Feeling happy about the move to Debian

Posted Jul 4, 2024 10:34 UTC (Thu) by atnot (subscriber, #124910)
In reply to: Feeling happy about the move to Debian by madhatter
Parent article: Debian debate over tag2upload reaches compromise

There's lots of distributions that manage to make minor techical improvements in less than 5 years without any sort of central dictatorship though. I'll just namedrop Arch, Gentoo, Mint, NixOS, to a lesser extent fedora but I mean it's basically all of them except RedHat and Ubuntu.

The thing that *is* unique about Debian is that whereas most other distributions consider packages and infrastructure shared community endeavors, in debian they are considered sanctimonious personal fiefdoms. Sure, there will be people who focus on specific areas or packages and there will be someone's username listed as a primary contact. But it's not a statement of ownership as much as responsibility. Nobody would get upset if someone else just made some distribution-wide changes to your package, in fact it happens quite regularly. Whereas in debian touching other people's stuff is considered taboo enough that the only way to get anything done is to push the person who maintains the linter to add a lint which might then become an error in 3 years time. This extends across the whole organization, with no way to get a natural, sensible consensus on anything because everything is a power play for who owns what and thus gets to block everything.

It is certainly a fun, attention-grabbing spectacle to watch. Especially compared to other distros where stuff mostly just silently works without major drama (at least of the technical kind). But that doesn't make it effective community governance.

Feeling happy about the move to Debian

Posted Jul 4, 2024 12:32 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (2 responses)

> It is certainly a fun, attention-grabbing spectacle to watch

yeah, well, maybe it's fun when you watch it for the first time. The second time you get annoyed, the third time you reach for your blood pressure meds, and after that you wish you could reach for a clue-by-four instead.

I've been a DD for 20 years by now and I'm on semi-hiatus for more than half that time, for precisely this reason.

I'll be back as soon as I can "git push" a program and see it get built (a) immediately and automatically, after passing CI on Salsa, and (b) without watching it go through an arcane upstream-source-tarball-plus-Debian-packaging-plus-explicit-patches-to-upstream dance.

Assuming, that is, that I live long enough (and keep my mental sanity on the way).

Feeling happy about the move to Debian

Posted Jul 5, 2024 11:58 UTC (Fri) by Baughn (subscriber, #124425) [Link] (1 responses)

NixOS has its own issues, but that’s precisely how it works. There are even automated VM-based integration tests.

Feeling happy about the move to Debian

Posted Jul 5, 2024 12:28 UTC (Fri) by atnot (subscriber, #124910) [Link]

NixOS is probably the nicest implementation of this, yeah. If you're unfamiliar, the whole package set is just one big git repo containing all of the build scripts, with one big public cache that continuously rebuilds it. So there's not really even any "releases" per se, just one git commit hash for the whole distribution.

But you really don't need to go that esoteric to have a nice workflow like that. Pretty much all not too-big-to-fail distros have highly automated packaging that can release updates with a git push or even just a button press on an automatically created PR.

I think even in Fedora you only need to register the upstream release tarball with their internal mirror and put update it's hash in a file these days, at least when I last looked at it. And that's using the venerable RPM, not something newfangled.