Debian Package Maintainer Steps Down, Complaining About 'Old Infrastructure' (stapelberg.ch) 176
Michael Stapelberg, maintains "a bunch" of Debian packages and services, and says the free software Linux distro "has been in my life for well over 10 years at this point."
Today he released a 2,255-word essay explaining why he's "winding down" his involvement in Debian to a minimum, citing numerous complaints including Debian's complicated build stack, waits of up to seven hours before package uploads can be installed, leading to "asynchronous" feedback -- and Debian's lack of tooling for large changes.
The closest to "sending out a change for review" is to open a bug report with an attached patch... Culturally, reviews and reactions are slow. There are no deadlines. I literally sometimes get emails notifying me that a patch I sent out a few years ago (!!) is now merged. This turns projects from a small number of weeks into many years, which is a huge demotivator for me.
Interestingly enough, you can see artifacts of the slow online activity manifest itself in the offline culture as well: I don't want to be discussing systemd's merits 10 years after I first heard about it.
Lastly, changes can easily be slowed down significantly by holdouts who refuse to collaborate. My canonical example for this is rsync, whose maintainer refused my patches to make the package use debhelper purely out of personal preference. Granting so much personal freedom to individual maintainers prevents us as a project from raising the abstraction level for building Debian packages, which in turn makes tooling harder.
There's also several complaints about old infrastructure -- for example, "I dread interacting with the Debian bug tracker. debbugs is a piece of software (from 1994) which is only used by Debian and the GNU project these days." Stapelberg also complains that the "painful" experience of developing using Debian "leaves a lot to be desired," and adds that "It baffles me that in 2019, we still don't have a conveniently browsable threaded archive of mailing list discussions."
"My frustration level ultimately exceeded the threshold," Stapelberg writes in the essay, adding "I hope this post inspires someone, ideally a group of people, to improve the developer experience within Debian." He'll soon transition packages to be team-maintained "where it makes sense," but also "orphan packages where I am the sole maintainer... For all intents and purposes, please treat me as permanently on vacation..."
"I will try to keep up best-effort maintenance of the manpages.debian.org service and the codesearch.debian.net service, but any help would be much appreciated."
Today he released a 2,255-word essay explaining why he's "winding down" his involvement in Debian to a minimum, citing numerous complaints including Debian's complicated build stack, waits of up to seven hours before package uploads can be installed, leading to "asynchronous" feedback -- and Debian's lack of tooling for large changes.
The closest to "sending out a change for review" is to open a bug report with an attached patch... Culturally, reviews and reactions are slow. There are no deadlines. I literally sometimes get emails notifying me that a patch I sent out a few years ago (!!) is now merged. This turns projects from a small number of weeks into many years, which is a huge demotivator for me.
Interestingly enough, you can see artifacts of the slow online activity manifest itself in the offline culture as well: I don't want to be discussing systemd's merits 10 years after I first heard about it.
Lastly, changes can easily be slowed down significantly by holdouts who refuse to collaborate. My canonical example for this is rsync, whose maintainer refused my patches to make the package use debhelper purely out of personal preference. Granting so much personal freedom to individual maintainers prevents us as a project from raising the abstraction level for building Debian packages, which in turn makes tooling harder.
There's also several complaints about old infrastructure -- for example, "I dread interacting with the Debian bug tracker. debbugs is a piece of software (from 1994) which is only used by Debian and the GNU project these days." Stapelberg also complains that the "painful" experience of developing using Debian "leaves a lot to be desired," and adds that "It baffles me that in 2019, we still don't have a conveniently browsable threaded archive of mailing list discussions."
"My frustration level ultimately exceeded the threshold," Stapelberg writes in the essay, adding "I hope this post inspires someone, ideally a group of people, to improve the developer experience within Debian." He'll soon transition packages to be team-maintained "where it makes sense," but also "orphan packages where I am the sole maintainer... For all intents and purposes, please treat me as permanently on vacation..."
"I will try to keep up best-effort maintenance of the manpages.debian.org service and the codesearch.debian.net service, but any help would be much appreciated."
Re: Maybe he should be paid (Score:5, Funny)
Only way I'd come help would be a guarantee we were getting rid of systemd.
Re: Maybe he should be paid (Score:2)
The thing about projects like Devuan is they are almost wholly reliant on the base project. Devuan dies without Debian.
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Currently, if the Debian project somehow fell apart, you'd be right.
Down the road, if people keep migrating to Devuan, it will simply become what Debian was, without systemd.
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The thing about projects like Devuan is they are almost wholly reliant on the base project. Devuan dies without Debian.
So what you're saying is they need all the help they can get.
Re: Maybe he should be paid (Score:2)
Then there's the people who stopped a long time ago and didn't bother announcing it to random people on the World Wide Webz
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Sort of - if posting to Facebook actually contributed something of value to the world.
email client (Score:2)
"It baffles me that in 2019, we still don't have a conveniently browsable threaded archive of mailing list discussions."
Aren't there a lot of clients that can do this? Wouldn't it be rather trivial (less than a week's worth of time) to implement a website using Majordomo or GNU Mailman or even write your own from scratch?
Re: email client (Score:1)
Sure, go do it. For free.
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He's a millennial. He probably uses Gmail, which uses subject header (and timestamp) to thread, ignoring References and In-Reply-To.
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I think that was the point. He used to use gmane which does give a threaded interface, but gmane is not maintained reliably as it once was.
So, it's a question of someone finding the will to do it, I guess.
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He used to use gmane which does give a threaded interface, but gmane is not maintained reliably as it once was.
That's like saying Atlantis is not maintained reliably as it once was. Visited gmane.org recently?
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The people who unceremoniously close PRs and bug reports as "won't fix" or "stale" are the whiny kids.
Package Tools are the worse (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that fixing tool affects lots and lots of other people. Change the tools, and you break lots of other projects that many not thank you for it, even if it's for long term good. Or, alternatively, some of them use your new versions of tools and some of them do not. Then you have fragmentation.
It's not only debian which has these problems of course. Old mature projects are slow, slow, slow to change.
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Re:Package Tools are the worse (Score:5, Interesting)
But, the flip side is, some of this stuff is so arcane.
I can't speak as an even vaguely "good" developer, because I'm not. But what little tinkering I've done with various Debian packages, it's been sodding hard work. Typically, something I'm doing isn't quite what I should be doing... e.g. I've downloaded the source packages and tried recompiling, except I'm doing it under Raspbian and some of their packages aren't quite in sync (e.g. debhelper is slightly older).
So then, because things are not working as per the instructions I'm looking at on how to build Debian packages, I'm faced with _trying_ to grok what is being done.
Now, this is in large part because I'm not an experienced *nix user or C programmer. So for example, whilst I broadly know what make does and what a makefile is (the person who decided that using a space or a tab in the wrong place would break things really should suffer in the next life however), the syntax is pretty hateful and I don't want to have to try to understand the whole thing. Plus, this is Debian, so it's probably generated by some other tool and to try to read and understand it will take me a huge amount of time alone.
Plus there's absolutely loads of other bits of tooling all glued together somehow. Any time I've looked at it, it's just a bunch of rabbit holes I go down, leading to another, and then to another, before eventually I have to call it quits because I can't invest the time, for what is typically some minor issue that I might hope to be able to fix.
I know the above is a bit unfocused and ranty... and I would understand if people wrote it off as being down to my lack of understanding. My concern is that if newbies want to jump in and contribute, the barrier to entry is very very steep, and as a result, it's likely people won't bother.
A few months ago I encountered a problem with file / libmagic (or something) where a file beginning with "80" would report as being mime-type "application/zlib"... in my case, I had a text file that happened to start with "80" and should've been reported as "text/plain".
Turns out this only happened in Debian Jessie and not Stretch. And reporting involved using the Debian reporting tool... and I dunno, it just all looked too much like hard work. And I knew I'd be updating to Stretch soon anyway and I could work around the immediate problem so... I didn't bother.
Anyway... thank you (anyone) for listening!
Re: Package Tools are the worse (Score:1)
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You just described something not unique to Debian, but related to any complex technology in any field. If you read a study about genetic research and want to know more about it and start pursuing things, you will find a lot of 'rabbit holes' related to many no doubt extremely complex topics that all related in one way or another to the subject matter.
If you start working with a modern web framework technology and haven't studied computer science formally and especially a lot of newer developments, you will
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I can't imagine what it is you think the standard computer science curriculum has to do with understanding arbitrary, evolved lash-ups of tools.
I think pretty much what you need is experience with a few real world messes, so that you won't sweat the fact that nothing seems to make much sense.
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People used to joke about DLL Hell on Windows, but traditional Linux packages are pretty brittle too. That's one of the reasons why newer systems bundle everything in a self-sufficient container.
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The main reason is the js kids got burned by less.js and they've concluded that the dependencies on anything is dangerous and you can't trust anything but massive libraries shipped by the FANG.
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On the subject of backwards compatibility-- which I'm generally a big fan of-- the Makefile syntax was quickly understood to be a mistake, but the author had about 10 people using it already, and didn't want to annoy them by changing it.
I've seen people working on Makefiles who very carefully cut and paste the beginning of the previous line before entering a new one-- the
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True, and contrary to quite a few other posts here, there is a lot of activity and updating/modernization going on. For example: Debian Continuous Integration [debian.net] which is only a few years old.
I think the disgruntled maintainer should consider running for the Debian Project Leader [debian.org] position which is open right now and advocate for changes he wants.
Petty fiefdoms are always going to be a problem (Score:5, Interesting)
I read the article, and he did touch on the endemic issue I've run into of "that patch didn't come from us, so it's rejected (or ignored)".
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I can assure you that it is not just Debian that takes this approach. This story is getting a bit old, and perhaps things have changed, but I submitted a patch to kernel.org for a deadlock in the kernel with USB HID devices back in 2.10 and this simple (one line patch to remove a sleep with a spinlock) never got accepted. Even after I submitted it for 7 kernel versions in a row. Finally someone on the kernel team submitted the exact same patch and it instantly got accepted into the project. And guess ho
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Do you have a link to your patch?
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I've found that delays or rejections are often due to the maintainer not being able to properly test the patch. Often I'm fixing quite specific bugs or adding support for some unusual use case I have, and the maintainer just doesn't have the resources to test it.
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Screw NIH syndrome.
You're not wrong (Score:2, Insightful)
The truth is that revolution is always multi-generational.
The initial generation of youthful dissidents really don't know what they're doing, but they talk a lot, and bitch and moan about the way things should be.
Then, another generation comes along which takes a stab at actually doing something, and they fuck up horribly. They create religious cults with codes of conduct, and evangelize new ways of writing their ideas, and behave in impractical ways that makes everyone roll their eyes and think "Nothing wi
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The youth just close bug reports and PRs unilaterally. Not a solution.
Full of shit (Score:2)
There are thousands of packages that do not require changes other than fixes when bugs are found. Your software does the job it was designed to do without issue. STOP. Your work is done. You have reached the pinnacle. Everywhere else you go will be down hill.
Dependencies and obscure libraries are such a problem now they had to be made into containers because no one else can even begin to compile your shitty code.
If you have problems with these old fogies then start your own branch and quit your bitching.
That's the problem. (Score:4, Insightful)
When bugs are found, they do not get fixed. When you point out that a simple patch hasn't been applied in 8 months, then you get nothing but indignant whining about the nature of volunteer efforts and other older-person, boomer excuses; meanwhile another 8 months go by, at which point you decide it's not worth poking again.
So, you're right. That's exactly what's going to happen. All of these "working" packages are going to be re-written in Rust by pink-haired trannies, and thus the wheel will have been re-invented for the ten-thousandth time.
If there's one thing humans know how to do well, it's waste resources.
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That's a terrible statement to make. Not only is your prediction flat out wrong, it grossly misrepresents that already stigmatized social group.
Their hair will be green.
the culture of containers (Score:5, Informative)
> rsync, whose maintainer refused my patches to make the package use debhelper purely out of personal preference
I see this ridiculous attitude in docker, docker-compose, lxd, et al upstream maintainers as well.
They're in the container space because they don't understand packaging (or sane library/API design) so they got crushed by dependency hell. Their response? Run every single app in its own VM with its own copy of every single library under the sun. 500MB applications! YAY!
They refuse to take any packaging related patches.
Debian devs will drop one by one due to these people.
Re:the culture of containers (Score:5, Interesting)
Snap doesn't fucking work if your home directory is in a non standard location. Say /home/blah.corp/mylogin. I couldn't even get gnome calculator to run because of snap. Oh and the program itself is nearly two megabytes in size. Xcalc does the exact same functions and its not even 40 kilobytes!
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Don't even get me started on snap. What a steaming pile of shit.
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Oh hey look, another unfixed debian bug.
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bi... [debian.org]
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Xcalc does the exact same functions and its not even 40 kilobytes!
My 4TB of disk space and 32GB of ram thanks you for your efficiency.
Seriously though just because it isn't suitable for use in a lite distro on challenged hardware doesn't mean it doesn't have a purpose. Your example uses a nice standard Xcalc, but pick something which has a lot of dependencies and quick development cycle with constantly added features and you're in for a world of hurt if you happen to want to run the latest version without the distro maintainer's "approval".
Slashdot: Where we are happy wai
Re: (Score:2)
> Lennart Poettering is that you? Because considering it's quite common in larger installations to hash those directions, that is HILLARIOUS. We have for example done upto three letters: /home/f/foo /home/b/bar /home/ba/baz /home/kap/kappa
>
>
>
> etc. Some of us do actually use *IX on multi user systems.
The purple haired pinheads in charge have no idea what you are on about. They're 100% clueless.
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It isn't a ridiculous attitude, it is basic Law of Identity: I am not you, and you are not me. The upstream software exists for whatever the purposes and preferences of its developers are; the distribution that includes that software is merely a user. Their preferences may or may not be part of the development process, according to the prerogatives of the upstream developer.
If a volunteer maintainer at a distro feels entitled to dictate changes, maybe they've been volunteering too long and should move on to
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As I said "Debian devs will drop one by one due to these people."
Debian will die because of that idiotic attitude, and all that will be left is containers. Wonderful.
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500MB applications! YAY!
And? Not all 500MB is loaded at once, so they don't take massive amounts of RAM, and HDD is cheap. Docker and snap may not be suitable for lite distributions, but having seen Linux systems where aptitude gets so fucking out of control that a format was in order due to the addition of non standard repositories because someone dares not to want to wait for the blessing of a maintainer to run the latest version of some software, I see the point.
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>so they don't take massive amounts of RAM
The whole purpose of shared libraries is that multiple applications can mmap the same .text area.
The reason you don't see large memory usage is only because applications take proportionally orders of magnitude more bss/heap/stack compared with .text than they used to.
To that extent, fine. Let's ditch shared libraries. But you could do the same by just statically linking all of your binaries.
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> non standard repositories
Meaning non-free. Wonderful how far Debian has regressed.
dude got busy? (Score:5, Insightful)
> When I joined Debian, I was still studying, i.e. I had luxurious
> amounts of spare time. Now, over 5 years of full time work later, my
> day job taught me a lot, both about what works in large software
> engineering projects and how I personally like my computer systems. I
> am very conscious of how I spend the little spare time that I have
> these days
Yes he has many good, useful and interesting points. The fact that his life has changed and can no longer dedicate the same amount of time, effort and energy as he could when he was a student with fewer responsibilities is the key non-sensationalist takeaway imo.
> Culturally, reviews and reactions are slow. There are no deadlines. I
> literally sometimes get emails notifying me that a patch I sent out a
> few years ago (!!) is now merged. This turns projects from a small
> number of weeks into many years, which is a huge demotivator for me.
Hardly a new problem. People have been complaining about this for a very long time. Part of what spawned Ubuntu. These really large, old projects with huge user install bases tend to be very resistant to change for good reason.
He has some valid points but also much of what he expresses is personal preference. Things that bug him others really prefer. Who can say which is right / how things should change? *shrug*
Re: Dude got busy IS the problem (Score:2)
It's all open source. There's no good reason to continue supporting the software with development and patches. Anyone can fork it.
What you're really saying is any upstart junior programmer with a patch should be able to receive the benefit of putting their code in a project whose name has decades of caché, rather than forking the project and needing to spend the next two decades doing marketing and getting their fork to take over.
Grow up.
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It's all open source. There's no good reason to continue supporting the software with development and patches. Anyone can fork it.
Forking doesn't solve the problem, which is that the place the users go to get the software is antiquated and baroque. If you fork it, now the users have to go somewhere else (or to two places) and you'll wind up only serving a subset of the users. The best solution for the users is for the centralized repository to be efficiently maintained.
What you're really saying is any upstart junior programmer with a patch should be able to receive the benefit of putting their code in a project whose name has decades of cachÃf©, rather than forking the project and needing to spend the next two decades doing marketing and getting their fork to take over.
You're focused on the benefits to the maintainers, but the real issue is the benefits to the users. The project exists to serve the users, not the maintainers. If they
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You define best by your own prerogatives- if users want centralization they should not be running Linux. Full stop. The very idea is antithetical to FOSS.
The idea of "FOSS" is that you get software for free. The idea of Free Software is that the user gets software under a license that permits them to make and use modifications. The idea of Open Source is interoperability through source code access. None of these preclude centralization. In fact, software adoption depends on trust. Trust depends on either a web of trust system, or centralization. That's why Linux From Scratch is a niche concept, and virtually all Linux users run a distribution from one of the
Re: Dude got busy IS the problem (Score:2)
The idea of FOSS is you build on someone else's work. If you don't like the work they did, don't use it. If you are not qualified to build on their work, hire someone to do it. If you just wanna leach free software, then you're stuck with whatever the devs wanna give you.
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"He has some valid points but also much of what he expresses is personal preference. Things that bug him others really prefer. Who can say which is right / how things should change? *shrug*"
More or less my impression.
* On one hand, quite a lot of good ideas that come from his obvious knowledge of the innards of the project.
* Then, he seems to be good at what he does, he's ten years older (and more expert) and has his ideas, so there's also quite a bit of what he finds others to be guilty of (my way or the h
Re: (Score:2)
> Culturally, reviews and reactions are slow. There are no deadlines. I
> literally sometimes get emails notifying me that a patch I sent out a
> few years ago (!!) is now merged. This turns projects from a small
> number of weeks into many years, which is a huge demotivator for me.
Hardly a new problem. People have been complaining about this for a very long time. Part of what spawned Ubuntu. These really large, old projects with huge user install bases tend to be very resistant to change for good reason.
He has some valid points but also much of what he expresses is personal preference. Things that bug him others really prefer. Who can say which is right / how things should change? *shrug*
Hmm, well, my experience is that often enough, it isn't so much that people _prefer_ a particular way, they just can't see how to change it. That doesn't mean that any old change which comes along is acceptable - maybe there are 20 people pulling in different incompatible directions.
I think the more likely problem is that 10 years in, you're no longer working on clear greenfield problems that are easy to move on. A higher proportion of the project's problems are hard problems, you have experience so you'r
so long... (Score:4, Insightful)
You were a fruitful Debian Maintainer for a decade long so, with the best of my wishes, Michael...
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Professional software isn't immune to this. I've had many many bugs I file and features I request at work languish for an inordinately long time because "we're in the middle of a release push" or "the other project is behind schedule so all resources are behind that" or even organizational infighting.
Re: Debian fuckin sucks (Score:2)
You prefer it when some professional support rep lies to you about future releases just to keep you strung on as a customer? Cause THAT's what professional software looks like.
I'll take passionate hobbyist over professional software house any day with most types of software.
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This is because many upstream developers don't think it is their responsibility to help package maintainers.
It may not be their responsibility, but it is certainly in their interest to at least provide a few different packaging options *built into* the upstream sources, .deb and .rpm being the most common.
But they've all thrown up their hands and said "it's not my problem", leaving us with the cancer that is snap and docker, then complain that Debian is trash.
Guess what, docker, lxd, and snapd won't even ru
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> Many times the package maintainer will actually submit something but when they get the WTF that isn't how we want our software handled from the devs they disappear and never some back.
I've seen this happen as well.
if that (Score:2)
An institution is its people (Score:2, Insightful)
I know it hurts man, but you've uncovered an important lesson for others: Go where you're appreciated; don't work for people who can't see your value.
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I've submitted probably close to a hundred debian bug reports over the years. These are project that don't have an upstream or the bug is debian specific. Most of them include patches to fix the issue. I don't think any have been looked at.
Got links?
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If the debian bug system wasn't so outdated, you could search by submitter.
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You can search by submitter. For example:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bi... [debian.org]
The op set up his slashdot profile to hide his email address though.
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What do you know.
I've got a long list of unfixed bugs as well.
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bi... [debian.org]
FreeBSD (Score:5, Insightful)
As a Debian to FreeBSD convert myself, it sounds like pretty much everything they're looking for is already solved in the FreeBSD ecosystem. It has been absolutely night and day as a user, administrator, and contributor working with FreeBSD compared to any Linux distro. It is so nice having one single ecosystem for the kernel, base OS, and 3rd party software, instead of each being handled by different communities with different objectives overall. if a breaking change needs to occur in the FreeBSD world, the entire kernel/OS/software stack is updated in unison with a new major version release.
The Borg is indeed effective (Score:1)
They're just not very creative.
Evolution by variation and selection (even if that variation is mindless) out-competes would-be Intelligent Design every time.
In fact, there is no such thing as Intelligent Design; there are just 2 kinds of design: That which works explicitly with variation and selection and that which tries to thwart it. FreeBSD is nice to work with because it doesn't do anything interesting; it's a well-polished turd.
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Been using it since 3.4 and still through 12. It has its uses.
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Security nightmare. OpenBSD, ok, but freebsd? hell no.
Hardware support nightmare. OpenBSD doesn't support enough hardware to be useful to Joe Average. It's fine if you're building systems specifically for it, but beyond annoying if you're trying to run it on hardware that you have lying around. This is why Linux is still king, even netbsd couldn't keep up with it in hardware support. Gentoo is a good effort to use a BSD-style repository model with Linux, but not good enough. Last time I tried to install it, the install failed due to dependencies.
To my mind, th
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Portage has always seemed slapdash by comparison.
So, Gentoo?
...
When I try actually using the USE flags, things go south rapidly. Even when I don't, the build is often problematic. No thanks.
Nobody wants to lead Debian (Score:2, Interesting)
Recently the period for nominations to fill the Debian Project Leader position expired and not a single Debian developer has stepped forward to nominate themselves to take the reigns of the project. According to Debian constitution, the period for nominations will be extended one week until a developer finally throws their hat into the ring though it may not occur before the current DPL's term is up.
Reviews are the highest priority items on queue (Score:4, Interesting)
One thing I love about my current job is that everyone takes this rule almost 100% seriously. You are almost forbidden to do anything while you have a review pending on you.
The reasons are fairly obvious -- reviews are a blocking operation. Sure, the developer can go work on something else, but if he's got a chain of dependencies to work through, things get hairy if he gets too far ahead of the reviewers.
Other benefits are more subtle. First, it encourages everyone to carefully pre-review, because they know that sending it up will interrupt everyone and they don't want to do so trivially. The second major benefit is that the longer things are pending, the greater the chances of merge conflicts, and even with the best of tools, 3-way merging is the enemy.
Of course, we aren't robots. And a huge change may take a week to read. But it's a good general default rule that you shouldn't be writing code or investigating bug reports if you've got a patch waiting on you.
"...To scratch my itch, not yours" (Score:2)
Is what we so often hear in OSS, often followed closely by "and if you don't like it do yourself"
Now what were hearing, in this instance, is what he wanted didn't scratch someone else's itch and he doesn't like that answer.
Gee, I wonder why?
Never ask for justice. Karma will tend to apply it you just to see if that's what you really want.
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often followed closely by "and if you don't like it do yourself"
Which is a damn stupid attitude. Not everyone who uses software is qualified to write code for it. Even a skilled coder might not have the chops for a particular type of software. Take encryption, for example. That's a highly specialized field requiring a highly specialized skill-set.
Re: "...To scratch my itch, not yours" (Score:2)
It seems to work for Microsoft and Apple.
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Wiki infrastructure (Score:1)
I am wondering since a long time, why the Arch wiki does contain so much more (high-quality) content than the Debian wiki, although the developer and user base of Debian should be much higher.
One reason also here could be infrastructure. The Arch wiki
-> https://wiki.archlinux.org/ [archlinux.org]
is a mediawiki instance, which looks much more attractive than Debian's wiki
-> https://wiki.debian.org/ [debian.org]
which is a moinmoin wiki instance. I can understand that the motivation of users and developers is higher if they can crea
Devuan (Score:2)
Might be worth a shot. Most people using it seem to be fairly happy with it.
I am using Calculate Linux, based on Gentoo, now. But Devuan is looking good. I used to love Debian, before the systemd crap.
Any attempt to discuss the shortcomings? (Score:2)
Re: systemd merits? Name 10. (Score:2)
To claim it has no merits is ignorant. Setting up daemons on Linux is traditionally so difficult that many programming languages started just providing their own rather than try to get developers to understand initd well enough to write properly secured and managed daemons.
I can't tell you how many times I've seen Amazon Linux go down because no one sets up log rotation properly in the standard system packages. With initd, this is a bespoke per package hunt for how the logs get handled. With systemd, it's t
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Re: (Score:2)
Setting up daemons on Linux is traditionally so difficult that many programming languages started just providing their own rather than try to get developers to understand initd well enough to write properly secured and managed daemons.
Wait, what? This is nonsense. First, there is no initd, it's init. Maybe you got it confused with inetd, which is used for short-running daemons. Managing those has always been easy. And because of the Unix philosophy of (among other things) using small, simple components that do one job and do it well, and more importantly are standards-based, it's easy to swap inetd out for a more secure inetd (typically xinetd.)
I can't tell you how many times I've seen Amazon Linux go down because no one sets up log rotation properly in the standard system packages. With initd, this is a bespoke per package hunt for how the logs get handled. With systemd, it's trivial and consistent.
The whole point of using a distribution is that this only has to get figured out once, by whoe
Re: systemd merits? Name 10. (Score:2)
My point was not that systemd fixes the log problem. My point is that on a systemd system, it is trivial to audit and manage all your logging in a way that is consistent and simple. The fact that they integrated something like logging rather than just wrangling STDOUT/STDERR means that one doesn't have to hunt the init script to discover how logging is handled, where it goes, how to configure log rotation, etc.
Configuring logging sounds simple. It should be. But the traditional way of doing it simply does n
Re: systemd merits? Name 10. (Score:2)
Well, if you count install base as success, I'd say systemd has been pretty successful already. It certainly has its issues, but it's largely the expected issues you see with any new system, especially once that system has been foisted onto large numbers of unprepared admins.
Re: systemd merits? Name 10. (Score:2)
The important people chose it. Like the engineers at RedHat and those working on Debian.
Re: Has laid what low? (Score:2)
Well, the traditional form is "has been laid low".