6 ms·

distros get unbelievable amounts of hate for not immediately integrating upstream changes, there's really no winning

IshKebab 2y ago
Rightly so. The idea that all software should be packaged for all distros, and that you shouldn't want to use the latest version of software is clearly ludicrous. It only seems vaguely reasonable because it's what's always been done. If Linux had evolved a more sensible system and someone came along and suggested "no actually I think each distro should have its own package format and they should all be responsible for packaging all software in the world, and they should use old versions too for stability" they would rightly be laughed out of the room.
- bluGill 2y ago
  There are too many distributions / formats. However distribution package are much better than snap/flatpack/docker for most uses, the only hard part is there are so many that no program can put "and is integrated into the package manager" in their release steps. You can ship a docker container in your program release - it is often done but rarely what should be done.
  - oivey 2y ago
    For some cases maybe that makes sense, but in a very large percentage it does not. As example, what if I want to build and use/deploy a Python app that needs the latest NumPy, and the system package manager doesn’t have it. It would be hard to justify for me to figure out and build a distro specific package for this rather than just using the Python package on PyPI.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      The point is the distro should provide the numpy you need.
      - aseipp 2y ago
        And what happens when they can't do that because you need the latest major version with specific features?
- michaelt 2y ago
  > The idea that […] you shouldn't want to use the latest version of software is clearly ludicrous. To get to that world, we developers would have to give up making breaking changes. We can’t have any “your python 2 code doesn’t work on python 3” nonsense. Should we stop making breaking changes? Maybe. Will we? No.
  - dagw 2y ago
    We can’t have any “your python 2 code doesn’t work on python 3” nonsense This only happens because distros insit on shipping python and then everyone insisted on using that python to run their software. In an alternate world everybody would just ship their own python with their own app and not have that problem. That's how windows basically solves this
    - bluGill 2y ago
      Which sounds good until you run out of disk space. Of course I grew up when hard drives were not affordable by normal people - my parents had to save for months to get my a floppy drive.
  - charcircuit 2y ago
    You can have both python 2 and python 3 installed. Apps should get the dependencies they request. Distros swapping out dependencies out from under them has caused numerous issues for developers.
- marcusb 2y ago
  What is a distribution but a collection of software packaged in a particular way?
  - mtndew4brkfst 2y ago
    a miserable pile of software packages </sotn>
- microtonal 2y ago
  nixpkgs packages pretty much everything I need. It’s a very large package set and very fresh. It’s mostly about culture and tooling. I tried to contribute to Debian once and gave up after months. I was contributing to nixpkgs days after I started using Nix. Having every package as part of a distribution is immensely useful. You can declaratively define your whole system with all software. I can roll out a desktop, development VM or server within 5 minutes and it’s fully configured.
  - jorvi 2y ago
    The problem with NixOS (Nix?) is that it is currently embroiled in a culture war. Just to give an example, someone made an April's Fools joke about Elon Musk sponsoring NixOS and they got their post muted and (almost?) caught a suspension. There is currently a gazillion forks, some being forks of forks because they weren't considered culturally pure enough for the culturally purged fork. Hopefully Determinate Systems or Ekela can get some real maturity and corporate funding into the system and pull the whole thing out of the quagmire.
    - anonfordays 2y ago
      >Just to give an example, someone made an April's Fools joke about Elon Musk sponsoring NixOS and they got their post muted and (almost?) caught a suspension. This can't be real. Are you sure it was something innocuous and not something bigoted?
      - mtndew4brkfst 2y ago
        Real as you or me, though I disagree with almost everything else the quoted poster expressed other than that forks are happening and the dividing lines include cultural norms rather than strictly technical disagreements. https://discourse.nixos.org/t/breaking-doge-to-recommend-nix-widely/62490 https://discourse.nixos.org/t/breaking-doge-to-recommend-nix... Same author quoted the original text on their Reddit thread and was mostly uncriticized there: https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1joshae/breaking_doge_to_recommend_nix_widely/mkuw5xa/ https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1joshae/breaking_dog... I personally found it incredibly distasteful and also fairly representative of the quality of conversation you often get from some of the Nix community. I'm not offensive, you're just thin skinned, can't you take a joke, etc. is extremely common. You'll have to judge for yourself whether it's bigoted or dog whistle or neither. I'm a former casual community member with modest open source work in that ecosystem (projects and handful of nixpkgs PRs) before I left permanently last spring. I no longer endorse its use for any purpose and I seek to replace every piece of it that I was using. I still hear about the ways they continue to royally fuck up their governance and make negligible progress on detoxifying the culture. It took them until last fucking week to ban Anduril from making hiring posts on the same official forum.
jorvi 2y ago
They do not. Even the vast majority of Arch users thinks the policy of "integrate breakage anyway and post the warning on the web changelog" is pants-on-head insane, especially compared to something like SUSE Tumbleweed (also a rolling distro) where things get tested and will stay staged if broken.
- loeg 2y ago
  > They do not. I present to you sibling comment posted slightly before yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43655093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43655093 They do.
  - jorvi 2y ago
    No, they do not. No sane person would say "I would rather integrate a package with a breaking change without explicit build warning / deprecation".
    - loeg 2y ago
      You're the one who has added "breaking." The original claim was just that integrators get hate for not keeping up with upstreams, which is true. Many changes aren't breaking; and users don't know which ones are or aren't anyway.
      - jorvi 2y ago
        No, your claim was that integrators get hate for not immediately integrating upstream changes. Which is patently false, because users would rather have the packages tested for breaking changes and either patched or have a deprecation warning, rather than having the changes blindly integrated and having their legs pulled out from under them by a breaking change. No one is hating on distro packagers for taking a slight delay to verify and test things. I brought up Arch because they get a lot of hate for exactly doing that and consequently pulling people's legs out from under them.
        2y ago
zer00eyz 2y ago
Distros get real hate for being so out of date that upstream gets a stream of bug reports on old and solved issues. Prime example of this is what the Bottles dev team as done. It isnt an easy problem to solve.
6SixTy 2y ago
That's, in my experience, mostly Debian Stable.

Rightly so. The idea that all software should be packaged for all distros, and that you shouldn't want to use the latest version of software is clearly ludicrous. It only seems vaguely reasonable because it's what's always been done. If Linux had evolved a more sensible system and someone came along and suggested "no actually I think each distro should have its own package format and they should all be responsible for packaging all software in the world, and they should use old versions too for stability" they would rightly be laughed out of the room.

bluGill 2y ago
There are too many distributions / formats. However distribution package are much better than snap/flatpack/docker for most uses, the only hard part is there are so many that no program can put "and is integrated into the package manager" in their release steps. You can ship a docker container in your program release - it is often done but rarely what should be done.
- oivey 2y ago
  For some cases maybe that makes sense, but in a very large percentage it does not. As example, what if I want to build and use/deploy a Python app that needs the latest NumPy, and the system package manager doesn’t have it. It would be hard to justify for me to figure out and build a distro specific package for this rather than just using the Python package on PyPI.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    The point is the distro should provide the numpy you need.
    - aseipp 2y ago
      And what happens when they can't do that because you need the latest major version with specific features?
michaelt 2y ago
> The idea that […] you shouldn't want to use the latest version of software is clearly ludicrous. To get to that world, we developers would have to give up making breaking changes. We can’t have any “your python 2 code doesn’t work on python 3” nonsense. Should we stop making breaking changes? Maybe. Will we? No.
- dagw 2y ago
  We can’t have any “your python 2 code doesn’t work on python 3” nonsense This only happens because distros insit on shipping python and then everyone insisted on using that python to run their software. In an alternate world everybody would just ship their own python with their own app and not have that problem. That's how windows basically solves this
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Which sounds good until you run out of disk space. Of course I grew up when hard drives were not affordable by normal people - my parents had to save for months to get my a floppy drive.
- charcircuit 2y ago
  You can have both python 2 and python 3 installed. Apps should get the dependencies they request. Distros swapping out dependencies out from under them has caused numerous issues for developers.
marcusb 2y ago
What is a distribution but a collection of software packaged in a particular way?
- mtndew4brkfst 2y ago
  a miserable pile of software packages </sotn>
microtonal 2y ago
nixpkgs packages pretty much everything I need. It’s a very large package set and very fresh. It’s mostly about culture and tooling. I tried to contribute to Debian once and gave up after months. I was contributing to nixpkgs days after I started using Nix. Having every package as part of a distribution is immensely useful. You can declaratively define your whole system with all software. I can roll out a desktop, development VM or server within 5 minutes and it’s fully configured.
- jorvi 2y ago
  The problem with NixOS (Nix?) is that it is currently embroiled in a culture war. Just to give an example, someone made an April's Fools joke about Elon Musk sponsoring NixOS and they got their post muted and (almost?) caught a suspension. There is currently a gazillion forks, some being forks of forks because they weren't considered culturally pure enough for the culturally purged fork. Hopefully Determinate Systems or Ekela can get some real maturity and corporate funding into the system and pull the whole thing out of the quagmire.
  - anonfordays 2y ago
    >Just to give an example, someone made an April's Fools joke about Elon Musk sponsoring NixOS and they got their post muted and (almost?) caught a suspension. This can't be real. Are you sure it was something innocuous and not something bigoted?
    - mtndew4brkfst 2y ago
      Real as you or me, though I disagree with almost everything else the quoted poster expressed other than that forks are happening and the dividing lines include cultural norms rather than strictly technical disagreements. https://discourse.nixos.org/t/breaking-doge-to-recommend-nix-widely/62490 https://discourse.nixos.org/t/breaking-doge-to-recommend-nix... Same author quoted the original text on their Reddit thread and was mostly uncriticized there: https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1joshae/breaking_doge_to_recommend_nix_widely/mkuw5xa/ https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1joshae/breaking_dog... I personally found it incredibly distasteful and also fairly representative of the quality of conversation you often get from some of the Nix community. I'm not offensive, you're just thin skinned, can't you take a joke, etc. is extremely common. You'll have to judge for yourself whether it's bigoted or dog whistle or neither. I'm a former casual community member with modest open source work in that ecosystem (projects and handful of nixpkgs PRs) before I left permanently last spring. I no longer endorse its use for any purpose and I seek to replace every piece of it that I was using. I still hear about the ways they continue to royally fuck up their governance and make negligible progress on detoxifying the culture. It took them until last fucking week to ban Anduril from making hiring posts on the same official forum.

jorvi 2y ago

They do not. Even the vast majority of Arch users thinks the policy of "integrate breakage anyway and post the warning on the web changelog" is pants-on-head insane, especially compared to something like SUSE Tumbleweed (also a rolling distro) where things get tested and will stay staged if broken.

loeg 2y ago
> They do not. I present to you sibling comment posted slightly before yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43655093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43655093 They do.
- jorvi 2y ago
  No, they do not. No sane person would say "I would rather integrate a package with a breaking change without explicit build warning / deprecation".
  - loeg 2y ago
    You're the one who has added "breaking." The original claim was just that integrators get hate for not keeping up with upstreams, which is true. Many changes aren't breaking; and users don't know which ones are or aren't anyway.
    - jorvi 2y ago
      No, your claim was that integrators get hate for not immediately integrating upstream changes. Which is patently false, because users would rather have the packages tested for breaking changes and either patched or have a deprecation warning, rather than having the changes blindly integrated and having their legs pulled out from under them by a breaking change. No one is hating on distro packagers for taking a slight delay to verify and test things. I brought up Arch because they get a lot of hate for exactly doing that and consequently pulling people's legs out from under them.
      - 2y ago

zer00eyz 2y ago

Distros get real hate for being so out of date that upstream gets a stream of bug reports on old and solved issues. Prime example of this is what the Bottles dev team as done. It isnt an easy problem to solve.

6SixTy 2y ago

That's, in my experience, mostly Debian Stable.