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Swimming against the tide.Swimming against the tide.Posted Aug 7, 2008 7:39 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227)In reply to: Swimming against the tide. by drag Parent article: Freespire moves back to Debian
That's not different of what Debian themselves do with the software they package. The packagers pick some version of a program, add and move stuff around so it matches the distro's policies and put custom fixes on top when problems are found. More often than not, Debian's fixes are not pushed back to the original code, that has probably moved on. That's life. Building a derivative only saves you so much work. AFAIK, only Slackware is free from this, because they the software as is.
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Swimming against the tide. Posted Aug 7, 2008 12:45 UTC (Thu) by pjdc (subscriber, #6906) [Link] More often than not, Debian's fixes are not pushed back to the original code, that has probably moved on.Are you sure about this? Debian developers are encouraged to feed changes upstream, and thanks to apt-listchanges I get to see plenty of remarks in changelogs about Debian patches actually being merged upstream. Of course, plenty of others are dropped due to upstream fixes and changes rendering them obsolete.
Swimming against the tide. Posted Aug 7, 2008 16:14 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Well I wasn't trying to make out that Debian is godlike and they do no wrong. I am sure that they are as guilty at it as anybody. And the Slackware attitude to dependency tracking with software packages is pretty much correct. It's a nice feature, but it's not the best way to solve many of the problems faced with Linux software distribution. > That's life. Building a derivative only saves you so much work. The ideal situation is the upstream developers package the software themselves and then distributions collect them, test them, and then provide them to their end users. That should be the ultimate goal for software distribution.. people package their own software and it 'just works' on all distributions. All the distributions that get released around the same time all use the same software. Similar versions of OpenSSL, Xorg, Linux, GCC, etc etc. Having a dozen different people tweak all these applications in dozen different ways is kinda silly seeing how little it actually benefits end users. I mean, as a end user.. Is the GCC provided by Suse is going to be different enough and provide compelling improvements compared to the version shipping with CentOS, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, etc etc? Is it possible justify the amount of duplicate work that all these people put into building and packaging their own very-slightly-different versions when there is so much other important work that these guys could get done by working together? And if Suse did indeed have some dramatic improvement to their GCC version.. wouldn't it be nice if Debian users could just copy it off of Suse's FTP server or installation cdroms and use it? No worries? That the GCC developers could just suck down the patches and use them without worrying how it may break something in Debian? I like the idea of high quality binary distribution of open source software. But maybe there are other ways.. rpm2git seem interesting. Maybe it can be extended to support debs... I don't know. It could be a useful way to start smoothing out the trivial differences (that pop up as stumbling blocks for users) between distributions and lead to higher amounts of software compatibility.
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