourage its adoption in Debian?

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.