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Debian maintainer laments old infrastructure

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  Debian maintainer laments old infrastructure RS Wood  <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2019-03-10 20:42 -0400
    Re: Debian maintainer laments old infrastructure Héctor Abreu <invalid@invalid.invalid> - 2019-03-11 13:54 +0000
      Re: Debian maintainer laments old infrastructure kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) - 2019-03-12 09:41 -0400
        Re: Debian maintainer laments old infrastructure Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> - 2019-03-12 18:46 +0000
          Re: Debian maintainer laments old infrastructure Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> - 2019-03-13 02:01 -0300
        Re: Debian maintainer laments old infrastructure Anssi Saari <as@sci.fi> - 2019-03-13 12:19 +0200
          Re: Debian maintainer laments old infrastructure kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) - 2019-03-13 10:11 -0400
        Re: Debian maintainer laments old infrastructure Oregonian Haruspex <no_email@invalid.invalid> - 2019-03-29 06:08 +0000

#17526 — Debian maintainer laments old infrastructure

From the «probably all Deb's fault» department:
Title: Debian Package Maintainer Steps Down, Complaining About 'Old Infrastructure'
Author: help@slashdot.org
Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2019 19:49:00 -0400
Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/k_N9L7bEecM/debian-package-maintainer-steps-down-complaining-about-old-infrastructure

Michael Stapelberg, maintains "a bunch" of Debian packages and services, and
says the free software Linux distro "has been in my life for well over 10 years
at this point." Today he released a 2,255-word essay explaining why he's
"winding down" his involvement in Debian to a minimum, citing numerous
complaints including Debian's complicated build stack, waits of up to seven
hours before package uploads can be installed, leading to "asynchronous"
feedback -- and Debian's lack of tooling for large changes. The closest to
"sending out a change for review" is to open a bug report with an attached
patch... Culturally, reviews and reactions are slow. There are no deadlines. I
literally sometimes get emails notifying me that a patch I sent out a few years
ago (!!) is now merged. This turns projects from a small number of weeks into
many years, which is a huge demotivator for me. Interestingly enough, you can
see artifacts of the slow online activity manifest itself in the offline
culture as well: I don't want to be discussing systemd's merits 10 years after
I first heard about it. Lastly, changes can easily be slowed down significantly
by holdouts who refuse to collaborate. My canonical example for this is rsync,
whose maintainer refused my patches to make the package use debhelper purely
out of personal preference. Granting so much personal freedom to individual
maintainers prevents us as a project from raising the abstraction level for
building Debian packages, which in turn makes tooling harder. There's also
several complaints about old infrastructure -- for example, "I dread
interacting with the Debian bug tracker. debbugs is a piece of software (from
1994) which is only used by Debian and the GNU project these days." Stapelberg
also complains that the "painful" experience of developing using Debian "leaves
a lot to be desired," and adds that "It baffles me that in 2019, we still don't
have a conveniently browsable threaded archive of mailing list discussions."
"My frustration level ultimately exceeded the threshold," Stapelberg writes in
the essay, adding "I hope this post inspires someone, ideally a group of
people, to improve the developer experience within Debian." He'll soon
transition packages to be team-maintained "where it makes sense," but also
"orphan packages where I am the sole maintainer... For all intents and
purposes, please treat me as permanently on vacation..." "I will try to keep up
best-effort maintenance of the manpages.debian.org service and the
codesearch.debian.net service, but any help would be much appreciated."

[image 2][2][image 4][4][image 6][6]

Read more of this story[7] at Slashdot.
[image 8]

Links:
[1]: http://twitter.com/home?status=Debian+Package+Maintainer+Steps+Down%2C+Complaining+About+'Old+Infrastructure'%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F2TCCLjA (link)
[2]: https://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png (image)
[3]: http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Flinux.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F19%2F03%2F10%2F2245221%2Fdebian-package-maintainer-steps-down-complaining-about-old-infrastructure%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook (link)
[4]: https://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png (image)
[5]: http://plus.google.com/share?url=https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/03/10/2245221/debian-package-maintainer-steps-down-complaining-about-old-infrastructure?utm_source=slashdot&utm_medium=googleplus (link)
[6]: https://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png (image)
[7]: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/19/03/10/2245221/debian-package-maintainer-steps-down-complaining-about-old-infrastructure?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed (link)
[8]: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/k_N9L7bEecM (image)

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#17534

On 2019-03-11, RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> wrote:
> From the «probably all Deb's fault» department:
> Title: Debian Package Maintainer Steps Down, Complaining About 'Old Infrast
> Author: help@slashdot.org
> Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2019 19:49:00 -0400
> Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/k_N9L7bEecM/debian-pa
>
> Michael Stapelberg, maintains "a bunch" of Debian packages and services, and
> says the free software Linux distro "has been in my life for well over 10 years
> at this point." Today he released a 2,255-word essay explaining why he's
> "winding down" his involvement in Debian to a minimum, citing numerous
> complaints including Debian's complicated build stack, waits of up to seven
> hours before package uploads can be installed, leading to "asynchronous"
> feedback -- and Debian's lack of tooling for large changes. The closest to
> "sending out a change for review" is to open a bug report with an attached
> patch... Culturally, reviews and reactions are slow. There are no deadlines. I
> literally sometimes get emails notifying me that a patch I sent out a few years
> ago (!!) is now merged. This turns projects from a small number of weeks into
> many years, which is a huge demotivator for me. Interestingly enough, you can
> see artifacts of the slow online activity manifest itself in the offline
> culture as well: I don't want to be discussing systemd's merits 10 years after
> I first heard about it. Lastly, changes can easily be slowed down significantly
> by holdouts who refuse to collaborate. My canonical example for this is rsync,
> whose maintainer refused my patches to make the package use debhelper purely
> out of personal preference. Granting so much personal freedom to individual
> maintainers prevents us as a project from raising the abstraction level for
> building Debian packages, which in turn makes tooling harder. There's also
> several complaints about old infrastructure -- for example, "I dread
> interacting with the Debian bug tracker. debbugs is a piece of software (from
> 1994) which is only used by Debian and the GNU project these days." Stapelberg
> also complains that the "painful" experience of developing using Debian "leaves
> a lot to be desired," and adds that "It baffles me that in 2019, we still don't
> have a conveniently browsable threaded archive of mailing list discussions."
> "My frustration level ultimately exceeded the threshold," Stapelberg writes in
> the essay, adding "I hope this post inspires someone, ideally a group of
> people, to improve the developer experience within Debian." He'll soon
> transition packages to be team-maintained "where it makes sense," but also
> "orphan packages where I am the sole maintainer... For all intents and
> purposes, please treat me as permanently on vacation..." "I will try to keep up
> best-effort maintenance of the manpages.debian.org service and the
> codesearch.debian.net service, but any help would be much appreciated."
>

I just hope that the chaos described in that post won't affect Devuan,
the Debian's fork I chose to work with. I don't understand much about
the systemd's controversy, I just chose Devuan because it will let me
continue working as I have traditionally done with Debian, with no
significant changes.
-- 
Héctor Abreu

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#17551

=?UTF-8?Q?H=C3=A9ctor?= Abreu  <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>I just hope that the chaos described in that post won't affect Devuan,
>the Debian's fork I chose to work with. I don't understand much about
>the systemd's controversy, I just chose Devuan because it will let me
>continue working as I have traditionally done with Debian, with no
>significant changes.

Basically, there is a split going on in the Linux development community
between people who have the traditional Unix philosophy of small modular
programs that can be mixed and matched to create complex systems and which
use text files for configuration, and people who want Linux to be more like 
Windows, with everything in big blocks that use binary configuration files.

This split is causing a lot of different individual controversies but
they need to be looked at as symptoms of the underlying split rather than
as their own issues.

As for me, I just want to be able to remove the damn modem manager from the
system without removing the desktop gui as well.
--scott
-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

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#17555

In comp.misc, Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:
> Basically, there is a split going on in the Linux development community
> between people who have the traditional Unix philosophy of small modular
> programs that can be mixed and matched to create complex systems and which
> use text files for configuration, and people who want Linux to be more like 
> Windows, with everything in big blocks that use binary configuration files.

See also Imagemagick versus Netpbm.

> This split is causing a lot of different individual controversies but
> they need to be looked at as symptoms of the underlying split rather than
> as their own issues.
> 
> As for me, I just want to be able to remove the damn modem manager from the
> system without removing the desktop gui as well.

Have you considered Slackware?

Elijah
------
also, don't you know the GUI has a modem manager so it needs the modem backend

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#17558

Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> writes:

> In comp.misc, Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:
>
>> Basically, there is a split going on in the Linux development community
>> between people who have the traditional Unix philosophy of small modular
>> programs that can be mixed and matched to create complex systems and which
>> use text files for configuration, and people who want Linux to be more like 
>> Windows, with everything in big blocks that use binary configuration files.

That's my take, too.

> See also Imagemagick versus Netpbm.

I use both.  Aside from simple viewing, though, Netpbm has done what I
needed more often than Iagemagick and I've even written code to do
useful things with p{bgp}m images because, well, it was the easiest
way to get there.

>> This split is causing a lot of different individual controversies but
>> they need to be looked at as symptoms of the underlying split rather than
>> as their own issues.
>> 
>> As for me, I just want to be able to remove the damn modem manager from the
>> system without removing the desktop gui as well.

Uh huh.  But then, I don't use a GUI desktop.  X and a window manager,
yes, big leap forward over bare console(s).  Not so much the
"desktop".

> Have you considered Slackware?

Bought a Great Fat Book with a Caldera & Redhat CDs in the back 20
years ago.  Installed Caldera, became instantly annoyed with default
KDE, hastily switched to Slackware and never looked back.

(Oh, and I'm still using a modem out here in the bandwidth boonies but
I don't have a "modem manager", just some scripts and a command or
two.  Slackware, y'know?)

-- 
Mike Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada

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#17559

kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) writes:

> Basically, there is a split going on in the Linux development community
> between people who have the traditional Unix philosophy of small modular
> programs that can be mixed and matched to create complex systems and which
> use text files for configuration, and people who want Linux to be more like 
> Windows, with everything in big blocks that use binary configuration files.

So is "everything in big blocks that use binary configuration files"
supposed to describe systemd? I don't see how. Systemd uses text based
configuration files as far as I know. I've written a few but I'm by no
means an expert on systemd.

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#17561

In article <vg3ftrr84ah.fsf@coffee.modeemi.fi>, Anssi Saari  <as@sci.fi> wrote:
>kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) writes:
>
>> Basically, there is a split going on in the Linux development community
>> between people who have the traditional Unix philosophy of small modular
>> programs that can be mixed and matched to create complex systems and which
>> use text files for configuration, and people who want Linux to be more like 
>> Windows, with everything in big blocks that use binary configuration files.
>
>So is "everything in big blocks that use binary configuration files"
>supposed to describe systemd? I don't see how. Systemd uses text based
>configuration files as far as I know. I've written a few but I'm by no
>means an expert on systemd.

systemd and gnome3 are good examples of big monolithic chunks of code that
do everything, are linked to everything.  Systemd does tend to use text-based
unit files instead of XML files or proprietary binary files, though.
--scott
-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

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#17674

Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:
> =?UTF-8?Q?H=C3=A9ctor?= Abreu  <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>> 
>> I just hope that the chaos described in that post won't affect Devuan,
>> the Debian's fork I chose to work with. I don't understand much about
>> the systemd's controversy, I just chose Devuan because it will let me
>> continue working as I have traditionally done with Debian, with no
>> significant changes.
> 
> Basically, there is a split going on in the Linux development community
> between people who have the traditional Unix philosophy of small modular
> programs that can be mixed and matched to create complex systems and which
> use text files for configuration, and people who want Linux to be more like 
> Windows, with everything in big blocks that use binary configuration files.
> 
> This split is causing a lot of different individual controversies but
> they need to be looked at as symptoms of the underlying split rather than
> as their own issues.
> 
> As for me, I just want to be able to remove the damn modem manager from the
> system without removing the desktop gui as well.
> --scott

I’ve already started preparing for the future by installing OpenBSD on my
laptop. So far it’s a joy.

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