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Re: Debian maintainer laments old infrastructure

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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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Thread

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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