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Patching your Debian is not hard: http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/ubuntu_itch_scratch.html http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/ubuntu_itch_scratch.html

• Nullabillity 7y ago
  No, but it's cumbersome. Let's say your patch doesn't get in in time for Terminator 0.96 (following the same example), or it's not relevant for upstreaming. Now you need to go through the same process again to upgrade. So much for `apt-get upgrade`. And it gets even worse if your change breaks binary compatibility: now you need to find and rebuild all packages that depend on it too! The beauty of NixOS here is that you patch the "repository" instead, so will get applied on top of the current version as long as the patch applies cleanly. And all of Nix's usual logic applies for rebuilding dependendees as required.
• eeh 7y ago
  The steps in that blog post aren't difficult, but it doesn't include all the steps and assumptions: * how do you roll that dpkg out to your fleet? Now you need a deb archive? * "For Debian the tool is called reportbug". Note that reportbug is a CLI tool to send an email to Debian's bug tracker, whose status/tags are then also controlled by control emails. It has a notoriously difficult learning curve. * Many Debian packages expect patches via email, rather than the more familiar git-based approaches. Some Debian packages do accept patches via git, I'm aware. Hopefully the package you're filing a patch against does. * The blog post also misses out the work the Debian package maintainer has to do: use their own approach (and there are multiple) for doing a package release/signing. NixOS? It's a PR that's built by CI. Like how we usually handle software systems. * You've patched a single version. What happens when a new package is released but your patch didn't make it in? IME, after years of using Debian I made a few but barely any patches against Debian because of the frictions involved. The frictionless experience of NixOS has made me more active.