21 ms·

Winding down my Debian involvement

469 points by secure 8y ago

kanox 8y ago
Not really a fan of "I'm leaving X because of free time and also this 20-point list of why you suck."
- Insanity 8y ago
  Why not?
- secure 8y ago
  I’m sorry you got that impression from the article. I’m not leaving over less free time, I’m leaving because of the issues I describe. Reduced free time amplified some issues, though.
glennpratt 8y ago
The sidebar makes this barely readable on Pixel 2. The markdown is easy to read: https://github.com/stapelberg/hugo/blob/master/content/posts/2019-03-10-debian-winding-down.markdown https://github.com/stapelberg/hugo/blob/master/content/posts...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- chapium 8y ago
  the content is very narrow on iphone6 as well, but safari readability view suffices
- gjasny 8y ago
  Reader mode in Firefox works like a charm.
  - chacha2 8y ago
    You can also enable reader mode in Chrome if you turn on its flag in 'chrome://flags'.
    - amdavidson 8y ago
      Which flag is that? I don't see anything when searching for "read".
- secure 8y ago
  Sorry about that! I’m not great with Web Design, as you can tell. If anyone wants to contribute a CSS fix, or just a pointer to a good article on how to fix this, I’d be very grateful!
  - switz 8y ago
    You could add the following CSS to the container (`.row` here but you should make the class name a bit more specific) which will stack the sidebar and your content into a backwards column (so the sidebar shows up after scrolling past the content, which looks and feels ok for a quick & scrappy mobile fix. display: flex; flex-direction: reverse-column; Put that in a media query to only target phones/small devices. Feel free to message me if you're confused and would prefer a fast PR, but you strike me as someone who wouldn't mind learning a bit & I'm in Morocco with limited internet. edit: I would also move the branding (name & logo) above the content so people know who they're reading. And adjust the margins a bit. Frontend is Fun.
    - jerf 8y ago
      "Put that in a media query to only target phones/small devices." Tone: Honest question. What's that, exactly? I've been trying to figure that out off and on for the last, oh, 5 or 6 years, and I keep bouncing off the problem as being too complicated to be worth it for my personal site. If there's a clean answer that has developed in the time since I basically gave up, I'd (again, no sarcasm) love to hear it. But I'd probably need a link to something; Google is clogged with old stuff here.
      - kryptiskt 8y ago
        Media queries are ways to only apply a bunch of CSS on clients that fulfill some conditions. If I write: @media (max-width: 500px) { p { font-style: italic; } } It will turn the text in p tags italic on small screens.
    - secure 8y ago
      Thank you so much! Committed your suggestion in https://github.com/stapelberg/hugo/commit/3a7227fef47fc49550c83e05d7ee7f626cbdfaee https://github.com/stapelberg/hugo/commit/3a7227fef47fc49550.... Let me know your Paypal, if you have any, and I’ll gladly invite you for a virtual coffee as a sign of my gratitude :)
wgjordan 8y ago
The post shares several pain points with Debian's slow, aging change-process and integration-infrastructure. Open question: If Debian contributors feel the need to drop out and move on due to these pain points, are there less-painful Linux-distribution projects out there that are getting more of these pain points right they can flock to? Is this a sign that Debian needs to reform, or that other, newer distributions are outpacing it?
- nik736 8y ago
  I switched all my servers to Ubuntu years ago when people were telling me "Ubuntu is no server distribution". I honestly never looked back.
  - SteveNuts 8y ago
    Ubuntu LTS distributions have been the perfect mix of new-ish packages and stability for us.
  - apetresc 8y ago
    I think Ubuntu suffers equally from every single pain point that Michael describes in his post.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - astazangasta 8y ago
    Given that ubuntu depends heavily on debian maintainers and governance, what exactly does this improve?
  - Twirrim 8y ago
    Ubuntu is... interesting. Watch out for what packages you rely on, and what repository those packages come from. If they're in universe, expect your bug reports on Launchpad to go unanswered or unresolved. The only way to get fixes in them is to go upstream to Debian. But note that not every bug in a universe package is actually fixable or broken in a Debian world, because the bug might be down to interactions between a decision made by Canonical with packages in the main repository, and those for the universe package.
justinsaccount 8y ago
I used debian for over 10 years and never managed to contribute anything. 10 Minutes after using homebrew for the first time I sent in a PR to update a package to the latest version and update the built dependencies.
- nothrabannosir 8y ago
  Honestly, as both a Mac and a Debian user, I’m not sure which one I prefer. I understand your frustration, but random strangers not being allowed to push updates to my operating system in 5.34 seconds doesn’t sound all bad. To me. (Obviously not that TFA paints a rosy picture..)
  - giovannibajo1 8y ago
    Those changes are reviewed by maintainers. The fact that a random stranger is able to push a change and get it reviewed, approved, merged, and available in minutes should be the goal of most open source projects. On the contrary, older projects tend to be too reactionary when it comes to infrastructure tools, so in turn they get very slow interactions. This becomes a demotivator for anybody who is used to more efficient workflows. It is not a coincidence that the author became demotivated after doing some professional experience.
    - ethbro 8y ago
      > The fact that a random stranger is able to push a change and get it reviewed, approved, merged, and available in minutes should be the goal of most open source projects > On the contrary, older projects tend to be too reactionary when it comes to infrastructure tools, so in turn they get very slow interactions Well said. 'Open source' doesn't say anything about infrastructure. But it's just as important.
    - msh 8y ago
      > The fact that a random stranger is able to push a change and get it reviewed, approved, merged, and available in minutes should be the goal of most open source projects. That sounds like a security risk to me.
shmerl 8y ago
Personally, I'm annoyed at Debian still not having a Web frontend for bug filing. Practically all other distros have some kind of issue tracker site that allows filing bugs through it. Using reportbug or e-mail feels way less comfortable in comparison.
- xyzzyz 8y ago
  Better have fewer high quality bug reports than more low quality reports. The latter just teaches you to ignore them.
  - Twirrim 8y ago
    That falsely presupposes that only people with poor quality bug reports would be put off from reporting bugs due to the interface. I've known people who can provide high quality, detailed bugs, decide not to because the extra hassles in reporting to Debian just aren't worth it to them.
    - geofft 8y ago
      And I've seen people who learn how to report bugs to the Debian bugtracker and then proceed to spend tons of time filing low-quality bugs now that they've acquired that skill, until (maybe) they get banned from the bugtracker. And I've seen Debian package maintainers fail to file bugs correctly....
    - tedunangst 8y ago
      No, it assumes that quality ratio varies by reporting mechanism. 9 good reports and 1 bad report are better than 18 good reports and 82 bad reports.
      - geofft 8y ago
        That's subjective - I would much rather spend a few minutes sorting out the 82 bad ones than miss 9 good reports. (Actually, I would much rather have 18 good reports and spend several minutes trying to see if there's anything of value in the 82 bad ones: see for instance the high-school kid who found the Apple FaceTime vulnerability and who couldn't figure out how to report it.) One of the principles of the Debian Social Contract reads: We will not hide problems. We will keep our entire bug report database open for public view at all times. Reports that people file online will promptly become visible to others. Dissuading people from filing bug reports feels like it's not in the spirit of this principle. You're basically hiding problems because you don't think the problem reporter is worthy.
ansible 8y ago
I've been using Debian / Ubuntu for many years, as much due to inertia and familiarity as anything else. And I have a lot of respect for the project. If I wanted to start being a contributor to a distribution, which one would be the best to dive in to?
- camdenlock 8y ago
  I would be interested to know the generally-accepted answers to this as well. What are the free/libre OSes which most folks enjoy contributing to?
  - doublepg23 8y ago
    It's a bit of an odd ball, but I loved contributing to the GuixSD project. I contributed multiple packages after learning Guile Scheme in a couple of days.
- Insanity 8y ago
  And a follow-up question: how would you get involved with it.
- type0 8y ago
  The smaller ones are often easier to contribute, port some packages to Void!
  - aboutruby 8y ago
    That's also where you make the least impact. There is probably an impact graph with popularity * impact of change on the project * probability of change being accepted * log(delay of change reaching 80% of users). For instance with Homebrew: high popularity, high probability of being accepted and low delay to reach 80% of users, so the impact of the change on the project is the main factor.
- UncleEntity 8y ago
  > If I wanted to start being a contributor to a distribution, which one would be the best to dive in to? I tried to contribute a package to Fedora once upon a time...gave up in frustration after a while since it went nowhere after a bit of hoop jumping.
robocat 8y ago
I noticed a mistake in a comment in a default file in the /etc/ directory - pretty certain the file is part of Debian (although this was on Ubuntu). I thought I would try to fix it. Two hours googling later and I couldn't even work out who the maintainer was. I don't like eating other people's time, but I even tried using IRC.
- bnegreve 8y ago
  For next time: dpkg -S path/to/file gives the the name of the package containing a file, and dpkg -s package-name gives you the name of the maintainer.
  - ktjfi 8y ago
    All mails I've sent to maintainers of packages regarding issues with them have been ignored. I think they prefer you to use the bug tracker. (Which sucks, so I always end up doing nothing about it.) In the end I switched all my servers to Ubuntu. It's been good and I love PPAs.
    - iforgotpassword 8y ago
      Ubuntu bug reporting is just as shitty. No reply for 6+ months was common for me. One time I even tracked down the issue, which was fixed upstream just one commit after the one they used for their package. Still no reaction, but about a year later they asked of the problem still persists with the current release. I didn't bother to reply and stopped reporting to either Ubuntu or Debian.
      - lokedhs 8y ago
        I had the same experience. After an Ubuntu update, my workstation was suddenly not able to mount an NFS filesystem from FreeBSD when Kerberos was enabled. The bug was rather quickly marked as confirmed, with absolutely no updates for several years, even though the root cause was known. As far as I know, it still hasn't been fixed.
lifeisstillgood 8y ago
For me this is the telling part:: """When I joined Debian, I was still studying, i.e. I had luxurious amounts of spare time.""" OSS has stopped (if it ever truly was) being a part time endeavour. I know from bitter personal experience one cannout up with a lot of bureaucracy and process of it is your day job - you have time to get through the rubbish in order to find the diamonds. How we (as a society now utterly dependent on OSS) manage this problem is on a par with how we manage journalism - they are bigger questions than I have easy answers to
- JohnFen 8y ago
  > OSS has stopped (if it ever truly was) being a part time endeavour. I think that depends on what OSS crowd you want to run with. The part-time hobbyist sector may be, I think, stronger than ever before. The difference now is that there exists the "commercial" OSS sector. That is certainly not part-time hobbyist. There is some overlap between those two worlds, but they are very different and distinct worlds nonetheless.
ktjfi 8y ago
You're the guy behind i3? Thank you very much. I love it.
- secure 8y ago
  I’m glad you like i3!
  - iforgotpassword 8y ago
    Still using i3 too! It just works great and never gets in the way. Btw. You changed from .name to .ch I noticed... Trying to naturalize? ;)
    - secure 8y ago
      Baby steps ;)
- nocitrek 8y ago
  My productivity changed drastically ever since I switched to i3. There is almost no friction when I interface with my computer due to it. Thank you.
- dilawar 8y ago
  I3 is coolest thing ever.
ams6110 8y ago
Comes off to me as a guy who's just tired of the project after 10 years. Understandable that he finds annoyance and frustration in so many things. It's like a marriage that has reached the point where one or both partners have decided they don't want to be together anymore. As an outsider, to me the list of complaints sounds kind of petty and whining. Better to just say "I'm moving on, I wish everyone the best" and be done with it.
- glennpratt 8y ago
  You should try patching Debian packages. I too am an outsider, but I have had to modify Debian and it's brutal; every package is different and the number of entry points into the tooling is mind boggling. I have bugs I've never filed over years because I don't understand the particular packages process.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    I'm sure it's true, all I'm saying is that if you reach the point of walking away, just walk away. A list of grievances at that point is just going to be seen as a parting shot rather than having any real chance of motivating change.
    - ktjfi 8y ago
      The article mentions he's made attempts to fix some of those issues and the problems he's encountered.
    - kingosticks 8y ago
      But it probably does have a better chance of motivating change and maybe you are still trying to help. Obviously there are different ways to air your grievances, privately might be better, sure. I'm not sure if you are advocating for leaving without even giving some reasons in private. That to me would be an actively unhelpful way to leave.
    - ratsmack 8y ago
      I think the tone of the article was pretty stoic and so I didn't take it as "whining". I believe he just sees no future in an ever growing Debian bureaucracy and decided to voice the reason he is moving on. I've been with Debian since it's inception and can relate to what he is seeing.
WhatIsDukkha 8y ago
I wonder how well https://salsa.debian.org/public https://salsa.debian.org/public adoption is going? It seems designed to address a lot of these issues?
chubot 8y ago
Instead, currently, all packages become lint-unclean, all maintainers need to read up on what the new thing is, how it might break, whether/how it affects them, manually run some tests, and finally decide to opt in. This causes a lot of overhead and manually executed mechanical changes across packages. I always wondered if Debian/Ubuntu could benefit from a "monorepo". It seems to work for other distributions, e.g. Alpine Linux and Homebrew. https://github.com/alpinelinux/aports/tree/master/main https://github.com/alpinelinux/aports/tree/master/main Right now every Debian package lives in a separate repo, or it doesn't even have to live in a repo at all AFAIK. I think Debian has the most packages because their process is very loose and decoupled (as well as it being one of the oldest distros). But having tighter integration does help move things forward faster.
- JoshTriplett 8y ago
  I don't think it necessarily needs a monorepo, but having every package on Salsa (Debian's GitLab installation) would help.
  - thiscommuni 8y ago
    thiscomm ent juat for this comment this account password is cator but they needed 8 lettera so I added a F U C K at the tail Like country Joe at Woodstock live added It on the Head with trhee hundred thousans you fuckers out there eehhha! woodstock!!! whatever forgot what I was going to say againnn thata rhw problem with explanatioua offtopics going and with iphone fckn5 fckn typing shit (sont call it a aystem nor a keyboard fuck) anaway... id is a public open aource repo or repos or whatever you put it all in neaby place for easiness and selfcompletion righ but a private business is fucked anyway, even separaring all in diferent repos like the ancient naval fighting weapon named greek fire anyfuckingway they see everyfuckingahit and anyshit ans anyfuckingthing you fucking programm my friend So qhats the fuxking point of givimg fuxking free away fucking texhnology ??? if you know what I fucking mean righ... thanks
  - andrewharvey 8y ago
    The move to GitLab was a glimmer of hope that one day I'll be able to help contribute to the project which I'm a heavy user. I wish they went all in and used GitLab Issues for bugs and GitLab CI/CD to auto-build packages for both validation and pushing new packages into the Debian repositories.
devnonymous 8y ago
While this is sad and painful to read, I can't say I'm surprised. The problems listed are precisely the kind of problems that Redhat strategically supports fedora with, in terms of investment of resources. For all the hate Redhat receives it has consistently been a good community member by being willing to help fedora in areas that it knows are hard and yet not 'cool' enough to attract volunteer contributions. What has Ubuntu done for the debian community along the same lines?
jcoffland 8y ago
I've been using Debian for over 10 years and I still love it as a user. But as a developer, I find it extremely frustrating. I've several times attempted to figure out how to package my open-source projects [1] [2] for Debian but the process is a nightmare. As I understand it, I first have to find someone with appropriate privileges to mentor me. I should be able to just submit a potential package for review. Then there is a ton of documentation on creating packages but which 300 page guide is the right one to use is unclear. And which set of packaging tools should I use? In the end, the time investment required to get started has kept me from contributing. [1] https://camotics.org/ https://camotics.org/ [2] https://foldingathome.org/ https://foldingathome.org/
- billsix 8y ago
  Agreed, I've tried and failed to make Debian packages, and have no idea how to proceed. In contrast, with Gentoo and their documentation, it was straightforward for me to make my own additional, separate repo, look at other ebuilds to see how packaging works, and have everything just work. https://github.com/billsix/billsix-portage https://github.com/billsix/billsix-portage I submit ebuilds to Gentoo itself if I think others would benefit. As far as I can tell, packaging for Arch is straightforward as well.
  - bamboozled 8y ago
    NixOS was also easy to get started with, I really like it !
    - endgame 8y ago
      Agreed, Gentoo and Nixpkgs both have really helpful people onboarding new packagers.
    - nextos 8y ago
      NixOS (Nixpkgs actually) is indeed incredibly simple to contribute to. It's a monorepo, and packages are declarative. So for most usecases, its just 5-10 LOC describing the source location, dependencies and build process. After that, if it builds on your local copy of Nixpkgs, it will build on the same Nixpkgs commit as everything is purely functional. A simple PR is all you need. For updates, there's super low burden too. Thanks to packages being declarative, everything is quite explicit. So a bot can check for source updates upstream, update your package and rebuild it. All it requires is simple maintainer approval.
alexandernst 8y ago
Another issue, IMHO, is the fact that every time somebody proposes some change, for example Gitlab + Gitflow instead of sending patches in some awkward format, via mail, there are a few people that already have their own workflow based on (probably) mutt combined with 10s of scripts, and they don't really want to change their workflow for the greater good; instead, they'd just find reasons why the new proposal sucks and keep using what they already have.
waplot 8y ago
I wonder if this has anything to do with the SJWs.
paulcarroty 8y ago
According to my 10 years of Linux experience I can say: community Linux distributions sucks. 'Cause it's funny when you can upload a couple of packages and not funny when you need to debug installer or understand why it doesn't work under upgrade. When you do this professionally, your salary is the great motivator.
chungy 8y ago
The Arch User Repository (https://aur.archlinux.org/ https://aur.archlinux.org/) seems to solve a lot of the collaboration issues. It is pretty painless to create PKGBUILD files to make a package and to upload a new one to the AUR. Most maintainers read the comments and accept patches on a timely manner, and there's even a way to forcibly relinquish a package if a maintainer is AWOL for significant time. On the other side of the spectrum, I've found that the official binary repositories for Arch Linux suffer many of the same issues described in the article for Debian. Patches being ignored and collaboration or involvement being near impossible. Even worse, the few people in charge of the official repositories are allowed to basically remove packages from the AUR with no interaction with the AUR maintainer, for the purpose of "promoting" them to the official repositories. This has happened to me twice, and it resulted in what I think is a worse package in one of those cases.
- Foxboron 8y ago
  Yo! Trusted user from Arch Linux. >On the other side of the spectrum, I've found that the official binary repositories for Arch Linux suffer many of the same issues described in the article for Debian. Patches being ignored and collaboration or involvement being near impossible. Well, we still relay on svn internally so things are complicated to say the least. Even if we had things on git (which we are working on), I'm unsure if opening stuff up for outside collaborations like gentoo, alpine, void and nixos does is a good way. You need the proper tooling setup to make sure this isn't a burden on the maintainers. >Even worse, the few people in charge of the official repositories are allowed to basically remove packages from the AUR with no interaction with the AUR maintainer, for the purpose of "promoting" them to the official repositories. Which is true. Some people email maintainers of complicated packages before inclusion, and some also gives a headsup in the comments of the AUR. However, this is all done if the packager want to. There is no rules here. The removal is on the grounds that AUR packages shouldn't overlap with official ones. >This has happened to me twice, and it resulted in what I think is a worse package in one of those cases. I'm interested taking a look at this if you want :) foxboron@archlinux.org or just type in the comments.
  - chungy 8y ago
apple4ever 8y ago
Sad to see it takes this to raise such issues. It’s hard to make a change on the inside when so many people’s lives depend on not making that change. Maybe Debian needs to go through a OpenWRT/LEDE split. That was over a lot of resistence to change and general bureaucracy. In the end, they merged back after fixing the biggest problems.
- cicloid 8y ago
  Isn’t that Ubuntu?
- immernerstheime 8y ago
  nice nickname...once I made a drawing for a girl I liked on age 15 or so saying I am Crazy4U :D I guess you like apple cpmpuetrs or apple juice, what remembers me of chuck berry who like grape juice I mean cheap Bordeaux Stylish red Wine... He had that pirougue where he drinks bordeaux wine you can See on his song Bordeaux on my Pirogue an Fabulous a deviation or derivation or The Very Same Origin Itself of Jambalaya the One song recorded by ManyOne SO... There is only One X captain as there is only One sky and its not fckng me Fuck! not me, its not me OK! allright There is only One ocean that thE thrEE oceans form and there are 3 oceans as One and Earth As One with 3 oceans and 3 boats and each boat as One has a Cap and ALLCAPS join form the piroughe Our Own One boat one ocean As three x form an xxx only for adults as an X in HIGHCAP or BIGCAP whatever don`t call it anything yeah well A X cap is rare you see my friend you do not see righ you know what I mean you do not see you know Apple nickname friend likes fucking apple; I guess he likes fckng apple shitty computas I have One 11 fuckng inches shit or whatever macbook Air HongKong proudly assembled in 2013 in the deep of the sea a place name Atlantida, I took my boat with my sailors and I asked my sailor to tie me to the main master of the boat and never let me fall again for the singing og the mermaids and I have dropped my Sharp as me Myself as the dagger of Emperor who gave himself and his dagger to be dirtyed commanded by the very hands itselves of the very LIGHT and THE BRIGHTNESS WU ZHAO ! ! ! Filha de Wu Shihou, que detinha um cargo oficial, e Madame Yang (da linhagem da família imperial Sui), Wu Zhao pertencia à nobreza.[3] Por esta altura, apesar da sociedade chinesa ser uma sociedade patriarcal, as mulheres desfrutavam de uma relativa liberdade, comparando com outras épocas. Por essa razão, Wu Zhao teve a oportunidade de estudar a escrita e música chinesas. Isto vem-lhe a ser útil mais tarde, quando o imperador Taizong 太宗 aceita Wu Zhao no seu harém como uma consorte de nível cinco, que corresponde ao título “Senhora de Talentos” (Cairen 才人) , aos 13 anos. Wu Zhao, por esta altura, já demonstrava uma atitude bastante determinada como se vê neste excerto: “O imperador tinha um cavalo muito selvagem que ninguém conseguia dominar e então pediu às mulheres do seu palácio alguns conselhos. Wu respondeu, ‘Eu consigo controlá-lo [o cavalo], mas irei precisar de três coisas: primeiro, um chicote de ferro; segundo, um bastão de ferro; e terceiro, um punhal. Se o chicote de ferro não o levar a obedecer eu usarei o bastão de ferro para lhe bater na cabeça, e se isso não resultar eu usarei o punhal para cortar a sua garganta.”[4] Esta destreza feminina impressionou Taizong, empregando-a como sua secretária durante os próximos dez anos. Segundo o autor, Yuen Ting Lee, após a morte do imperador Taizong em 649, a “Senhora de Talentos” foi enviada para o templo budista Ganye. Mas ao invés de passar o resto da sua vida como uma freira budista, o filho de Taizong, Gaozong, que sucedeu a seu pai tornando-se imperador, visita-a no primeiro aniversário da morte do seu pai. Tendo sempre uma estima especial por Wu, o imperador afasta-a do templo e leva-a de novo para a corte, desta vez nomeando-a “Lady of Bright Countenance” (zhaoyi 昭裔) The Light my sister Zhao told a joke saying that TaiGong said: ´´You think you, little girl , is worthy of dirting my dagger`` The truth is that Taigon didnt offer histhe chain of steel (you think an Emperor would carry a fucking iron bar around) nor the horse was whipped by chain or hammer no hammer was offered what The Emperor Of China Taigong gave The Brightness was his dagger and she tamed Black Wind with a Flower... Never was it the cowardice faka false fucking cowardices fucking shit of the kind its not fucking alloewd to paint even in the simple cheap vases in Athenas It is fucking sharp like the talk and the blazer on tshirt of the smart bright and sharp white haired old sharp programmer And it weights like a fuckiing kilo and have these sharp fuking edges or borders call it filo(spanish) filo porque quilo (see janio quadros) whatever It Has The good shape of the disc that old grreek olim´pics loves one of the most the disc olympic disc (see statue or dont fucking see it if wyou will free will)) ok And it is with Atlantida and when I took the boat and my sailor tied me to the main master not to fall againg to singing of the mermaids and I let my weapon fall from the boat and before I let it slip by the border of the boat I envolved it in a Shirt and for it when it slips by the outer walls of the boat it leaves no Mark and left no marks on the outer wooden walls of the boat and when I first touched my feet on land I thoroughly look at the walls many many many times both sides of the boat and I See and I know and I See... There was no mark in the boat there is no Mark in The Boat... Chinese Idiom: 刻舟求剑(kèzhōuqiújiàn) Mark the Boat for a Dropped Sword Key Learning Point (Preview): 刻舟求剑 (kèzhōuqiújiàn) To Mark the Boat to Look for the Sword Idiom Story: Yǒu yígè Chǔguó rén chūmén yuǎnxíng. 有一个楚国人出门远行。 There was a man from Chu who went out on a long journey. Tā zài chéngchuán guòjiāng de shíhou, bù xiǎoxīn bǎ suíshēn dàizhe de jiàn luòdào jiāngzhōng le. 他在乘船过江的时候，不小心把随身带着的剑落到江中了。 When he was crossing the river by ship, his sword fell into the water because of his carelessness. Zhègè Chǔguó rén mǎshàng yòng yìbǎ xiǎodāo zài chuánxián shàng kè le gè jìhào, 这个楚国人马上用一把小刀在船舷上刻了个记号， The man from Chu immediately made a mark with his knife on the side of the boat where his sword fell in, Ránhòu huítóu duì dàjiā shuō: “Zhèshì wǒde jiàn diào xiàqù de dìfang. 然后回头对大家说：“ 这是我的剑掉下去的地方。” He then turn around and said to everybody: “This is where my sword fell in.” Zhòngrén yíhuò bù jiě de wàngzhe nàgè dāo kè de yìnjì. 众人疑惑不解地望着那个刀刻的印记。 The other people looked confusedly at the imprint made by the knife. Yǒurén cuīcù tā shuō: “Kuài xiàshuǐ qù zhǎo jiàn ya! 有人催促他说：“ 快下水去找剑呀！” Some people urged him by saying: “Hurry and find the sword!” Chǔguó rén shuō: “ Huāng shénme, wǒ yǒu jìhào ne.” 楚国人说： “ 慌什么，我有记号呢。” The man from Chu said: “There’s no need to hurry, I made a mark.” Chuán jìxù qiánxíng, yòu yǒu rén duì tā shuō: “Zài bú xiàqù zhǎo jiàn, zhè chuán yuè zǒu yuè yuǎn, 船继续前行，又有人对他说：“ 再不下去找剑，这船越走越远， dāngxīn zhǎo bù huílái le.” 当心找不回来了。” The ship continued to move forward, and another man said to him: “The ship is going farther and farther. If you don’t look for the sword, you won’t get it back.” Chǔguó rén yījiù zìxìn de shuō: “ Búyòng jí, búyòng jí, jìhào kè zài nàr ne. 楚国人依旧自信地说：“ 不用急，不用急，记号刻在那儿呢。” The man from Chu still said confidently: “Don’t worry, don’t worry. The mark is still there.” Zhízhì chuán xíngdào ànbiān tíngxià hòu, zhègè Chǔguó rén cái shùnzhe tā kè yǒu jìhào de dìfāng 直至船行到岸边停下后，这个楚国人才顺着他刻有记号的地方 xiàshuǐ qù zhǎojiàn. 下水去找剑。 When the ship stopped at the shore, the man from Chu jumped into the water at the place indicated by his mark to find the sword. Tā zài ànbiān chuánxià de shuǐzhōng fèi le hǎo dà yízhèn gōngfu, jiéguǒ háowúsuǒhuò, hái zhāolái le 他在岸边船下的水中费了好大一阵工夫，结果毫无所获，还招来了 zhòngrén de jīxiào. 众人的讥笑。 He looked for the sword in the water below the boat at the shore, taking a long time, but in vain. And he was laughed at by the others. Key Learning Point: 刻舟求剑(kèzhōuqiújiàn) This idiom is used as a metaphor to refer to those who consider things from a static viewpoint without taking into account the ever changing situation. Examples: Nǐ zěnme zǒng yòng lǎo bànfǎ jiějué wèntí? Zhēnshì kèzhōuqiújiàn! 你怎么总用老办法解决问题？真是刻舟求剑！ Why do you always use old ways to solve problems? It’s a foolish undertaking! Nǐmen gōngchǎng zěnme hái bù gǎijìn jìshù, zhè búshì kèzhōuqiújiàn ma? 你们工厂怎么还不改进技术，这不是刻舟求剑吗？ Why has your factory still not improved on your technology? You’re not taking a fruitless approach are you? Question: The man from Chu in the idiom刻舟求剑 (kèzhōuqiújiàn) is very ____. A. foolish B. clever C. principled See Answer See make a mark and take a picture See https://www.echineselearning.com/blog/chinese-idiom-kezhou-qiu-jian-mark-the-boat-for-a-dropped-sword https://www.echineselearning.com/blog/chinese-idiom-kezhou-q... SO THERE IS Near BY ATLANTIDA The Antequera Computer and there is no mark in the boat...
liuw 8y ago
I love Debian as a user. I considered becoming a DM then DD -- I read all the relevant documents and tested water with maintaining a package I used -- but ultimately gave up due to the bureaucracy and politics involved. The last straw was this: https://lwn.net/Articles/704608/ https://lwn.net/Articles/704608/
- emmelaich 8y ago
  (re the lwn link) Holy shit that is nuts.
- raverbashing 8y ago
  Yeah that was painful to read. And all too typical.
jdub 8y ago
Improving the distribution developer experience was one of the early objectives of Ubuntu, and where it had the least amount of success. It's a pity, because perhaps the only useful thing you could get out of essentially forking Debian (in itself not a great idea, but say you wanted to...) is independence from its technical and social processes. Ubuntu's processes are different, but not wildly improved... primarily because Launchpad was designed from a database schema, not for users. Ubuntu exploited a clear gaping hole in the distro market in 2004. There's still a gap in 2019, but it's a weirder market now than it was back then.
- secure 8y ago
  Thanks for the perspective! Ubuntu’s founding was before my time.
coleifer 8y ago
So some guy realizes that the vast resources and top-down direction available at large corporations don't translate to a huge open-source project (which itself is compromised of tons of open-source projects)? And it took him 10 years to realize this? Seriously though, I'm amazed at how well Debian just works. And I know it's because enough people are willing to put up with these types of frustrations. Thanks for the hard work.
- secure 8y ago
  I’m fully aware of how spoilt one can be as a developer at a large corporation, but I believe I have toned down my expectations reasonably, and still felt compelled to write this article and step down.
Boulth 8y ago
> I have more ideas that seem really compelling to me, but, based on how my previous projects have been going, I don’t think I can make any of these ideas happen within the Debian project. Interesting article. I had a chance of asking two distributions about some particular feature (making it easier to get GPG keys of developers). The first one I contacted was Gentoo: they quickly CCed my email to relevant people, discussed the matter between themselves and deployed the change in a week. Then I contacted Debian about the same thing. The email was basically identical. But the reply was largely negative, complaining about details and openly avoiding work. The entire interaction reminded me of large corporations where any change is met with resistance for resistance sake. (I use Arch btw.)
- jokab 8y ago
  > (I use Arch btw.) of course you do
stretchwithme 8y ago
Thank you for all of your hard work.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ausjke 8y ago
debian user for 20 years here, love it. debain is the base for so many other projects, it needs to keep going strong. in the meantime debian in many aspects is a bit "old" now, its infrastructure and the way to do things need evolve. I'm not a developer per se, it is not easy to become one either. There are so many ways to make packages and it's hard to pick the "best" one for example. I hope Debian can reform its model to make it even better, there are just so many archaic baggage from the past for new comers.
nh2 8y ago
In my experience, better tooling always wins in the long run. I've built Debian packages in the past, and after packaging the same software with Nix, it's very hard to not feel that Debian tooling and packaging is time consuming for no good reason. The nixpkgs model, where all you need to build everything is one `git clone`, all you need to make a change is a pull request and wait for a range of automated tests to tell you it's good (for both build and the _uses_ of a package!), and all you need to land a contributed change is click one button, seems strictly better. Over the years I've heard many people say "but shell scripts, FTP servers and arcane helper tools is the way we've done it for decades and that will never change" in many projects, but eventually, these projects shrink and those with a good developer experience and clean tooling overtake them. Similarly, after experiencing automatic, safe refactoring across billion-line typed-checked code bases, you can't help but wonder why people put up with spending their time going through heoric community efforts distributing work across people that a machine could easily do if you used good tooling. In my opinion, the real strength and legacy of Debian is successfully running a large, diverse, distributed project over decades with (reasonable) cohesion, democracy, and (reasonably) good organisation and project management. But even some non-technical problems go away with good tooling, and more time gets freed up to solve those hard tasks. Concrete example: In nixpkgs it is very easy to build overlays for the whole of NixOS that allow you to switch from dynamic to static linking or add hardening flags across all packages, avoiding big debates over which is the "one true way" because providing both is so easy, and both can be merged upstream. I think any big and successful project should continuously invest into better tooling, and simplify and automate things. That keeps contributors motivated and on board. (14-years happy Ubuntu [and thus Debian] user, and 10-years i3 user, so thanks for your efforts, Michael.)
xtat 8y ago
10+ year emeritus DD here -- Honestly I think "modern" dev culture is quite different from the core of he Debian community and this is both a strength and weakness. I can't say that I want Debian to look anything like the node ecosystem.
- xtat 8y ago
  Not saying there's not enormous room for improvement - just would be careful to conflate that with "it needs to work more like homebrew" or whatever-- yikes
  - int_19h 8y ago
    Look at some of the other examples people are bringing up to compare against, though. Gentoo definitely predates the modern dev culture, for example.
- debiandev 8y ago
  DD here. "modern" dev culture feels more like a Silicon Valley / HN bubble, where people believe that all companies "move fast and break things". Thankfully, most companies (including FAANGs where I worked) are way more careful than that. Flashy UIs change every day, really critical systems are kept very stable...
Conan_Kudo 8y ago
So I've been involved in Fedora for as long as Michael has been involved in Debian, and I have attempted branching out into other distribution communities over the years. To this day, the Debian community is the only community where I have not been able to get past the initial stages to get involved. And you don't have to look too hard to see that I'm in quite a few communities... There's a lot of parallels to Debian and Fedora when I started in the project over a decade ago. The clear divider in how the two projects evolved was that Fedora elected to implement a lazy consensus model for decision-making, and developed a culture with a bias for action and improvement. Debian requires full consensus (generally) and has a culture that favors inaction. This difference is what has kept me in the Fedora Project for over a decade, and I still enjoy working in that community and doing my part to improve the greater Linux community and ecosystem. Over the years, Fedora shed a lot of its more complex processes and developed simpler tools and supporting infrastructure to make it easier to use and contribute to the development of the distribution and outlying projects. Over the years, I've seen us replace our buildsystem infrastructure[1][2][3], develop APIs and protocols for weaving tools together[4], migrate SCMs and create the first ever binary store system for Git[5][6][7], develop tools to simplify complex tasks[8][9][10], and build replacements to proprietary or overly-complex systems and support open standards and interoperable systems[11][12], all to benefit our users, our contributors, and our ecosystem. We've taken a similar hammer to our processes and structures so that we enable a wider range of people to be involved, representing their concerns and making our community healthier than before. We're still continuing down this path of making it easier for people to leverage the Fedora Project resources for the benefit of the community with things like COPR[13], CI on packages with Koschei[14] and CentOS CI integration for projects and packages[15], etc. That's not to say Fedora is perfect, mind you. It still has some technical and process warts. But I'm proud of the fact that our community is still actively trying to improve our processes, our tools, and our distribution. We're not afraid to make things better, and our community generally wants to make the Linux world a better place. [1]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraSummit/NewBuildSystem https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraSummit/NewBuildSystem [2]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/CoreExtrasMerge https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/CoreExtrasMerg... [3]: http://koji.build/ http://koji.build/ [4]: https://fedmsg.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ https://fedmsg.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ [5]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Dist_Git_Proposal https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Dist_Git_Proposal [6]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Dist_Git_Project https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Dist_Git_Project [7]: https://github.com/release-engineering/dist-git https://github.com/release-engineering/dist-git [8]: https://www.mankier.com/1/fedpkg https://www.mankier.com/1/fedpkg [9]: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/docs/ https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/docs/ [10]: https://mirrormanager.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://mirrormanager.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ [11]: https://pagure.io/pagure https://pagure.io/pagure [12]: https://ipsilon-project.org/ https://ipsilon-project.org/ [13]: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/ https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/ [14]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Koschei https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Koschei [15]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CI/Pipeline https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CI/Pipeline
rixed 8y ago
Been using Debian more or less exclusively since Potato. And I'm a bit surprised by the tone of these comments and even more by the content of the blog post. To me, Debian had become an irrelevant fossil not because of any technical factor such as those listed here or there (lack of powerful tools to go over packages silos, bug reporting tools, communication tools, packaging tools...) Indeed I tend to believe not following the industry /best/ practices is actually an asset in many cases, sometime even a Debian landmark that served them and their users well (for instance, refusing to stick to release dates and favouring rock-solid new releases instead); Indeed, "they still use X why everybody else is using Y by now" should sounds very suspicious to many ears. To me as an outsider the obvious cause for Debian obsolescence is, and has been for more than a decade, the growing bureaucracy and consequently the lack of new blood and innovation. This opinion anchored the day when, participating to a Debian bug squashing party surrounded by similarly minded hackers, we were approached by a DD asking if he could check our identity papers in order to "simplify the process" of accepting our fixes. Organisations, and companies too to some degree, can sometime be best described by what they stand against. Since the beginning Debian has been standing against a hostile environment: I mentioned already the industry bad practices, but also part of this hostile outer world were the negligent upstreams, the unaware users, the cheating corporations and the misguided FOSS enthusiasts. Some bureaucracy was certainly in order to protect against them all. But I'm afraid one of Debian legacy will be that the DD will personify the FOSS bureaucrat, with its 300 pages long packaging manual and 30 steps long contributor approval processes, in the cultural pantheon of the distributions of the future.
fxfan 8y ago
Thank you, Mr Stapelberg. Some people in the OSS community can be overbearing and dealing with them on not one but two popular projects is something I, as a user (of both), want to thank you for.
z3t4 8y ago
I haven't made any debian packages, I heard it's a lot of work, but these looks good, not bad: * Granting personal freedom to individual maintainers * All maintainers need to read up on what the new thing is, how it might break, whether/how it affects them, manually run some tests, and finally decide to opt in.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  I routinely make Debian packages. It's not actually that hard -- unless you're intending to submit them for inclusion in the Debian repository. I don't do that, so I can ignore a lot of the most painful stuff.
Annatar 8y ago
I'm curious as to what the author would think of this in contrast to Debian: https://illumos.org/books/dev/ https://illumos.org/books/dev/
forty 8y ago
I have a naive question (I'm a long time Debian user, but never really tried to contribute): why isn't all the Debian in a single git repository? I'm not suggesting to vendor all the third party code but only all the packaging information, like, say, libreelec does (and I assume many others)
- regularfry 8y ago
  The simplest answer is that it predates repositories of that size being a practical idea, and it's not changed because of institutional inertia.
- rleigh 8y ago
  It's all down to history. When Debian was started, individual maintainers owned their packages completely, and they were often not kept under version control. This was a practical necessity for distributed development in the mid '90s. They uploaded the source and binaries when they uploaded a new Debian package version, but the actual source packages weren't necessarily under any sort of version control other than the Debian archive storing the uploaded versions. Today, keeping packages under version control is considered good practice, but even today it's not mandatory as far as I'm aware. While other systems, like the BSD ports, are in a single repository, this complete separation has had its advantages. The system is almost completely modular, with all the interdependencies explicitly documented. It's easy to add third-party packages. Look how easy it is to add extra BSD ports packages. You have to fork the entire thing because the repo doesn't just include the packages, it includes all the build infrastructure. This makes building third-party ports a bit more of a pain, because it wasn't considered important, while for Debian it was a fundamental design goal. On the flip side, making a patch for the BSD ports is the same for every single package and it takes just a few minutes to attach it to a bugzilla ticket.
- jlundberg 8y ago
  Debian actually vendors all third party code. Their source archive is the best place to search if you are looking for old but good software that is not available any more from the original author.
bhaak 8y ago
> Gmane used to paper over this issue, but Gmane’s availability over the last few years has been spotty, to say the least (it is down as I write this). The Gmane web interface is not just down but shut down for good: https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2016/07/28/the-end-of-gmane/comment-page-1/#comment-13502 https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2016/07/28/the-end-of-gmane/com... So this issue won't get better without Debian doing something themselves.
- vthriller 8y ago
  It's a shame that the only thing Gmane v2 effort [0] yielded is just a couple of blog posts. Why did they stop so abruptly?.. [0] http://home.gmane.org http://home.gmane.org
infinity0 8y ago
This developer is largely responsible for the Go ecosystem in Debian where they develop against HEAD. That's pretty hard and results in a lot of breakages. Go developers don't give a shit and push a lot of the externalities onto distro packages like Debian packagers (volunteers) or else Google developers (who get paid a huge amount to do bullshit engineering that nobody else cares about). We're making a lot of progress with Debian Rust packages and have automated away 90% of the ordinary Debian crap - which is needed in the general case but not for Rust where the constraints are very well-defined by Cargo - you only have to maintain two files (d/changelog and d/copyright) for the vast majority of Debian Rust crates.
jgoerzen 8y ago
Hi Michael, Thanks for writing this. I wrote a response here: https://changelog.complete.org/archives/9971-a-partial-defense-of-debian https://changelog.complete.org/archives/9971-a-partial-defen... The tl;dr version is I agree with you about some of the things you mention, but also feel like there's an element of personal preference for web-based tools showing through.
bfrog 8y ago
Compared to nixos everything else seems arcane, and compared to arch's pacman/makepkg combo everything else seems overly complicated.

469 points by secure 8y ago

kanox 8y ago

Not really a fan of "I'm leaving X because of free time and also this 20-point list of why you suck."

Insanity 8y ago
Why not?
secure 8y ago
I’m sorry you got that impression from the article. I’m not leaving over less free time, I’m leaving because of the issues I describe. Reduced free time amplified some issues, though.

glennpratt 8y ago

The sidebar makes this barely readable on Pixel 2. The markdown is easy to read: https://github.com/stapelberg/hugo/blob/master/content/posts/2019-03-10-debian-winding-down.markdown https://github.com/stapelberg/hugo/blob/master/content/posts...

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
chapium 8y ago
the content is very narrow on iphone6 as well, but safari readability view suffices
gjasny 8y ago
Reader mode in Firefox works like a charm.
- chacha2 8y ago
  You can also enable reader mode in Chrome if you turn on its flag in 'chrome://flags'.
  - amdavidson 8y ago
    Which flag is that? I don't see anything when searching for "read".
secure 8y ago
Sorry about that! I’m not great with Web Design, as you can tell. If anyone wants to contribute a CSS fix, or just a pointer to a good article on how to fix this, I’d be very grateful!
- switz 8y ago
  You could add the following CSS to the container (`.row` here but you should make the class name a bit more specific) which will stack the sidebar and your content into a backwards column (so the sidebar shows up after scrolling past the content, which looks and feels ok for a quick & scrappy mobile fix. display: flex; flex-direction: reverse-column; Put that in a media query to only target phones/small devices. Feel free to message me if you're confused and would prefer a fast PR, but you strike me as someone who wouldn't mind learning a bit & I'm in Morocco with limited internet. edit: I would also move the branding (name & logo) above the content so people know who they're reading. And adjust the margins a bit. Frontend is Fun.
  - jerf 8y ago
    "Put that in a media query to only target phones/small devices." Tone: Honest question. What's that, exactly? I've been trying to figure that out off and on for the last, oh, 5 or 6 years, and I keep bouncing off the problem as being too complicated to be worth it for my personal site. If there's a clean answer that has developed in the time since I basically gave up, I'd (again, no sarcasm) love to hear it. But I'd probably need a link to something; Google is clogged with old stuff here.
    - kryptiskt 8y ago
      Media queries are ways to only apply a bunch of CSS on clients that fulfill some conditions. If I write: @media (max-width: 500px) { p { font-style: italic; } } It will turn the text in p tags italic on small screens.
  - secure 8y ago
    Thank you so much! Committed your suggestion in https://github.com/stapelberg/hugo/commit/3a7227fef47fc49550c83e05d7ee7f626cbdfaee https://github.com/stapelberg/hugo/commit/3a7227fef47fc49550.... Let me know your Paypal, if you have any, and I’ll gladly invite you for a virtual coffee as a sign of my gratitude :)

wgjordan 8y ago

The post shares several pain points with Debian's slow, aging change-process and integration-infrastructure. Open question: If Debian contributors feel the need to drop out and move on due to these pain points, are there less-painful Linux-distribution projects out there that are getting more of these pain points right they can flock to? Is this a sign that Debian needs to reform, or that other, newer distributions are outpacing it?

nik736 8y ago
I switched all my servers to Ubuntu years ago when people were telling me "Ubuntu is no server distribution". I honestly never looked back.
- SteveNuts 8y ago
  Ubuntu LTS distributions have been the perfect mix of new-ish packages and stability for us.
- apetresc 8y ago
  I think Ubuntu suffers equally from every single pain point that Michael describes in his post.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- astazangasta 8y ago
  Given that ubuntu depends heavily on debian maintainers and governance, what exactly does this improve?
- Twirrim 8y ago
  Ubuntu is... interesting. Watch out for what packages you rely on, and what repository those packages come from. If they're in universe, expect your bug reports on Launchpad to go unanswered or unresolved. The only way to get fixes in them is to go upstream to Debian. But note that not every bug in a universe package is actually fixable or broken in a Debian world, because the bug might be down to interactions between a decision made by Canonical with packages in the main repository, and those for the universe package.

justinsaccount 8y ago

I used debian for over 10 years and never managed to contribute anything. 10 Minutes after using homebrew for the first time I sent in a PR to update a package to the latest version and update the built dependencies.

nothrabannosir 8y ago
Honestly, as both a Mac and a Debian user, I’m not sure which one I prefer. I understand your frustration, but random strangers not being allowed to push updates to my operating system in 5.34 seconds doesn’t sound all bad. To me. (Obviously not that TFA paints a rosy picture..)
- giovannibajo1 8y ago
  Those changes are reviewed by maintainers. The fact that a random stranger is able to push a change and get it reviewed, approved, merged, and available in minutes should be the goal of most open source projects. On the contrary, older projects tend to be too reactionary when it comes to infrastructure tools, so in turn they get very slow interactions. This becomes a demotivator for anybody who is used to more efficient workflows. It is not a coincidence that the author became demotivated after doing some professional experience.
  - ethbro 8y ago
    > The fact that a random stranger is able to push a change and get it reviewed, approved, merged, and available in minutes should be the goal of most open source projects > On the contrary, older projects tend to be too reactionary when it comes to infrastructure tools, so in turn they get very slow interactions Well said. 'Open source' doesn't say anything about infrastructure. But it's just as important.
  - msh 8y ago
    > The fact that a random stranger is able to push a change and get it reviewed, approved, merged, and available in minutes should be the goal of most open source projects. That sounds like a security risk to me.

shmerl 8y ago

Personally, I'm annoyed at Debian still not having a Web frontend for bug filing. Practically all other distros have some kind of issue tracker site that allows filing bugs through it. Using reportbug or e-mail feels way less comfortable in comparison.

xyzzyz 8y ago
Better have fewer high quality bug reports than more low quality reports. The latter just teaches you to ignore them.
- Twirrim 8y ago
  That falsely presupposes that only people with poor quality bug reports would be put off from reporting bugs due to the interface. I've known people who can provide high quality, detailed bugs, decide not to because the extra hassles in reporting to Debian just aren't worth it to them.
  - geofft 8y ago
    And I've seen people who learn how to report bugs to the Debian bugtracker and then proceed to spend tons of time filing low-quality bugs now that they've acquired that skill, until (maybe) they get banned from the bugtracker. And I've seen Debian package maintainers fail to file bugs correctly....
  - tedunangst 8y ago
    No, it assumes that quality ratio varies by reporting mechanism. 9 good reports and 1 bad report are better than 18 good reports and 82 bad reports.
    - geofft 8y ago
      That's subjective - I would much rather spend a few minutes sorting out the 82 bad ones than miss 9 good reports. (Actually, I would much rather have 18 good reports and spend several minutes trying to see if there's anything of value in the 82 bad ones: see for instance the high-school kid who found the Apple FaceTime vulnerability and who couldn't figure out how to report it.) One of the principles of the Debian Social Contract reads: We will not hide problems. We will keep our entire bug report database open for public view at all times. Reports that people file online will promptly become visible to others. Dissuading people from filing bug reports feels like it's not in the spirit of this principle. You're basically hiding problems because you don't think the problem reporter is worthy.

ansible 8y ago

I've been using Debian / Ubuntu for many years, as much due to inertia and familiarity as anything else. And I have a lot of respect for the project. If I wanted to start being a contributor to a distribution, which one would be the best to dive in to?

camdenlock 8y ago
I would be interested to know the generally-accepted answers to this as well. What are the free/libre OSes which most folks enjoy contributing to?
- doublepg23 8y ago
  It's a bit of an odd ball, but I loved contributing to the GuixSD project. I contributed multiple packages after learning Guile Scheme in a couple of days.
Insanity 8y ago
And a follow-up question: how would you get involved with it.
type0 8y ago
The smaller ones are often easier to contribute, port some packages to Void!
- aboutruby 8y ago
  That's also where you make the least impact. There is probably an impact graph with popularity * impact of change on the project * probability of change being accepted * log(delay of change reaching 80% of users). For instance with Homebrew: high popularity, high probability of being accepted and low delay to reach 80% of users, so the impact of the change on the project is the main factor.
UncleEntity 8y ago
> If I wanted to start being a contributor to a distribution, which one would be the best to dive in to? I tried to contribute a package to Fedora once upon a time...gave up in frustration after a while since it went nowhere after a bit of hoop jumping.

robocat 8y ago

I noticed a mistake in a comment in a default file in the /etc/ directory - pretty certain the file is part of Debian (although this was on Ubuntu). I thought I would try to fix it. Two hours googling later and I couldn't even work out who the maintainer was. I don't like eating other people's time, but I even tried using IRC.

bnegreve 8y ago
For next time: dpkg -S path/to/file gives the the name of the package containing a file, and dpkg -s package-name gives you the name of the maintainer.
- ktjfi 8y ago
  All mails I've sent to maintainers of packages regarding issues with them have been ignored. I think they prefer you to use the bug tracker. (Which sucks, so I always end up doing nothing about it.) In the end I switched all my servers to Ubuntu. It's been good and I love PPAs.
  - iforgotpassword 8y ago
    Ubuntu bug reporting is just as shitty. No reply for 6+ months was common for me. One time I even tracked down the issue, which was fixed upstream just one commit after the one they used for their package. Still no reaction, but about a year later they asked of the problem still persists with the current release. I didn't bother to reply and stopped reporting to either Ubuntu or Debian.
    - lokedhs 8y ago
      I had the same experience. After an Ubuntu update, my workstation was suddenly not able to mount an NFS filesystem from FreeBSD when Kerberos was enabled. The bug was rather quickly marked as confirmed, with absolutely no updates for several years, even though the root cause was known. As far as I know, it still hasn't been fixed.

lifeisstillgood 8y ago

For me this is the telling part:: """When I joined Debian, I was still studying, i.e. I had luxurious amounts of spare time.""" OSS has stopped (if it ever truly was) being a part time endeavour. I know from bitter personal experience one cannout up with a lot of bureaucracy and process of it is your day job - you have time to get through the rubbish in order to find the diamonds. How we (as a society now utterly dependent on OSS) manage this problem is on a par with how we manage journalism - they are bigger questions than I have easy answers to

JohnFen 8y ago
> OSS has stopped (if it ever truly was) being a part time endeavour. I think that depends on what OSS crowd you want to run with. The part-time hobbyist sector may be, I think, stronger than ever before. The difference now is that there exists the "commercial" OSS sector. That is certainly not part-time hobbyist. There is some overlap between those two worlds, but they are very different and distinct worlds nonetheless.

ktjfi 8y ago

You're the guy behind i3? Thank you very much. I love it.

secure 8y ago
I’m glad you like i3!
- iforgotpassword 8y ago
  Still using i3 too! It just works great and never gets in the way. Btw. You changed from .name to .ch I noticed... Trying to naturalize? ;)
  - secure 8y ago
    Baby steps ;)
nocitrek 8y ago
My productivity changed drastically ever since I switched to i3. There is almost no friction when I interface with my computer due to it. Thank you.
dilawar 8y ago
I3 is coolest thing ever.

ams6110 8y ago

Comes off to me as a guy who's just tired of the project after 10 years. Understandable that he finds annoyance and frustration in so many things. It's like a marriage that has reached the point where one or both partners have decided they don't want to be together anymore. As an outsider, to me the list of complaints sounds kind of petty and whining. Better to just say "I'm moving on, I wish everyone the best" and be done with it.

glennpratt 8y ago
You should try patching Debian packages. I too am an outsider, but I have had to modify Debian and it's brutal; every package is different and the number of entry points into the tooling is mind boggling. I have bugs I've never filed over years because I don't understand the particular packages process.
- ams6110 8y ago
  I'm sure it's true, all I'm saying is that if you reach the point of walking away, just walk away. A list of grievances at that point is just going to be seen as a parting shot rather than having any real chance of motivating change.
  - ktjfi 8y ago
    The article mentions he's made attempts to fix some of those issues and the problems he's encountered.
  - kingosticks 8y ago
    But it probably does have a better chance of motivating change and maybe you are still trying to help. Obviously there are different ways to air your grievances, privately might be better, sure. I'm not sure if you are advocating for leaving without even giving some reasons in private. That to me would be an actively unhelpful way to leave.
  - ratsmack 8y ago
    I think the tone of the article was pretty stoic and so I didn't take it as "whining". I believe he just sees no future in an ever growing Debian bureaucracy and decided to voice the reason he is moving on. I've been with Debian since it's inception and can relate to what he is seeing.

WhatIsDukkha 8y ago

I wonder how well https://salsa.debian.org/public https://salsa.debian.org/public adoption is going? It seems designed to address a lot of these issues?

chubot 8y ago

Instead, currently, all packages become lint-unclean, all maintainers need to read up on what the new thing is, how it might break, whether/how it affects them, manually run some tests, and finally decide to opt in. This causes a lot of overhead and manually executed mechanical changes across packages. I always wondered if Debian/Ubuntu could benefit from a "monorepo". It seems to work for other distributions, e.g. Alpine Linux and Homebrew. https://github.com/alpinelinux/aports/tree/master/main https://github.com/alpinelinux/aports/tree/master/main Right now every Debian package lives in a separate repo, or it doesn't even have to live in a repo at all AFAIK. I think Debian has the most packages because their process is very loose and decoupled (as well as it being one of the oldest distros). But having tighter integration does help move things forward faster.

JoshTriplett 8y ago
I don't think it necessarily needs a monorepo, but having every package on Salsa (Debian's GitLab installation) would help.
- thiscommuni 8y ago
  thiscomm ent juat for this comment this account password is cator but they needed 8 lettera so I added a F U C K at the tail Like country Joe at Woodstock live added It on the Head with trhee hundred thousans you fuckers out there eehhha! woodstock!!! whatever forgot what I was going to say againnn thata rhw problem with explanatioua offtopics going and with iphone fckn5 fckn typing shit (sont call it a aystem nor a keyboard fuck) anaway... id is a public open aource repo or repos or whatever you put it all in neaby place for easiness and selfcompletion righ but a private business is fucked anyway, even separaring all in diferent repos like the ancient naval fighting weapon named greek fire anyfuckingway they see everyfuckingahit and anyshit ans anyfuckingthing you fucking programm my friend So qhats the fuxking point of givimg fuxking free away fucking texhnology ??? if you know what I fucking mean righ... thanks
- andrewharvey 8y ago
  The move to GitLab was a glimmer of hope that one day I'll be able to help contribute to the project which I'm a heavy user. I wish they went all in and used GitLab Issues for bugs and GitLab CI/CD to auto-build packages for both validation and pushing new packages into the Debian repositories.

devnonymous 8y ago

While this is sad and painful to read, I can't say I'm surprised. The problems listed are precisely the kind of problems that Redhat strategically supports fedora with, in terms of investment of resources. For all the hate Redhat receives it has consistently been a good community member by being willing to help fedora in areas that it knows are hard and yet not 'cool' enough to attract volunteer contributions. What has Ubuntu done for the debian community along the same lines?

jcoffland 8y ago

I've been using Debian for over 10 years and I still love it as a user. But as a developer, I find it extremely frustrating. I've several times attempted to figure out how to package my open-source projects [1] [2] for Debian but the process is a nightmare. As I understand it, I first have to find someone with appropriate privileges to mentor me. I should be able to just submit a potential package for review. Then there is a ton of documentation on creating packages but which 300 page guide is the right one to use is unclear. And which set of packaging tools should I use? In the end, the time investment required to get started has kept me from contributing. [1] https://camotics.org/ https://camotics.org/ [2] https://foldingathome.org/ https://foldingathome.org/

billsix 8y ago
Agreed, I've tried and failed to make Debian packages, and have no idea how to proceed. In contrast, with Gentoo and their documentation, it was straightforward for me to make my own additional, separate repo, look at other ebuilds to see how packaging works, and have everything just work. https://github.com/billsix/billsix-portage https://github.com/billsix/billsix-portage I submit ebuilds to Gentoo itself if I think others would benefit. As far as I can tell, packaging for Arch is straightforward as well.
- bamboozled 8y ago
  NixOS was also easy to get started with, I really like it !
  - endgame 8y ago
    Agreed, Gentoo and Nixpkgs both have really helpful people onboarding new packagers.
  - nextos 8y ago
    NixOS (Nixpkgs actually) is indeed incredibly simple to contribute to. It's a monorepo, and packages are declarative. So for most usecases, its just 5-10 LOC describing the source location, dependencies and build process. After that, if it builds on your local copy of Nixpkgs, it will build on the same Nixpkgs commit as everything is purely functional. A simple PR is all you need. For updates, there's super low burden too. Thanks to packages being declarative, everything is quite explicit. So a bot can check for source updates upstream, update your package and rebuild it. All it requires is simple maintainer approval.

alexandernst 8y ago

Another issue, IMHO, is the fact that every time somebody proposes some change, for example Gitlab + Gitflow instead of sending patches in some awkward format, via mail, there are a few people that already have their own workflow based on (probably) mutt combined with 10s of scripts, and they don't really want to change their workflow for the greater good; instead, they'd just find reasons why the new proposal sucks and keep using what they already have.

waplot 8y ago

I wonder if this has anything to do with the SJWs.

paulcarroty 8y ago

According to my 10 years of Linux experience I can say: community Linux distributions sucks. 'Cause it's funny when you can upload a couple of packages and not funny when you need to debug installer or understand why it doesn't work under upgrade. When you do this professionally, your salary is the great motivator.

chungy 8y ago

The Arch User Repository (https://aur.archlinux.org/ https://aur.archlinux.org/) seems to solve a lot of the collaboration issues. It is pretty painless to create PKGBUILD files to make a package and to upload a new one to the AUR. Most maintainers read the comments and accept patches on a timely manner, and there's even a way to forcibly relinquish a package if a maintainer is AWOL for significant time. On the other side of the spectrum, I've found that the official binary repositories for Arch Linux suffer many of the same issues described in the article for Debian. Patches being ignored and collaboration or involvement being near impossible. Even worse, the few people in charge of the official repositories are allowed to basically remove packages from the AUR with no interaction with the AUR maintainer, for the purpose of "promoting" them to the official repositories. This has happened to me twice, and it resulted in what I think is a worse package in one of those cases.

Foxboron 8y ago
Yo! Trusted user from Arch Linux. >On the other side of the spectrum, I've found that the official binary repositories for Arch Linux suffer many of the same issues described in the article for Debian. Patches being ignored and collaboration or involvement being near impossible. Well, we still relay on svn internally so things are complicated to say the least. Even if we had things on git (which we are working on), I'm unsure if opening stuff up for outside collaborations like gentoo, alpine, void and nixos does is a good way. You need the proper tooling setup to make sure this isn't a burden on the maintainers. >Even worse, the few people in charge of the official repositories are allowed to basically remove packages from the AUR with no interaction with the AUR maintainer, for the purpose of "promoting" them to the official repositories. Which is true. Some people email maintainers of complicated packages before inclusion, and some also gives a headsup in the comments of the AUR. However, this is all done if the packager want to. There is no rules here. The removal is on the grounds that AUR packages shouldn't overlap with official ones. >This has happened to me twice, and it resulted in what I think is a worse package in one of those cases. I'm interested taking a look at this if you want :) foxboron@archlinux.org or just type in the comments.
- chungy 8y ago

apple4ever 8y ago

Sad to see it takes this to raise such issues. It’s hard to make a change on the inside when so many people’s lives depend on not making that change. Maybe Debian needs to go through a OpenWRT/LEDE split. That was over a lot of resistence to change and general bureaucracy. In the end, they merged back after fixing the biggest problems.

cicloid 8y ago
Isn’t that Ubuntu?
immernerstheime 8y ago
nice nickname...once I made a drawing for a girl I liked on age 15 or so saying I am Crazy4U :D I guess you like apple cpmpuetrs or apple juice, what remembers me of chuck berry who like grape juice I mean cheap Bordeaux Stylish red Wine... He had that pirougue where he drinks bordeaux wine you can See on his song Bordeaux on my Pirogue an Fabulous a deviation or derivation or The Very Same Origin Itself of Jambalaya the One song recorded by ManyOne SO... There is only One X captain as there is only One sky and its not fckng me Fuck! not me, its not me OK! allright There is only One ocean that thE thrEE oceans form and there are 3 oceans as One and Earth As One with 3 oceans and 3 boats and each boat as One has a Cap and ALLCAPS join form the piroughe Our Own One boat one ocean As three x form an xxx only for adults as an X in HIGHCAP or BIGCAP whatever don`t call it anything yeah well A X cap is rare you see my friend you do not see righ you know what I mean you do not see you know Apple nickname friend likes fucking apple; I guess he likes fckng apple shitty computas I have One 11 fuckng inches shit or whatever macbook Air HongKong proudly assembled in 2013 in the deep of the sea a place name Atlantida, I took my boat with my sailors and I asked my sailor to tie me to the main master of the boat and never let me fall again for the singing og the mermaids and I have dropped my Sharp as me Myself as the dagger of Emperor who gave himself and his dagger to be dirtyed commanded by the very hands itselves of the very LIGHT and THE BRIGHTNESS WU ZHAO ! ! ! Filha de Wu Shihou, que detinha um cargo oficial, e Madame Yang (da linhagem da família imperial Sui), Wu Zhao pertencia à nobreza.[3] Por esta altura, apesar da sociedade chinesa ser uma sociedade patriarcal, as mulheres desfrutavam de uma relativa liberdade, comparando com outras épocas. Por essa razão, Wu Zhao teve a oportunidade de estudar a escrita e música chinesas. Isto vem-lhe a ser útil mais tarde, quando o imperador Taizong 太宗 aceita Wu Zhao no seu harém como uma consorte de nível cinco, que corresponde ao título “Senhora de Talentos” (Cairen 才人) , aos 13 anos. Wu Zhao, por esta altura, já demonstrava uma atitude bastante determinada como se vê neste excerto: “O imperador tinha um cavalo muito selvagem que ninguém conseguia dominar e então pediu às mulheres do seu palácio alguns conselhos. Wu respondeu, ‘Eu consigo controlá-lo [o cavalo], mas irei precisar de três coisas: primeiro, um chicote de ferro; segundo, um bastão de ferro; e terceiro, um punhal. Se o chicote de ferro não o levar a obedecer eu usarei o bastão de ferro para lhe bater na cabeça, e se isso não resultar eu usarei o punhal para cortar a sua garganta.”[4] Esta destreza feminina impressionou Taizong, empregando-a como sua secretária durante os próximos dez anos. Segundo o autor, Yuen Ting Lee, após a morte do imperador Taizong em 649, a “Senhora de Talentos” foi enviada para o templo budista Ganye. Mas ao invés de passar o resto da sua vida como uma freira budista, o filho de Taizong, Gaozong, que sucedeu a seu pai tornando-se imperador, visita-a no primeiro aniversário da morte do seu pai. Tendo sempre uma estima especial por Wu, o imperador afasta-a do templo e leva-a de novo para a corte, desta vez nomeando-a “Lady of Bright Countenance” (zhaoyi 昭裔) The Light my sister Zhao told a joke saying that TaiGong said: ´´You think you, little girl , is worthy of dirting my dagger`` The truth is that Taigon didnt offer histhe chain of steel (you think an Emperor would carry a fucking iron bar around) nor the horse was whipped by chain or hammer no hammer was offered what The Emperor Of China Taigong gave The Brightness was his dagger and she tamed Black Wind with a Flower... Never was it the cowardice faka false fucking cowardices fucking shit of the kind its not fucking alloewd to paint even in the simple cheap vases in Athenas It is fucking sharp like the talk and the blazer on tshirt of the smart bright and sharp white haired old sharp programmer And it weights like a fuckiing kilo and have these sharp fuking edges or borders call it filo(spanish) filo porque quilo (see janio quadros) whatever It Has The good shape of the disc that old grreek olim´pics loves one of the most the disc olympic disc (see statue or dont fucking see it if wyou will free will)) ok And it is with Atlantida and when I took the boat and my sailor tied me to the main master not to fall againg to singing of the mermaids and I let my weapon fall from the boat and before I let it slip by the border of the boat I envolved it in a Shirt and for it when it slips by the outer walls of the boat it leaves no Mark and left no marks on the outer wooden walls of the boat and when I first touched my feet on land I thoroughly look at the walls many many many times both sides of the boat and I See and I know and I See... There was no mark in the boat there is no Mark in The Boat... Chinese Idiom: 刻舟求剑(kèzhōuqiújiàn) Mark the Boat for a Dropped Sword Key Learning Point (Preview): 刻舟求剑 (kèzhōuqiújiàn) To Mark the Boat to Look for the Sword Idiom Story: Yǒu yígè Chǔguó rén chūmén yuǎnxíng. 有一个楚国人出门远行。 There was a man from Chu who went out on a long journey. Tā zài chéngchuán guòjiāng de shíhou, bù xiǎoxīn bǎ suíshēn dàizhe de jiàn luòdào jiāngzhōng le. 他在乘船过江的时候，不小心把随身带着的剑落到江中了。 When he was crossing the river by ship, his sword fell into the water because of his carelessness. Zhègè Chǔguó rén mǎshàng yòng yìbǎ xiǎodāo zài chuánxián shàng kè le gè jìhào, 这个楚国人马上用一把小刀在船舷上刻了个记号， The man from Chu immediately made a mark with his knife on the side of the boat where his sword fell in, Ránhòu huítóu duì dàjiā shuō: “Zhèshì wǒde jiàn diào xiàqù de dìfang. 然后回头对大家说：“ 这是我的剑掉下去的地方。” He then turn around and said to everybody: “This is where my sword fell in.” Zhòngrén yíhuò bù jiě de wàngzhe nàgè dāo kè de yìnjì. 众人疑惑不解地望着那个刀刻的印记。 The other people looked confusedly at the imprint made by the knife. Yǒurén cuīcù tā shuō: “Kuài xiàshuǐ qù zhǎo jiàn ya! 有人催促他说：“ 快下水去找剑呀！” Some people urged him by saying: “Hurry and find the sword!” Chǔguó rén shuō: “ Huāng shénme, wǒ yǒu jìhào ne.” 楚国人说： “ 慌什么，我有记号呢。” The man from Chu said: “There’s no need to hurry, I made a mark.” Chuán jìxù qiánxíng, yòu yǒu rén duì tā shuō: “Zài bú xiàqù zhǎo jiàn, zhè chuán yuè zǒu yuè yuǎn, 船继续前行，又有人对他说：“ 再不下去找剑，这船越走越远， dāngxīn zhǎo bù huílái le.” 当心找不回来了。” The ship continued to move forward, and another man said to him: “The ship is going farther and farther. If you don’t look for the sword, you won’t get it back.” Chǔguó rén yījiù zìxìn de shuō: “ Búyòng jí, búyòng jí, jìhào kè zài nàr ne. 楚国人依旧自信地说：“ 不用急，不用急，记号刻在那儿呢。” The man from Chu still said confidently: “Don’t worry, don’t worry. The mark is still there.” Zhízhì chuán xíngdào ànbiān tíngxià hòu, zhègè Chǔguó rén cái shùnzhe tā kè yǒu jìhào de dìfāng 直至船行到岸边停下后，这个楚国人才顺着他刻有记号的地方 xiàshuǐ qù zhǎojiàn. 下水去找剑。 When the ship stopped at the shore, the man from Chu jumped into the water at the place indicated by his mark to find the sword. Tā zài ànbiān chuánxià de shuǐzhōng fèi le hǎo dà yízhèn gōngfu, jiéguǒ háowúsuǒhuò, hái zhāolái le 他在岸边船下的水中费了好大一阵工夫，结果毫无所获，还招来了 zhòngrén de jīxiào. 众人的讥笑。 He looked for the sword in the water below the boat at the shore, taking a long time, but in vain. And he was laughed at by the others. Key Learning Point: 刻舟求剑(kèzhōuqiújiàn) This idiom is used as a metaphor to refer to those who consider things from a static viewpoint without taking into account the ever changing situation. Examples: Nǐ zěnme zǒng yòng lǎo bànfǎ jiějué wèntí? Zhēnshì kèzhōuqiújiàn! 你怎么总用老办法解决问题？真是刻舟求剑！ Why do you always use old ways to solve problems? It’s a foolish undertaking! Nǐmen gōngchǎng zěnme hái bù gǎijìn jìshù, zhè búshì kèzhōuqiújiàn ma? 你们工厂怎么还不改进技术，这不是刻舟求剑吗？ Why has your factory still not improved on your technology? You’re not taking a fruitless approach are you? Question: The man from Chu in the idiom刻舟求剑 (kèzhōuqiújiàn) is very ____. A. foolish B. clever C. principled See Answer See make a mark and take a picture See https://www.echineselearning.com/blog/chinese-idiom-kezhou-qiu-jian-mark-the-boat-for-a-dropped-sword https://www.echineselearning.com/blog/chinese-idiom-kezhou-q... SO THERE IS Near BY ATLANTIDA The Antequera Computer and there is no mark in the boat...

liuw 8y ago

I love Debian as a user. I considered becoming a DM then DD -- I read all the relevant documents and tested water with maintaining a package I used -- but ultimately gave up due to the bureaucracy and politics involved. The last straw was this: https://lwn.net/Articles/704608/ https://lwn.net/Articles/704608/

emmelaich 8y ago
(re the lwn link) Holy shit that is nuts.
raverbashing 8y ago
Yeah that was painful to read. And all too typical.

jdub 8y ago

Improving the distribution developer experience was one of the early objectives of Ubuntu, and where it had the least amount of success. It's a pity, because perhaps the only useful thing you could get out of essentially forking Debian (in itself not a great idea, but say you wanted to...) is independence from its technical and social processes. Ubuntu's processes are different, but not wildly improved... primarily because Launchpad was designed from a database schema, not for users. Ubuntu exploited a clear gaping hole in the distro market in 2004. There's still a gap in 2019, but it's a weirder market now than it was back then.

secure 8y ago
Thanks for the perspective! Ubuntu’s founding was before my time.

coleifer 8y ago

So some guy realizes that the vast resources and top-down direction available at large corporations don't translate to a huge open-source project (which itself is compromised of tons of open-source projects)? And it took him 10 years to realize this? Seriously though, I'm amazed at how well Debian just works. And I know it's because enough people are willing to put up with these types of frustrations. Thanks for the hard work.

secure 8y ago
I’m fully aware of how spoilt one can be as a developer at a large corporation, but I believe I have toned down my expectations reasonably, and still felt compelled to write this article and step down.

Boulth 8y ago

> I have more ideas that seem really compelling to me, but, based on how my previous projects have been going, I don’t think I can make any of these ideas happen within the Debian project. Interesting article. I had a chance of asking two distributions about some particular feature (making it easier to get GPG keys of developers). The first one I contacted was Gentoo: they quickly CCed my email to relevant people, discussed the matter between themselves and deployed the change in a week. Then I contacted Debian about the same thing. The email was basically identical. But the reply was largely negative, complaining about details and openly avoiding work. The entire interaction reminded me of large corporations where any change is met with resistance for resistance sake. (I use Arch btw.)

jokab 8y ago
> (I use Arch btw.) of course you do

stretchwithme 8y ago

Thank you for all of your hard work.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ausjke 8y ago

debian user for 20 years here, love it. debain is the base for so many other projects, it needs to keep going strong. in the meantime debian in many aspects is a bit "old" now, its infrastructure and the way to do things need evolve. I'm not a developer per se, it is not easy to become one either. There are so many ways to make packages and it's hard to pick the "best" one for example. I hope Debian can reform its model to make it even better, there are just so many archaic baggage from the past for new comers.

nh2 8y ago

In my experience, better tooling always wins in the long run. I've built Debian packages in the past, and after packaging the same software with Nix, it's very hard to not feel that Debian tooling and packaging is time consuming for no good reason. The nixpkgs model, where all you need to build everything is one `git clone`, all you need to make a change is a pull request and wait for a range of automated tests to tell you it's good (for both build and the _uses_ of a package!), and all you need to land a contributed change is click one button, seems strictly better. Over the years I've heard many people say "but shell scripts, FTP servers and arcane helper tools is the way we've done it for decades and that will never change" in many projects, but eventually, these projects shrink and those with a good developer experience and clean tooling overtake them. Similarly, after experiencing automatic, safe refactoring across billion-line typed-checked code bases, you can't help but wonder why people put up with spending their time going through heoric community efforts distributing work across people that a machine could easily do if you used good tooling. In my opinion, the real strength and legacy of Debian is successfully running a large, diverse, distributed project over decades with (reasonable) cohesion, democracy, and (reasonably) good organisation and project management. But even some non-technical problems go away with good tooling, and more time gets freed up to solve those hard tasks. Concrete example: In nixpkgs it is very easy to build overlays for the whole of NixOS that allow you to switch from dynamic to static linking or add hardening flags across all packages, avoiding big debates over which is the "one true way" because providing both is so easy, and both can be merged upstream. I think any big and successful project should continuously invest into better tooling, and simplify and automate things. That keeps contributors motivated and on board. (14-years happy Ubuntu [and thus Debian] user, and 10-years i3 user, so thanks for your efforts, Michael.)

xtat 8y ago

10+ year emeritus DD here -- Honestly I think "modern" dev culture is quite different from the core of he Debian community and this is both a strength and weakness. I can't say that I want Debian to look anything like the node ecosystem.

xtat 8y ago
Not saying there's not enormous room for improvement - just would be careful to conflate that with "it needs to work more like homebrew" or whatever-- yikes
- int_19h 8y ago
  Look at some of the other examples people are bringing up to compare against, though. Gentoo definitely predates the modern dev culture, for example.
debiandev 8y ago
DD here. "modern" dev culture feels more like a Silicon Valley / HN bubble, where people believe that all companies "move fast and break things". Thankfully, most companies (including FAANGs where I worked) are way more careful than that. Flashy UIs change every day, really critical systems are kept very stable...

Conan_Kudo 8y ago

So I've been involved in Fedora for as long as Michael has been involved in Debian, and I have attempted branching out into other distribution communities over the years. To this day, the Debian community is the only community where I have not been able to get past the initial stages to get involved. And you don't have to look too hard to see that I'm in quite a few communities... There's a lot of parallels to Debian and Fedora when I started in the project over a decade ago. The clear divider in how the two projects evolved was that Fedora elected to implement a lazy consensus model for decision-making, and developed a culture with a bias for action and improvement. Debian requires full consensus (generally) and has a culture that favors inaction. This difference is what has kept me in the Fedora Project for over a decade, and I still enjoy working in that community and doing my part to improve the greater Linux community and ecosystem. Over the years, Fedora shed a lot of its more complex processes and developed simpler tools and supporting infrastructure to make it easier to use and contribute to the development of the distribution and outlying projects. Over the years, I've seen us replace our buildsystem infrastructure[1][2][3], develop APIs and protocols for weaving tools together[4], migrate SCMs and create the first ever binary store system for Git[5][6][7], develop tools to simplify complex tasks[8][9][10], and build replacements to proprietary or overly-complex systems and support open standards and interoperable systems[11][12], all to benefit our users, our contributors, and our ecosystem. We've taken a similar hammer to our processes and structures so that we enable a wider range of people to be involved, representing their concerns and making our community healthier than before. We're still continuing down this path of making it easier for people to leverage the Fedora Project resources for the benefit of the community with things like COPR[13], CI on packages with Koschei[14] and CentOS CI integration for projects and packages[15], etc. That's not to say Fedora is perfect, mind you. It still has some technical and process warts. But I'm proud of the fact that our community is still actively trying to improve our processes, our tools, and our distribution. We're not afraid to make things better, and our community generally wants to make the Linux world a better place. [1]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraSummit/NewBuildSystem https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraSummit/NewBuildSystem [2]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/CoreExtrasMerge https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/CoreExtrasMerg... [3]: http://koji.build/ http://koji.build/ [4]: https://fedmsg.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ https://fedmsg.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ [5]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Dist_Git_Proposal https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Dist_Git_Proposal [6]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Dist_Git_Project https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Dist_Git_Project [7]: https://github.com/release-engineering/dist-git https://github.com/release-engineering/dist-git [8]: https://www.mankier.com/1/fedpkg https://www.mankier.com/1/fedpkg [9]: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/docs/ https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/docs/ [10]: https://mirrormanager.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://mirrormanager.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ [11]: https://pagure.io/pagure https://pagure.io/pagure [12]: https://ipsilon-project.org/ https://ipsilon-project.org/ [13]: https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/ https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/ [14]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Koschei https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Koschei [15]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CI/Pipeline https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CI/Pipeline

rixed 8y ago

Been using Debian more or less exclusively since Potato. And I'm a bit surprised by the tone of these comments and even more by the content of the blog post. To me, Debian had become an irrelevant fossil not because of any technical factor such as those listed here or there (lack of powerful tools to go over packages silos, bug reporting tools, communication tools, packaging tools...) Indeed I tend to believe not following the industry /best/ practices is actually an asset in many cases, sometime even a Debian landmark that served them and their users well (for instance, refusing to stick to release dates and favouring rock-solid new releases instead); Indeed, "they still use X why everybody else is using Y by now" should sounds very suspicious to many ears. To me as an outsider the obvious cause for Debian obsolescence is, and has been for more than a decade, the growing bureaucracy and consequently the lack of new blood and innovation. This opinion anchored the day when, participating to a Debian bug squashing party surrounded by similarly minded hackers, we were approached by a DD asking if he could check our identity papers in order to "simplify the process" of accepting our fixes. Organisations, and companies too to some degree, can sometime be best described by what they stand against. Since the beginning Debian has been standing against a hostile environment: I mentioned already the industry bad practices, but also part of this hostile outer world were the negligent upstreams, the unaware users, the cheating corporations and the misguided FOSS enthusiasts. Some bureaucracy was certainly in order to protect against them all. But I'm afraid one of Debian legacy will be that the DD will personify the FOSS bureaucrat, with its 300 pages long packaging manual and 30 steps long contributor approval processes, in the cultural pantheon of the distributions of the future.

fxfan 8y ago

Thank you, Mr Stapelberg. Some people in the OSS community can be overbearing and dealing with them on not one but two popular projects is something I, as a user (of both), want to thank you for.

z3t4 8y ago

I haven't made any debian packages, I heard it's a lot of work, but these looks good, not bad: * Granting personal freedom to individual maintainers * All maintainers need to read up on what the new thing is, how it might break, whether/how it affects them, manually run some tests, and finally decide to opt in.

JohnFen 8y ago
I routinely make Debian packages. It's not actually that hard -- unless you're intending to submit them for inclusion in the Debian repository. I don't do that, so I can ignore a lot of the most painful stuff.

Annatar 8y ago

I'm curious as to what the author would think of this in contrast to Debian: https://illumos.org/books/dev/ https://illumos.org/books/dev/

forty 8y ago

I have a naive question (I'm a long time Debian user, but never really tried to contribute): why isn't all the Debian in a single git repository? I'm not suggesting to vendor all the third party code but only all the packaging information, like, say, libreelec does (and I assume many others)

regularfry 8y ago
The simplest answer is that it predates repositories of that size being a practical idea, and it's not changed because of institutional inertia.
rleigh 8y ago
It's all down to history. When Debian was started, individual maintainers owned their packages completely, and they were often not kept under version control. This was a practical necessity for distributed development in the mid '90s. They uploaded the source and binaries when they uploaded a new Debian package version, but the actual source packages weren't necessarily under any sort of version control other than the Debian archive storing the uploaded versions. Today, keeping packages under version control is considered good practice, but even today it's not mandatory as far as I'm aware. While other systems, like the BSD ports, are in a single repository, this complete separation has had its advantages. The system is almost completely modular, with all the interdependencies explicitly documented. It's easy to add third-party packages. Look how easy it is to add extra BSD ports packages. You have to fork the entire thing because the repo doesn't just include the packages, it includes all the build infrastructure. This makes building third-party ports a bit more of a pain, because it wasn't considered important, while for Debian it was a fundamental design goal. On the flip side, making a patch for the BSD ports is the same for every single package and it takes just a few minutes to attach it to a bugzilla ticket.
jlundberg 8y ago
Debian actually vendors all third party code. Their source archive is the best place to search if you are looking for old but good software that is not available any more from the original author.

bhaak 8y ago

> Gmane used to paper over this issue, but Gmane’s availability over the last few years has been spotty, to say the least (it is down as I write this). The Gmane web interface is not just down but shut down for good: https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2016/07/28/the-end-of-gmane/comment-page-1/#comment-13502 https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2016/07/28/the-end-of-gmane/com... So this issue won't get better without Debian doing something themselves.

vthriller 8y ago
It's a shame that the only thing Gmane v2 effort [0] yielded is just a couple of blog posts. Why did they stop so abruptly?.. [0] http://home.gmane.org http://home.gmane.org

infinity0 8y ago

This developer is largely responsible for the Go ecosystem in Debian where they develop against HEAD. That's pretty hard and results in a lot of breakages. Go developers don't give a shit and push a lot of the externalities onto distro packages like Debian packagers (volunteers) or else Google developers (who get paid a huge amount to do bullshit engineering that nobody else cares about). We're making a lot of progress with Debian Rust packages and have automated away 90% of the ordinary Debian crap - which is needed in the general case but not for Rust where the constraints are very well-defined by Cargo - you only have to maintain two files (d/changelog and d/copyright) for the vast majority of Debian Rust crates.

jgoerzen 8y ago

Hi Michael, Thanks for writing this. I wrote a response here: https://changelog.complete.org/archives/9971-a-partial-defense-of-debian https://changelog.complete.org/archives/9971-a-partial-defen... The tl;dr version is I agree with you about some of the things you mention, but also feel like there's an element of personal preference for web-based tools showing through.

bfrog 8y ago

Compared to nixos everything else seems arcane, and compared to arch's pacman/makepkg combo everything else seems overly complicated.