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Losses at MandrivaLosses at MandrivaPosted Dec 2, 2008 18:00 UTC (Tue) by walters (subscriber, #7396)In reply to: Losses at Mandriva by MattPerry Parent article: Losses at Mandriva
Yeah, the duplication of effort is staggering. I see a few directions from which to attack the problem:
* Start replacing more of the user experience with PackageKit, gradually relegating apt/yum/etc to http and untar wrappers.
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Losses at Mandriva Posted Dec 3, 2008 10:14 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
That's the point of view of someone who never did any sustained packaging work and thinks packaging is just painting upstream tars in pretty distro colours.
Anyone who maintained a large set of packages during a significant length of time will tell you this is wishful thinking and most developer releases are nowhere near ready for direct user consumption.
Packaging is first and foremost taking care of all the little details developers don't get because they feel they are beneath them (legal audits, sane defaults, upgrade path, etc).
The core image thing is just the typical "it makes my head hurt, let's ignore it" developer response to managing modularity. It lead the Java world in an unmaintainable impasse for example (that's a core SUN guy writing it)
Losses at Mandriva Posted Dec 3, 2008 10:49 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
I often think if wouldn't it be better for us all if distributions' packagers stopped acting as developers.
The time in which the amount of available software was scarce is well behind us. So why not simply _dump_ those packages that are not properly finished up?
Maybe it would be a saner world if packagers were just adding pretty colors to upstream tarballs.
Losses at Mandriva Posted Dec 3, 2008 10:57 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
Because this is all interlinked stuff and killing one badly-behaved module will have cascading side-effects that will kill many other modules.
Packagers *hate* acting as developers. They just can not afford to wait for each individual developer to acknowledge his latest stupid change just made a quarter of the distro un-deployable.
Losses at Mandriva Posted Dec 3, 2008 14:19 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]
Do you think that it's a great idea to keep distributing the software made by people that is unable to acknowledge when something stupid has been done?
Wouldn't it be better to be more selective? Please packagers, think of yourselves.
Losses at Mandriva Posted Dec 3, 2008 14:26 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
I think you do nott realise there are almost no projects that do not goof sometimes and such a decision would only produce a nice embedded kernel-only distribution.
Losses at Mandriva Posted Dec 3, 2008 17:04 UTC (Wed) by walters (subscriber, #7396) [Link]
Actually, I spent a long time in Debian doing package work, and I maintain right now a nontrivial number of things in Fedora.
I also happen to be doing upstream work for several of these things. And I strongly believe that the right place for the things you mention (legal audits, defaults, upgrade path) - *should be handled upstream*.
If you want to help Free Software, go upstream and help out there. Don't duplicate work in little downstream boxes.
Losses at Mandriva Posted Dec 3, 2008 19:01 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
Actually, I don't mean to be disrespectful, and I don't want this to turn in a pissing match, but I hope you realise most packagers do not have the luxury of having a $dayjob at a big Linux company, with a backup team, packaging stuff they are paid to work on, and leveraging company IT resources for stuff they do in their spare time. Also none of your packages strike me as either having a high connectivity or being released by an entity not having the resources to push out clean QAed releases.
Which is in no way a criticism of your many qualities or work. You just seem to be in an extremely privileged situation for packaging, and rather unrepresentative of the many people that transformed a small RHL in a huge Fedora repository.
I work upstream-side too when possible. I say when, because this is not by any measure the general case, and your average packager do not have by any measure the resources or backup to change this situation. Or the luxury to just rewrite bits when an upstream is not helpful.
What you're asking for is the BSD model of highly controlled well-behaved core code. I happen to believe one reason for Linux' success is it made a big place for less-than-perfect joyous anarchy, and this was made possible by the packaging layer you complain of here.
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