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for those (rightfully) complaining about the experience of making dot-deb packaging .. yes all true and needs to improve YET the Apple iPhone app developer expe

for those (rightfully) complaining about the experience of making dot-deb packaging .. yes all true and needs to improve YET the Apple iPhone app developer experience has been tremendously painful and rude for a decade also.. somehow given $INCENTIVES the app devs for iPhone just consider it table stakes?

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adamc 2y ago
Money is a powerful incentive.
- robocat 2y ago
  Except for 99% psych studies showing that it is a poor incentive[1]. Talking to a person doing hotel reservations today - his personal incentives were to do give quality service (unfortunately the managers incentives were financially misaligned with that!). Most job satisfaction seems to be derived from internal incentives and money is not that good in my experience. Maybe different in the USA from New Zealand. [1] see psych reproducability studies.
  - ericjmorey 2y ago
    All of that is demonstration that money isn't an ideal means of incentive, but I have never worked a job without getting paid despite being asked many times to do exactly that.
  - adamc 2y ago
    No, that demonstrates that the monetary delta wasn't a good incentive. But I challenge you to find a lot of people working jobs without pay. There are some, if they have independent means, but not many. Likewise, most fiction authors expect at least the potential to make an income if enough people read their book -- etc. There are other incentives, for sure. Evidently not enough of them attract Debian contributors.
o11c 2y ago
Apps are usually first party, which makes a big difference. The thing that seems to be relatively rare about Debian among Linux distributions is that the packaging data is intrusive - a debian/ directory within the package itself, which must have already been downloaded. Most other distros seem to have external packaging - some sort of package specification that points to the URL of the upstream and is responsible for pulling it. It cannot be overstated how much friction this inversion adds, whether for new packages, for updated upstream packages, or for distro-specific (hopefully temporary, but Debian has a bad record for that) patching. (I actually tried filing this as a bug once, but it immediately got moved to the mailing list, and I promptly got un-CC'ed and stopped being able to reply, since what lunatic actually subscribes to a firehose of a mailing list? Email also considered harmful)

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[deleted]

adamc 2y ago

Money is a powerful incentive.

robocat 2y ago
Except for 99% psych studies showing that it is a poor incentive[1]. Talking to a person doing hotel reservations today - his personal incentives were to do give quality service (unfortunately the managers incentives were financially misaligned with that!). Most job satisfaction seems to be derived from internal incentives and money is not that good in my experience. Maybe different in the USA from New Zealand. [1] see psych reproducability studies.
- ericjmorey 2y ago
  All of that is demonstration that money isn't an ideal means of incentive, but I have never worked a job without getting paid despite being asked many times to do exactly that.
- adamc 2y ago
  No, that demonstrates that the monetary delta wasn't a good incentive. But I challenge you to find a lot of people working jobs without pay. There are some, if they have independent means, but not many. Likewise, most fiction authors expect at least the potential to make an income if enough people read their book -- etc. There are other incentives, for sure. Evidently not enough of them attract Debian contributors.

o11c 2y ago

Apps are usually first party, which makes a big difference. The thing that seems to be relatively rare about Debian among Linux distributions is that the packaging data is intrusive - a debian/ directory within the package itself, which must have already been downloaded. Most other distros seem to have external packaging - some sort of package specification that points to the URL of the upstream and is responsible for pulling it. It cannot be overstated how much friction this inversion adds, whether for new packages, for updated upstream packages, or for distro-specific (hopefully temporary, but Debian has a bad record for that) patching. (I actually tried filing this as a bug once, but it immediately got moved to the mailing list, and I promptly got un-CC'ed and stopped being able to reply, since what lunatic actually subscribes to a firehose of a mailing list? Email also considered harmful)