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Debian is well known to not be a democracy. This is a do-ocracy. Votes are very rare and, except for systemd (2 in 10 years), are quite non-technical. The secon

Debian is well known to not be a democracy. This is a do-ocracy. Votes are very rare and, except for systemd (2 in 10 years), are quite non-technical. The second key aspect is that you can't force anyone to do anything. The third key aspect is the project is unable to reach any consensus (there is always someone to disagree and do enough noise for the discussion to go nowhere and we cannot vote). Most of the points listed by Michael derive from that. It's impossible to change something. We can only do small things for which no cooperation is needed.

rstuart4133 6y ago
> It's impossible to change something. We can only do small things for which no cooperation is needed. And yet the migration to systemd, which required lots of changes in disparate packages, happened. And the migration away from python2 will happen too, albeit perhaps not as fast as the people driving it would like. And the new source format happened. And for repeatable builds - Debian leads the world. Methinks "we can only do small things for which no cooperation is needed" might be overstating the case a smidgen. Lots of things with aren't small happen in Debian on a regular basis.
- vbernat 6y ago
  Migration to systemd is painful and it needed two GR and a lot of drama to move forward. We had to wait debhelper 10 for it to not be a hack in packaging (2016). Migration away from python2 is wanted by doko, the Python maintainer. If he didn't want that, nothing would move. We were stuck for a long time with Python 2.6 because he didn't want to migrate to Python 2.7. As he is also maintainer of gcc and Java, nobody wanted to vote him out. I may have missed the headlines around the new source format. Ack for repeatable builds. What about bikesheds/PPA? Many discussions a few years back but mostly blocked because FTP masters want it to be integrated into DAK and under various other non-technical constraints.

rstuart4133 6y ago

> It's impossible to change something. We can only do small things for which no cooperation is needed. And yet the migration to systemd, which required lots of changes in disparate packages, happened. And the migration away from python2 will happen too, albeit perhaps not as fast as the people driving it would like. And the new source format happened. And for repeatable builds - Debian leads the world. Methinks "we can only do small things for which no cooperation is needed" might be overstating the case a smidgen. Lots of things with aren't small happen in Debian on a regular basis.

vbernat 6y ago
Migration to systemd is painful and it needed two GR and a lot of drama to move forward. We had to wait debhelper 10 for it to not be a hack in packaging (2016). Migration away from python2 is wanted by doko, the Python maintainer. If he didn't want that, nothing would move. We were stuck for a long time with Python 2.6 because he didn't want to migrate to Python 2.7. As he is also maintainer of gcc and Java, nobody wanted to vote him out. I may have missed the headlines around the new source format. Ack for repeatable builds. What about bikesheds/PPA? Many discussions a few years back but mostly blocked because FTP masters want it to be integrated into DAK and under various other non-technical constraints.