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Was there ever a mirror of this dustup in the Linux distro community? I'm unaware of one ever happening, and I'm wondering whether it's because of mere fortune

Was there ever a mirror of this dustup in the Linux distro community? I'm unaware of one ever happening, and I'm wondering whether it's because of mere fortune or because there's something about the APT / dpkg model that precludes this kind of messiness. Perhaps the Ruby community is suffering the curse of having lived with reliable Internet for so long they never had to solve the problem of building up automatic package mirrors? This just feels like a lot of words and energy burned on a problem that ought to be as simple as "Here's the package, here's its checksum, go to town."

busterarm 1y ago
Ideologically-rooted dustups are popping off all across open source right now, it seems. Forks-included. I've even seen unironic claims of certain pieces of technology containing "Hitler particles". That shook me a bit because that's an old in-joke and was always intended to be a joke...
- shadowgovt 1y ago
  Who is the in-group for that in-joke?
  - busterarm 1y ago
    Leftists. It's a Trotsky quote.
shevy-java 1y ago
There was - see old systemd discussions. For instance, how devuan was started. It is not 1:1 comparable though. Ruby, python etc... have a much more varied community. People contribute code. Only few contribute to the linux kernel directly. There are many more who write "apps", so this could be comparable. Still it feels different to me, since a language community is different to a community that uses different programming languages. > Perhaps the Ruby community is suffering the curse of having lived with reliable Internet for so long they never had to solve the problem of building up automatic package mirrors? No, I think it is more that people never anticipated that corporations could take over projects. This has become more of a problem in the last years. Who controls github, for instance? > This just feels like a lot of words and energy burned on a problem that ought to be as simple as "Here's the package, here's its checksum, go to town." This is the issue of decentralized hosting versus top-down control. Ruby didn't have that problem in the past. It became more of an issue in the last some years. See DHH having an old tweet where he pointed out that he wants more control; I think this was from 2018. I don't remember it fully but it is on the ruby reddit.
zahlman 1y ago
The fact that you speak of "the Linux distro community" but also "the APT / dpkg model" is already telling. Most distros — i.e., everything not derived from Debian — don't even use the same package format. A lot of the problem has been mitigated simply by letting people choose among competitive suites of alternatives. That said, there's been quite a bit of drama lately in prominent Linux projects — notably bcachefs, X11 (and the fork XLibre), and the Omarchy distribution (even connected to the current story!).

busterarm 1y ago

Ideologically-rooted dustups are popping off all across open source right now, it seems. Forks-included. I've even seen unironic claims of certain pieces of technology containing "Hitler particles". That shook me a bit because that's an old in-joke and was always intended to be a joke...

shadowgovt 1y ago
Who is the in-group for that in-joke?
- busterarm 1y ago
  Leftists. It's a Trotsky quote.

shevy-java 1y ago

There was - see old systemd discussions. For instance, how devuan was started. It is not 1:1 comparable though. Ruby, python etc... have a much more varied community. People contribute code. Only few contribute to the linux kernel directly. There are many more who write "apps", so this could be comparable. Still it feels different to me, since a language community is different to a community that uses different programming languages. > Perhaps the Ruby community is suffering the curse of having lived with reliable Internet for so long they never had to solve the problem of building up automatic package mirrors? No, I think it is more that people never anticipated that corporations could take over projects. This has become more of a problem in the last years. Who controls github, for instance? > This just feels like a lot of words and energy burned on a problem that ought to be as simple as "Here's the package, here's its checksum, go to town." This is the issue of decentralized hosting versus top-down control. Ruby didn't have that problem in the past. It became more of an issue in the last some years. See DHH having an old tweet where he pointed out that he wants more control; I think this was from 2018. I don't remember it fully but it is on the ruby reddit.

zahlman 1y ago

The fact that you speak of "the Linux distro community" but also "the APT / dpkg model" is already telling. Most distros — i.e., everything not derived from Debian — don't even use the same package format. A lot of the problem has been mitigated simply by letting people choose among competitive suites of alternatives. That said, there's been quite a bit of drama lately in prominent Linux projects — notably bcachefs, X11 (and the fork XLibre), and the Omarchy distribution (even connected to the current story!).