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I like Debian, but I agree it's become too slow and bureaucratic. Sadly, like most big organizations, it is hard to implement changes from inside. In my opini

• asveikau 8y ago
  > it's become too slow and bureaucratic. When I first used Debian in the 90s it had a reputation for being slow and bureaucratic.
  • josteink 8y ago
    And unlike most distros which were around back then, Debian is still here today, so it must be good for something. That said, I agree anything Debian (and thus Ubuntu too) and FSF feels awkwardly baroque to work with these days. Old email-based systems, bickering over politics and minor issues rather than the subject at hand, for weeks or months... and no standard CI?!? With all that I too find myself spending my time contributing elsewhere. It’s a shame as these 2 organizations acts as a fundament for sooo many things I rely on daily, but I just can’t bother.
    • noir_lord 8y ago
      > Debian is still here today, so it must be good for something. It’s stable and I know they’ll still be around 5 years from now. They also very rarely break anything on updates. There are only three Linux distress I’d run in production, RHEL, Debian or Ubuntu (depending.
    • sanxiyn 8y ago
      What is the problem with old email-based systems? This is an honest question.
      • josteink 8y ago
        For FSF and Emacs all bugs, discussions and contribution are handled through email. Sending patch-files by email and then having to discuss/defend your patch for weeks, only to have to create and send a new one, leaving receivers to diff patch-files to see what is different... Let’s just say in 2019 you expect something a little more sophisticated to be available to make your contribution easier.
      • rleigh 8y ago
        There's no problem with systems which allow interaction by email. It can be handy, and if you like that, then the Debian BTS is convenient for responding to bugs as a maintainer. However, email-only systems which don't offer any other methods of interaction can be problematic. email-only interaction can be massively inefficient. For larger changes, I might need to change the severities, tags, and follow up to dozens of bugs. For every metadata change I make, I need to check the reply to make sure the change took place. That means manually tying together sent emails with BTS replies and repeating any which failed. I used to track all this on large pieces of paper! I shouldn't need a manual system to manage my interaction with an issue tracking system. When I press submit in any other system, the effect is immediate. This is hugely costly in terms of time and effort to do really trivial and mundane things. It's one thing to do it once, but what happens when you make 30 changes and have to wait 20 minutes for each request to round-trip? It's a logistical nightmare which can take several hours to complete. If I was to highlight a single problem with the Debian BTS, it's that there was a failure to acknowledge its inefficiencies and look at other systems. The criticisms raised in this thread aren't new; they were known 15+ years back. There's a reason why the others are not using email as their primary mode of interaction, and it's a shame the BTS didn't get a decent web frontend to make it more efficient as well as more accessible.
    • JohnFen 8y ago
      The thing that I think Debian does best (which is the same thing that has kept me using Debian since about 1996) is stability. I don't think any other Linux distro (that isn't Debian-based, anyway) even comes close.
• hanru 8y ago
  > In my opinion, most Debian's issues stem from a centralized imperative package manager where all packages need to be carefully kept in sync for things to work. Hmm, in my opinion, this is good thing, not an issue needs to be solved.