That sort of defies the allure of running Linux to begin with

Posted Aug 13, 2008 0:46 UTC (Wed) by PaulWay (guest, #45600)
In reply to: That sort of defies the allure of running Linux to begin with by pr1268
Parent article: Udev rules and the management of the plumbing layer

I think you're missing the aim of this proposal.  Think of it as parallel to the Linux
Standard Base - a set of rules that is reasonably comprehensive and comprehensible between
distros.  That way a Debian sysadmin can look at a SuSE machine and still know their way
around the udev rules, without throwing up their hands and saying "I don't know, Debian does
it differently to everyone else".  Additions, deletions and modifications to that set of rules
won't surprise anyone if they're done in a way that's consistent across all distributions.

In other words, no-one's saying "you must have rules for the Foomeister 3000 video card on
your system", they're saying "rules for video cards will look like this and be stored here".

Frankly, a Debian developer saying "no, the entire rest of the community must conform to my
ways" is a bit disappointing but doesn't surprise me either.  You'd think the OpenSSH debacle
would have taught them a bit of hubris...

That sort of defies the allure of running Linux to begin with

Posted Aug 13, 2008 14:57 UTC (Wed) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link] (2 responses)

> Frankly, a Debian developer saying "no, the entire rest of the community must conform to my
ways" is a bit disappointing but doesn't surprise me either.  You'd think the OpenSSH debacle
would have taught them a bit of hubris...

I think that's a bit too sweeping generalization. Marco is only speaking as himself, you
should not make the assumption that that's the way the whole Debian community thinks/acts.
Since the openssl debacle there is now a large group in Debian that believes any divergence
from upstream is _bad_. But since we are talking about a very large group pf people, suprise
suprise, there is a large range of opinions and attitudes. In future please don't label a huge
group on one members actions. Or atleast reserve that for /. - lets keep lwn.net at a bit
higher quality discussion.

That sort of defies the allure of running Linux to begin with

Posted Aug 14, 2008 12:48 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link]

> I think that's a bit too sweeping generalization. Marco is only speaking as himself, you should not make the assumption that that's the way the whole Debian community thinks/acts.

Maybe not, but without a large number of developers either telling Marco he's got this one wrong or telling everyone else that Marco's attitude doesn't reflect Debian's overall position - or ultimately replacing Marco if he won't play ball - the Debian community is granting Marco a degree of implicit approval.

That sort of defies the allure of running Linux to begin with

Posted Aug 14, 2008 16:36 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

At the macro scale, I'm afraid the situations are quite a bit more similar than you realize.
Both involve Debian developers believing that their way is more "elegant" (an awfully
subjective term) and patching upstream with little regard for the chance that upstream
understands the code quite a bit better than they do, and little motivation to push those
changes back upstream.

If it was for additional functionality, then I could understand.  But elegance??  What an
awful reason to diverge!