3 ms·

My first upload will soon be 10 years ago. One thing that is definitely noticeable is that while creating a package is still by no means trivial, it has definit

My first upload will soon be 10 years ago. One thing that is definitely noticeable is that while creating a package is still by no means trivial, it has definitely become much, much easier. 10 years ago, you had a handful of very idiosyncratic build helpers to help you manage your package. Today, effectively it's just one [1], debhelper, and it has become trivial to build packages with it. It's a very powerful framework that can be overridden do do basically anything you like, but usually automagically does the right thing. Gone are the days where you had to write an unwieldy debian/rules file. 3 years ago, you had X version control systems supported: git, svn, mercurial, cvs, and who nows what else. Sounds unreasonable, right? Well, when you rely on volunteer work, you need to live with the fact that volunteers will choose the particular tooling they like to work with. Today, you have Salsa which is a GitLab instance, and people apparently just learned to deal with it, and the world hasn't come tumbling down. I absolutely agree with the author that some things are just wrong within Debian. However, I believe these are inherent to the nature of an organization comprised entirely of volunteers; achieving consensus becomes really hard because nobody wants to be told how to spend their free time. On the other hand, being involved in Debian has also been an incredibly formative experience. I believe Debian does some things right that others still fail at or trail after. [1] https://anarc.at/blog/2019-02-05-debian-build-systems/ https://anarc.at/blog/2019-02-05-debian-build-systems/ [2] https://salsa.debian.org https://salsa.debian.org

kakwa_ 8y ago
The Debian tooling can be really fantastic at time. If the upstream is clean (project with a proper setup.py/Makefile/CMake/Makefile.pl/etc), you only have to declare the meta-data, the build and runtime dependencies and you are set. But at the same time, I'm not a big fan of other aspects. For example, the fact the packaging is split between at least 3 or 4 files and generally something close to a dozen (at least control, rule, changelog, copyright and maybe .install, .conffiles, .postinst, .preinst, etc) is a bit complex at first specially compared to rpm where everything is centralized into one .spec file. I'm also not a big fan of how Debian packages handle permission different than root:root. dpkg-statoverride in post install doesn't feel natural, the newcomer while typically use chown, which is wrong. rpm is better in that regard, you explicitly state the permissions in the spec file %files section. And I'm also not a big fan of Debian renaming upstream archives (<pkg>_<ver>.orig.tar.gz), IMHO, upstream should be taken as it is, including the file name. But that's a minor one and also a very personal opinion. I've mixed opinions about packages with a lot of scripting to handle a kind of default but slightly customized configuration. I know it can be disabled with "DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive" but I feel like it's a lot of efforts and an unecessary source of complexity and bugs for a distribution that will primarily be used on servers where such helpers are almost useless specially using tools like puppet/chef/ansible/saltstack. The tooling also feels a bit like an aggregation of scripts put on top of each. For example, when you want to build in a clean and throwaway environment (aka a chroot), you have pbuilder, cowbuilder, qemubuilder, whalebuilder... CentOS/Fedora has mock. Granted it's less advanced (apart maybe from mockchain) but at least it the obvious choice. For a lot of things, the Debian packaging feels like Perl: there is 10 ways to do it. But 9 of them are wrong, and you have to go through dozens of pages of policies with no search box (https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/index.html https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/index.html) to figure out the right way. And it's also kind of difficult to follow examples (by downloading source packages to see how it's done) since it's not explicit where each part fits, at least for a newcomer.
- Conan_Kudo 8y ago
  I'm curious, in what way do you feel it's less advanced? Mock supports leveraging qemu-user-static for doing foreign architectures as of Mock 1.4.11, which I think was the only major feature that the Debian tools had for a while that Mock lacked. Is there something else missing?
  - kakwa_ 8y ago
    Mock doesn't have COW (copy on write), cowbuilder by contrast creates a base chroot, then use copy on write to enrich it per build. This speeds-up things considerably. Also, cowbuilder runs fine with several instance running at the same time, mock is a bit more sketchy in that regard. Basically, you can only build one package at a time. Typically, it's a bit of an issue for my personal scripts: https://github.com/kakwa/amkecpak https://github.com/kakwa/amkecpak, in them I can basically do make rpm -j 42 to build 42 packages at the same time, but with mock/mockchain, the chroot creation has some concurrency issues. In fairness, I used the rather old mock version packaged by Debian, I've not looked at 1.4, it seems that some of these issues are addressed now.

kakwa_ 8y ago

The Debian tooling can be really fantastic at time. If the upstream is clean (project with a proper setup.py/Makefile/CMake/Makefile.pl/etc), you only have to declare the meta-data, the build and runtime dependencies and you are set. But at the same time, I'm not a big fan of other aspects. For example, the fact the packaging is split between at least 3 or 4 files and generally something close to a dozen (at least control, rule, changelog, copyright and maybe .install, .conffiles, .postinst, .preinst, etc) is a bit complex at first specially compared to rpm where everything is centralized into one .spec file. I'm also not a big fan of how Debian packages handle permission different than root:root. dpkg-statoverride in post install doesn't feel natural, the newcomer while typically use chown, which is wrong. rpm is better in that regard, you explicitly state the permissions in the spec file %files section. And I'm also not a big fan of Debian renaming upstream archives (<pkg>_<ver>.orig.tar.gz), IMHO, upstream should be taken as it is, including the file name. But that's a minor one and also a very personal opinion. I've mixed opinions about packages with a lot of scripting to handle a kind of default but slightly customized configuration. I know it can be disabled with "DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive" but I feel like it's a lot of efforts and an unecessary source of complexity and bugs for a distribution that will primarily be used on servers where such helpers are almost useless specially using tools like puppet/chef/ansible/saltstack. The tooling also feels a bit like an aggregation of scripts put on top of each. For example, when you want to build in a clean and throwaway environment (aka a chroot), you have pbuilder, cowbuilder, qemubuilder, whalebuilder... CentOS/Fedora has mock. Granted it's less advanced (apart maybe from mockchain) but at least it the obvious choice. For a lot of things, the Debian packaging feels like Perl: there is 10 ways to do it. But 9 of them are wrong, and you have to go through dozens of pages of policies with no search box (https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/index.html https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/index.html) to figure out the right way. And it's also kind of difficult to follow examples (by downloading source packages to see how it's done) since it's not explicit where each part fits, at least for a newcomer.

Conan_Kudo 8y ago
I'm curious, in what way do you feel it's less advanced? Mock supports leveraging qemu-user-static for doing foreign architectures as of Mock 1.4.11, which I think was the only major feature that the Debian tools had for a while that Mock lacked. Is there something else missing?
- kakwa_ 8y ago
  Mock doesn't have COW (copy on write), cowbuilder by contrast creates a base chroot, then use copy on write to enrich it per build. This speeds-up things considerably. Also, cowbuilder runs fine with several instance running at the same time, mock is a bit more sketchy in that regard. Basically, you can only build one package at a time. Typically, it's a bit of an issue for my personal scripts: https://github.com/kakwa/amkecpak https://github.com/kakwa/amkecpak, in them I can basically do make rpm -j 42 to build 42 packages at the same time, but with mock/mockchain, the chroot creation has some concurrency issues. In fairness, I used the rather old mock version packaged by Debian, I've not looked at 1.4, it seems that some of these issues are addressed now.