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Before, when Debian Wheezy was the current stable version, I would have read this and assumed no sarcasm and agreed wholeheartedly. But these days, I'm with you

Before, when Debian Wheezy was the current stable version, I would have read this and assumed no sarcasm and agreed wholeheartedly. But these days, I'm with you, I just can't tell. Given the recent article by Michael Stapleburg[1] that made it to the front page of HN the other day and now this it seems like things are a bit rocky at Debian these days. A shame too because even though I don't use it that much any more I still consider it one of, if not the, most important Linux distributions available. Hopefully this is just a glitch that will get sorted sooner than later! [1] https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-winding-down/ https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-windin...

geofft 8y ago
I actually think things are a lot less rocky these days - nothing in Michael Stapelberg's post is new, it's just a difference of scale and perhaps the developer population getting a bit older and more committed to their day jobs. There are a lot of things helping with scale: Alioth (running a fork of SourceForge's code) was replaced with Salsa (running GitLab), which effectively collapsed the options for version control from CVS, SVN, Git, Darcs, etc. to just Git. Debhelper 9 standardized a ton of workflows. Team maintenance is a lot more common than individual maintenance, and uploading packages owned by unresponsive maintainers has gotten a lot more socially acceptable. But a lot of the old problems have scaled more quickly than solutions: if you're doing an archive-wide change, there are more packages you need to touch, more people you need to contact, etc., so each old problem happens more. (I also don't think any of the problems in that post are about developers being disagreeable or argumentative - just about Debian having a lot of technical debt and no easy way to pay it down.)
- smhenderson 8y ago
  Fair enough and based on what I read yesterday your comments about problems scaling faster than solutions makes a lot of sense. You seem to be more on top of it then me. As someone who no longer uses it but has a lot of history using Debian I hope you are correct and that this latest issue of not finding a leader according to the standard schedule is just something they route around. Based on the tone of the end of today's article it sounds like that's the case.

geofft 8y ago

I actually think things are a lot less rocky these days - nothing in Michael Stapelberg's post is new, it's just a difference of scale and perhaps the developer population getting a bit older and more committed to their day jobs. There are a lot of things helping with scale: Alioth (running a fork of SourceForge's code) was replaced with Salsa (running GitLab), which effectively collapsed the options for version control from CVS, SVN, Git, Darcs, etc. to just Git. Debhelper 9 standardized a ton of workflows. Team maintenance is a lot more common than individual maintenance, and uploading packages owned by unresponsive maintainers has gotten a lot more socially acceptable. But a lot of the old problems have scaled more quickly than solutions: if you're doing an archive-wide change, there are more packages you need to touch, more people you need to contact, etc., so each old problem happens more. (I also don't think any of the problems in that post are about developers being disagreeable or argumentative - just about Debian having a lot of technical debt and no easy way to pay it down.)

smhenderson 8y ago
Fair enough and based on what I read yesterday your comments about problems scaling faster than solutions makes a lot of sense. You seem to be more on top of it then me. As someone who no longer uses it but has a lot of history using Debian I hope you are correct and that this latest issue of not finding a leader according to the standard schedule is just something they route around. Based on the tone of the end of today's article it sounds like that's the case.