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It is also something that will make upstream hate them, possibly to the point of actively making their life difficult in retribution. (Problems along this line

It is also something that will make upstream hate them, possibly to the point of actively making their life difficult in retribution. (Problems along this line already are why the bcachefs dev told users to avoid debian and the packager eventually dropped the package: https://www.reddit.com/r/bcachefs/comments/1em2vzf/psa_avoid_debian/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bcachefs/comments/1em2vzf/psa_avoid...)

Hemospectrum 2y ago
> ...and the packager eventually dropped the package Related HN discussion from August/September: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41407768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41407768
woodruffw 2y ago
I'm one of those potential upstreams. It's all OSS and I understand the pain of path dependency, so I don't think it would be fair to go out of my way to make any downstream distribution maintainer's life harder than necessary. At the same time, I suspect this kind of policy will make my life harder than necessary: users who hit bugs due to distribution packaging quirks will be redirected to me for triage, and I'll have a very hard time understanding (much less fixing) quirks that are tied to transitive subdependencies that my own builds intentionally exclude.
kelnos 2y ago
> It is also something that will make upstream hate them This was my thought. Xubuntu decided to ship unstable development pre-releases of the core Xfce components in their last stable OS release, and I got really annoyed getting bug reports from users who were running a dev release that was 4 releases behind current, where things were fixed. This was completely unnecessary and wasted a bunch of my time.
Arnavion 2y ago
Users ought to report bugs to their distro first, and the distro package maintainer should then decide whether it's an upstream bug or a distro packaging bug. That would cut out all the noise that upstream hates. The problem is users have gotten savvy about talking to upstream directly. It helps that upstream is usually on easy-to-use and search-engine-indexed platforms like GitHub these days vs mailing lists. It would still be fine if the user did the diligence of checking whether the problem exists in upstream or just the distro package, but they often don't do that either.
- int_19h 2y ago
  It's a lot of effort for the user to do that kind of testing. They would need to either build that package from scratch themselves, or to install a different distro.
  - Arnavion 2y ago
    "Users ought to report bugs to their distro first" does not require any testing or compiling. Them reporting directly upstream is the one that would require diligence to prove it's not a distro bug, though that still doesn't nececssarily require compiling or checking other distros, just looking at code.
jeroenhd 2y ago
I've been avoiding bcachefs because the main author always seem to be stirring up some kind of internet drama. If they recommend users to stay away from Debian, I take that as a good reason to use Debian over other distros. I like Debian's stability and don't really need my filesystem to move fast and break things. If this is the direction bcachefs is going, I don't think it's ever going to be a good platform to run an OS on top of.
- rcxdude 2y ago
  As far as I can tell, bcachefs is in "move fast and fix things" phase, where the dev is iterating to bring the fs from experimental to actually usable, and I can imagine it's quite stressful if some segment of your existing users are being given a version with known serious bugs.

Hemospectrum 2y ago

> ...and the packager eventually dropped the package Related HN discussion from August/September: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41407768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41407768

woodruffw 2y ago

I'm one of those potential upstreams. It's all OSS and I understand the pain of path dependency, so I don't think it would be fair to go out of my way to make any downstream distribution maintainer's life harder than necessary. At the same time, I suspect this kind of policy will make my life harder than necessary: users who hit bugs due to distribution packaging quirks will be redirected to me for triage, and I'll have a very hard time understanding (much less fixing) quirks that are tied to transitive subdependencies that my own builds intentionally exclude.

kelnos 2y ago

> It is also something that will make upstream hate them This was my thought. Xubuntu decided to ship unstable development pre-releases of the core Xfce components in their last stable OS release, and I got really annoyed getting bug reports from users who were running a dev release that was 4 releases behind current, where things were fixed. This was completely unnecessary and wasted a bunch of my time.

Arnavion 2y ago

Users ought to report bugs to their distro first, and the distro package maintainer should then decide whether it's an upstream bug or a distro packaging bug. That would cut out all the noise that upstream hates. The problem is users have gotten savvy about talking to upstream directly. It helps that upstream is usually on easy-to-use and search-engine-indexed platforms like GitHub these days vs mailing lists. It would still be fine if the user did the diligence of checking whether the problem exists in upstream or just the distro package, but they often don't do that either.

int_19h 2y ago
It's a lot of effort for the user to do that kind of testing. They would need to either build that package from scratch themselves, or to install a different distro.
- Arnavion 2y ago
  "Users ought to report bugs to their distro first" does not require any testing or compiling. Them reporting directly upstream is the one that would require diligence to prove it's not a distro bug, though that still doesn't nececssarily require compiling or checking other distros, just looking at code.

jeroenhd 2y ago

I've been avoiding bcachefs because the main author always seem to be stirring up some kind of internet drama. If they recommend users to stay away from Debian, I take that as a good reason to use Debian over other distros. I like Debian's stability and don't really need my filesystem to move fast and break things. If this is the direction bcachefs is going, I don't think it's ever going to be a good platform to run an OS on top of.

rcxdude 2y ago
As far as I can tell, bcachefs is in "move fast and fix things" phase, where the dev is iterating to bring the fs from experimental to actually usable, and I can imagine it's quite stressful if some segment of your existing users are being given a version with known serious bugs.