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Posted Nov 28, 2012 16:24 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
In reply to: Some changes needed... by Wol
Parent article: Langasek: Upstart in Debian

I'm not sure how demanding quality and working on building a robust infrastructure is supposed to be a bad trait ... I think if more developers were less tolerant of misbehaving infrastructure that the Linux software stack would be even better than it is now.


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Posted Nov 28, 2012 16:57 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

>I'm not sure how demanding quality and working on building a robust infrastructure is supposed to be a bad trait ... I think if more developers were less tolerant of misbehaving infrastructure that the Linux software stack would be even better than it is now.

We tried that. It was called HURD. As you know, it's been a roaring success and now powers 87% of desktops around the world.

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Posted Nov 28, 2012 17:07 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

I've actually tried HURD when it became available in Debian (I think it was about 5 years ago). It was a crappy PITA - nothing worked, daemons crashed, system was locking up all the time.

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Posted Nov 28, 2012 17:50 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

And that's what actually happens in reality when you focus on theoretical elegance like being intolerant of misbehaving infrastructure, rather than focussing on making things that work in this world.

It's why 32-bit applications can't play sound out of the box on Debian wheezy (at least as of a couple of weeks ago), because both PulseAudio and Debian's multiarch implementation care more about 'technical excellence' than working software.

(I know, I should have filed a bug for my specific problem, or at least found out if there was one already, but I'd just spent ages trying to figure out why 32-bit applications can't use OpenGL on NVidia hardware only to discover that the bug was filed, the reason understood, a fix posted, and the maintainer intentionally didn't apply it because "if there's two things in the world I don't care about it's wine and the nvidia driver". I had no desire to head right back down that particular rabbit hole.)

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Posted Nov 28, 2012 17:58 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> "if there's two things in the world I don't care about it's wine and the nvidia driver"

Was this a package maintainer or upstream?

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Posted Nov 28, 2012 18:52 UTC (Wed) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

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Posted Nov 28, 2012 19:06 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

That seems like something FESCo would handle in Fedora (conflict between packager of A and packager of B which depends on A). There's no way to elevate it in Debian?

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Posted Dec 1, 2012 15:05 UTC (Sat) by viiru (subscriber, #53129) [Link]

> That seems like something FESCo would handle in Fedora (conflict between
> packager of A and packager of B which depends on A). There's no way to
> elevate it in Debian?

Yes there is, the Technical Committee (see http://www.debian.org/devel/tech-ctte ).

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Posted Nov 28, 2012 22:24 UTC (Wed) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

It's interesting to see that other people had the same kind of issues with Debian maintainers that I did. It's one of the reasons why I switched away from Debian some time ago.

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Posted Nov 28, 2012 17:41 UTC (Wed) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

> We tried that. It was called HURD.
Lennart doesn't call for some crazy new design that nobody is able to implement, he merely advocates fixing bugs instead of working around them. And he does succeed with that, most distros ship with PulseAudio, Avahi and systemd today.

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