Debian maintainer laments old infrastructure

From	RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com>
Newsgroups	comp.misc
Subject	Debian maintainer laments old infrastructure
Date	2019-03-10 20:42 -0400
Organization	solani.org
Message-ID	<0hnglf-alp.ln1@rasp.therandymon.com> (permalink)

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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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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

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