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Yeah I hate it when distros do this. Does Debian actually change upstream significantly? I thought they kept things fairly vanilla. I know Fedora patched in V

Yeah I hate it when distros do this. Does Debian actually change upstream significantly? I thought they kept things fairly vanilla. I know Fedora patched in VAAPI support on Firefox before it was merged into the Mozilla codebase. I can’t think of a worse piece of software to patch, the last thing I want to be running untested code on is my web browser.

jasonjayr 6y ago
Most of the Debian changes I've seen consist of changing default paths to match Debian's standards, backporting security changes (esp if a version bump changes functionality), and support 'conf.d' directories so packages can drop-in configuration files, and remove them easily.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  > "backporting security changes (esp if a version bump changes functionality" Thats not a trivial matter, its a potential source of many issues
  - marcosdumay 6y ago
    It's also a source of many solutions. There are really no perfect option here. Upstream and distro developers have different goals, and it's up to you to decide what you should adopt.
    - jhardy54 6y ago
      Opinion: the 'perfect solution' is to keep up with upstream and avoid backporting. It takes more work, but it reduces the separation between distro and upstream.
      - tsimionescu 6y ago
        That's definitely not ideal for users, though. Forced updates every 6 months is annoying to most people. Forced updates every day or so would be annoying to basically everyone.
        bipson 6y ago
        Running Fedora since I-don't-even-remember-when (around 2008?) and I was never annoyed (unless I try to run CUDA and the like, because they rely on e.g. an ancient GCC etc.). In particularly it was a significant improvement over the annoyances of Ubuntu, and I am still angry when thinking about the brief period I was maintaining a bunch of servers running Debian. Really unnecessarily difficult - particularly updating/upgrading and trying to clear the mess their systemd approach caused, in particular missing unit files for popular services (I think it was the isc-dhcp-server).
        tsimionescu 6y ago
        But this means that you are happy to upgrade all of your computer every six months or whatever Fedora's cadence is. Most people are definitely not happy to do so, because updates mean changes to stuff that works, and most people hate it when stuff that already works changes beneath them. This is of course even worse if you are not the end-user but are trying to ship an appliance to your customers. Why would you want to update the entire appliance OS in the field fo all of your customers just to ship a security patch, instead of sticking with the same base OS on already released appliances?
        bipson 6y ago
        Hm, let's dissect. Upgrade schedule for Fedora is twice a year, yes. Goes by without any issues, stuff still works. There is change and then there is change. Yes, I understand that some things don't need to change, and why do they always have to. Do I need my Desktop to still resemble 3.11 because "Why did it ever change"? - No. Some things in life simply change and they always have. I try to keep up where change is necessary. And if I would be shipping appliances to customers, why should I have "forced updates" of any kind outside of my control? I would never sell anything without my own repos, quality control, etc. Do you seriously sell Debian devices to anyone and support them, if anything outside of your control breaks? I seriously don't understand the argument. And if I ship software of any kind that relies on some libraries, I have to maintain it, of course. This includes going with the major releases. If this is embedded hardware, where there simply are only two or three updates in its lifetime, everything is different of course, but how on earth would I then have forced updates from RedHat??
      - vbernat 6y ago
        It takes less work. Just run Debian unstable. That's exactly what it is.
      - jacobush 6y ago
        Eh, upstream is not always the best either. Sometimes they don't fix security issues. Sometimes upstream is very change happy and the distribution will do best by lagging behind "and see what happens".
      - tremon 6y ago
        Your "perfect solution" just shifts responsibility for package maintenance (keeping up with changes) to the end user. Many people use Debian exactly because they don't want to deal with every upstream brainfart.
  - eikenberry 6y ago
    Yes, but the alternative is un-patched security issues. Non-trivial but important.
    - jhasse 6y ago
      No the alternative can also be to live with functionality changes.
      - eikenberry 6y ago
        New functionality means new bugs and breaking changes to old functionality. Sometimes the trade-off is worth it, but don't like being forced to update when it isn't.
  - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
    It's the whole point of having a distribution. If I wanted an endless stream of new vulnerabilities I can just use upstream software.
- jhasse 6y ago
  Note that "bugfixes" are most of the time considered as a functionality change.
girst 6y ago
Regarding Fedora's Firefox: The Fedora Firefox mainainers, Martin Stransky and Jan Horak, are also the main maintainers of the Linux/GTK parts of Firefox. The VAAPI patches you've mentioned are (afair) mostly-if-not-all Martin's work. So he's not applying some rando's "untested" patches.
- symlinkk 6y ago
  But the patches weren’t in Firefox’s codebase, so they didn’t go through the typical Firefox QA process including the Nightly, Beta, etc process. I’m not saying those guys don’t know what they’re doing, obviously they are experts. But I would prefer to trust but verify (not just trust).
npsimons 6y ago
> Does Debian actually change upstream significantly? I thought they kept things fairly vanilla. IME, they do keep things fairly vanilla, and I speak as someone who has run Debian since . . . I wanna say 2002? Plus I've done kernel dev work, and Debian's kernel patches ain't nothing compared to what RedHat used to do.
- freedomben 6y ago
  I maintain a custom/forked driver[1] and support both Fedora/RHEL/CentOS and Ubuntu, and while Ubuntu has gotten much better, in years past I actually had to manage Ubuntu specific branches because they were so hacked up with custom patches from Canonical. I would spend more time fixing Ubuntu weirdness than I would all other distros combined. It's gotten much better the past several releases though, so thank you to Canonical for that :-) The various RPM flavors keep their kernels vanilla enough that I can mostly just rebase on top of linux-stable, and it's been that way since I started 7 years ago (according to github). Arch is the winner. I've never had to make a custom patch for Arch. Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat but opinions are my own [1]: https://github.com/FreedomBen/rtl8188ce-linux-driver https://github.com/FreedomBen/rtl8188ce-linux-driver
  - npsimons 6y ago
    Fair enough, but I don't put Ubuntu in the same class as Debian, because while they may share many base packages in common, I do seem to remember them patching the kernel more than Debian, and usually stuff that would break my kernel dev too. Hence another reason I'm not on Ubuntu.
    - freedomben 6y ago
      Agreed. On a related but different note it does seem like Debian gets (unfairly) painted with light generated by Ubuntu. I run Debian on some machines and most of the issues I have with Ubuntu are not problems on Debian (such as: Snap obsession and forcing, Abandoned/system-wrecking PPAs that are hard to recover from, etc)
lmm 6y ago
> Does Debian actually change upstream significantly? I thought they kept things fairly vanilla. No, they radically change things to match their standards. E.g. look at their tomcat package which explodes it all over the filesystem.
- gspr 6y ago
  What is a distribution if not a collection of software that obey the same standard? Without the latter, all you have is a burlap sack full of software. Hardly a distribution. Fine if that's what you want, but it's not what Debian is.
  - lmm 6y ago
    A distribution is by definition distributing something that already exists, so I think distributions that stick close to upstream are more in the spirit of the concept. I also think Debian's approach has shown itself to produce something less reliable on the whole. Of course if you prefer the Debian approach, knock yourself out.
    - gspr 6y ago
      For those of you that don't like that terminology: let's just use the words that Debian itself uses, namely "the universal operating system". What is an operating system if not a collection of software that follow a standard so as to interoperate? > I also think Debian's approach has shown itself to produce something less reliable on the whole I think the opposite. Is there something particular you'd like to point to? I accept the SSH disaster. But that's 12 years ago now, and it is a single example.
      - lmm 6y ago
        > Is there something particular you'd like to point to? I accept the SSH disaster. But that's 12 years ago now, and it is a single example. Debian's patches to cdrecord introduced so many bugs that they eventually ended up driving the original author away from open source. I think I remember something about the python 2 -> 3 transition being harder on Debian because of changes they've made? The packaged Tomcat on Debian is so different that every time I've seen someone running Tomcat they've installed it manually instead. Debian has essentially given up on packaging Hadoop. Some of their criticisms of its build process are certainly valid, but others seem to be an unreasonable expectation that everything will build exactly the way Debian expects. E.g. if I'm understanding correctly, they essentially take the position that they won't package anything built with Maven, on frankly spurious grounds. Debian tends to end up with very outdated versions of anything from an ecosystem that uses large numbers of small libraries, or, basically, anything that isn't written in C or Perl. E.g. Python libraries are typically a long way out of date (even compared to other distributions), and Debian's package management tends to be less compatible with Python's built-in tools like pip than other distributions (e.g. Debian is more likely to rename a Python library, in my experience, which then breaks reverse-dependencies on that library or leads to having two incompatible copies of it installed). So people running Python programs on Debian tend to end up with either a difficult-to-manage mix of system and non-system dependencies, or multiple parallel installs of Python. You could say that Debian offers a reliable platform and it's the users' fault for installing these unreliable things on top of it. But an OS exists to run applications, not the other way around, and I find that in practice Debian's approach means users are forced to step outside the managed parts of it much more than with other distributions, and it handles it less well when they do, making for setups that are less reliable in practice. Put it this way: the "add-on repository" culture is a lot stronger in Debian/Ubuntu than in other distributions, and I think that's actually a weakness rather than a strength.
Fnoord 6y ago
When you use Nix, and Nix does it, you like it when they do it, cause else they software doesn't work (Nix doesn't use default FHS).

jasonjayr 6y ago

Most of the Debian changes I've seen consist of changing default paths to match Debian's standards, backporting security changes (esp if a version bump changes functionality), and support 'conf.d' directories so packages can drop-in configuration files, and remove them easily.

ClumsyPilot 6y ago
> "backporting security changes (esp if a version bump changes functionality" Thats not a trivial matter, its a potential source of many issues
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  It's also a source of many solutions. There are really no perfect option here. Upstream and distro developers have different goals, and it's up to you to decide what you should adopt.
  - jhardy54 6y ago
    Opinion: the 'perfect solution' is to keep up with upstream and avoid backporting. It takes more work, but it reduces the separation between distro and upstream.
    - tsimionescu 6y ago
      That's definitely not ideal for users, though. Forced updates every 6 months is annoying to most people. Forced updates every day or so would be annoying to basically everyone.
      - bipson 6y ago
        Running Fedora since I-don't-even-remember-when (around 2008?) and I was never annoyed (unless I try to run CUDA and the like, because they rely on e.g. an ancient GCC etc.). In particularly it was a significant improvement over the annoyances of Ubuntu, and I am still angry when thinking about the brief period I was maintaining a bunch of servers running Debian. Really unnecessarily difficult - particularly updating/upgrading and trying to clear the mess their systemd approach caused, in particular missing unit files for popular services (I think it was the isc-dhcp-server).
        tsimionescu 6y ago
        But this means that you are happy to upgrade all of your computer every six months or whatever Fedora's cadence is. Most people are definitely not happy to do so, because updates mean changes to stuff that works, and most people hate it when stuff that already works changes beneath them. This is of course even worse if you are not the end-user but are trying to ship an appliance to your customers. Why would you want to update the entire appliance OS in the field fo all of your customers just to ship a security patch, instead of sticking with the same base OS on already released appliances?
        bipson 6y ago
        Hm, let's dissect. Upgrade schedule for Fedora is twice a year, yes. Goes by without any issues, stuff still works. There is change and then there is change. Yes, I understand that some things don't need to change, and why do they always have to. Do I need my Desktop to still resemble 3.11 because "Why did it ever change"? - No. Some things in life simply change and they always have. I try to keep up where change is necessary. And if I would be shipping appliances to customers, why should I have "forced updates" of any kind outside of my control? I would never sell anything without my own repos, quality control, etc. Do you seriously sell Debian devices to anyone and support them, if anything outside of your control breaks? I seriously don't understand the argument. And if I ship software of any kind that relies on some libraries, I have to maintain it, of course. This includes going with the major releases. If this is embedded hardware, where there simply are only two or three updates in its lifetime, everything is different of course, but how on earth would I then have forced updates from RedHat??
    - vbernat 6y ago
      It takes less work. Just run Debian unstable. That's exactly what it is.
    - jacobush 6y ago
      Eh, upstream is not always the best either. Sometimes they don't fix security issues. Sometimes upstream is very change happy and the distribution will do best by lagging behind "and see what happens".
    - tremon 6y ago
      Your "perfect solution" just shifts responsibility for package maintenance (keeping up with changes) to the end user. Many people use Debian exactly because they don't want to deal with every upstream brainfart.
- eikenberry 6y ago
  Yes, but the alternative is un-patched security issues. Non-trivial but important.
  - jhasse 6y ago
    No the alternative can also be to live with functionality changes.
    - eikenberry 6y ago
      New functionality means new bugs and breaking changes to old functionality. Sometimes the trade-off is worth it, but don't like being forced to update when it isn't.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  It's the whole point of having a distribution. If I wanted an endless stream of new vulnerabilities I can just use upstream software.
jhasse 6y ago
Note that "bugfixes" are most of the time considered as a functionality change.

girst 6y ago

Regarding Fedora's Firefox: The Fedora Firefox mainainers, Martin Stransky and Jan Horak, are also the main maintainers of the Linux/GTK parts of Firefox. The VAAPI patches you've mentioned are (afair) mostly-if-not-all Martin's work. So he's not applying some rando's "untested" patches.

symlinkk 6y ago
But the patches weren’t in Firefox’s codebase, so they didn’t go through the typical Firefox QA process including the Nightly, Beta, etc process. I’m not saying those guys don’t know what they’re doing, obviously they are experts. But I would prefer to trust but verify (not just trust).

npsimons 6y ago

> Does Debian actually change upstream significantly? I thought they kept things fairly vanilla. IME, they do keep things fairly vanilla, and I speak as someone who has run Debian since . . . I wanna say 2002? Plus I've done kernel dev work, and Debian's kernel patches ain't nothing compared to what RedHat used to do.

freedomben 6y ago
I maintain a custom/forked driver[1] and support both Fedora/RHEL/CentOS and Ubuntu, and while Ubuntu has gotten much better, in years past I actually had to manage Ubuntu specific branches because they were so hacked up with custom patches from Canonical. I would spend more time fixing Ubuntu weirdness than I would all other distros combined. It's gotten much better the past several releases though, so thank you to Canonical for that :-) The various RPM flavors keep their kernels vanilla enough that I can mostly just rebase on top of linux-stable, and it's been that way since I started 7 years ago (according to github). Arch is the winner. I've never had to make a custom patch for Arch. Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat but opinions are my own [1]: https://github.com/FreedomBen/rtl8188ce-linux-driver https://github.com/FreedomBen/rtl8188ce-linux-driver
- npsimons 6y ago
  Fair enough, but I don't put Ubuntu in the same class as Debian, because while they may share many base packages in common, I do seem to remember them patching the kernel more than Debian, and usually stuff that would break my kernel dev too. Hence another reason I'm not on Ubuntu.
  - freedomben 6y ago
    Agreed. On a related but different note it does seem like Debian gets (unfairly) painted with light generated by Ubuntu. I run Debian on some machines and most of the issues I have with Ubuntu are not problems on Debian (such as: Snap obsession and forcing, Abandoned/system-wrecking PPAs that are hard to recover from, etc)

lmm 6y ago

> Does Debian actually change upstream significantly? I thought they kept things fairly vanilla. No, they radically change things to match their standards. E.g. look at their tomcat package which explodes it all over the filesystem.

gspr 6y ago
What is a distribution if not a collection of software that obey the same standard? Without the latter, all you have is a burlap sack full of software. Hardly a distribution. Fine if that's what you want, but it's not what Debian is.
- lmm 6y ago
  A distribution is by definition distributing something that already exists, so I think distributions that stick close to upstream are more in the spirit of the concept. I also think Debian's approach has shown itself to produce something less reliable on the whole. Of course if you prefer the Debian approach, knock yourself out.
  - gspr 6y ago
    For those of you that don't like that terminology: let's just use the words that Debian itself uses, namely "the universal operating system". What is an operating system if not a collection of software that follow a standard so as to interoperate? > I also think Debian's approach has shown itself to produce something less reliable on the whole I think the opposite. Is there something particular you'd like to point to? I accept the SSH disaster. But that's 12 years ago now, and it is a single example.
    - lmm 6y ago
      > Is there something particular you'd like to point to? I accept the SSH disaster. But that's 12 years ago now, and it is a single example. Debian's patches to cdrecord introduced so many bugs that they eventually ended up driving the original author away from open source. I think I remember something about the python 2 -> 3 transition being harder on Debian because of changes they've made? The packaged Tomcat on Debian is so different that every time I've seen someone running Tomcat they've installed it manually instead. Debian has essentially given up on packaging Hadoop. Some of their criticisms of its build process are certainly valid, but others seem to be an unreasonable expectation that everything will build exactly the way Debian expects. E.g. if I'm understanding correctly, they essentially take the position that they won't package anything built with Maven, on frankly spurious grounds. Debian tends to end up with very outdated versions of anything from an ecosystem that uses large numbers of small libraries, or, basically, anything that isn't written in C or Perl. E.g. Python libraries are typically a long way out of date (even compared to other distributions), and Debian's package management tends to be less compatible with Python's built-in tools like pip than other distributions (e.g. Debian is more likely to rename a Python library, in my experience, which then breaks reverse-dependencies on that library or leads to having two incompatible copies of it installed). So people running Python programs on Debian tend to end up with either a difficult-to-manage mix of system and non-system dependencies, or multiple parallel installs of Python. You could say that Debian offers a reliable platform and it's the users' fault for installing these unreliable things on top of it. But an OS exists to run applications, not the other way around, and I find that in practice Debian's approach means users are forced to step outside the managed parts of it much more than with other distributions, and it handles it less well when they do, making for setups that are less reliable in practice. Put it this way: the "add-on repository" culture is a lot stronger in Debian/Ubuntu than in other distributions, and I think that's actually a weakness rather than a strength.

Fnoord 6y ago

When you use Nix, and Nix does it, you like it when they do it, cause else they software doesn't work (Nix doesn't use default FHS).