
Leaderless Debian - Tomte
https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/782786/1b0334c3a2a9d8b1/
======
ilovecaching
Controversial opinion warning, and I would love to hear some counterpoints
outside of my thought bubble.

I've never understood the appeal of Debian or Ubuntu, or I guess I don't
understand why people would invest so much time in them compared to Fedora and
Redhat. In actual buisness dealings Redhat has always led the way in
enterprise (whole data centers), kernel development (a bunch of the
maintainers work for them and they lead efforts like cgroups v2), and other
highly technical pieces of the ecosystem, including acquiring all of the start
developers (such as the systemd folks). Investing in Redhat is an investment
into a deeper understanding of LInux through their excellent documentation and
well paying positions through their famously good certifications.

There is of course a lot of debian and ubunutu out there in small deployments,
usually individuals, small buisnesses, and education, but they are ultimately
less lucrative and more oriented towards beginners/hobbyists. At least Ubuntu
used to be. I'm not really sure who the target audience of debian is.

I've also never understood the appeal of .deb or apt, or what debians end goal
is. They never seem to be doing anything that interesting except grinding away
at repackaging everything. Canonical is just flailing to find some sort of
niche and historically (Ubuntu phone, Mir, Open Stack, Upstart, probably snap)
they are incredibly bad at finding relevance. I think having multiple
packaging ecosystems is the stupidest idea in the world, and don't see the
value add except giving people the illusion of more choices.

~~~
oblio
The thing is, for a long time, deb/apt were way superior to what rpm/yum
offered. Heck, Debian had apt way earlier than Red Hat had yum.

If anything, Red Hat should have adopted apt.

In terms of sheer number of dumb competing initiatives, Ubuntu > Red Hat >
Debian.

~~~
ilovecaching
So I've heard this before, and I really want to know what are the things that
make apt better? The only thing I can see is that yum was pretty slow (dnf
seems to be marginally better). Otherwise, the rpm package format seems pretty
on par with deb and apt seems like a super crusty interface with multiple
commands and stuff.

~~~
oblio
Debian had a much more rigorous packaging policy than Red Hat/Fedora Core
early on (the same policy that slows down development and annoys developers
today, as you can see in the various recent HN threads) and way more packages
in the main repos.

Using RH easily led you into an "rpm hell" of packages from various third-
party repos that conflicted:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_hell#Platform-
speci...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_hell#Platform-specific)

Now they're both comparable. Yum/dnf are ok, the rpm repos are big. And apt
actually has "apt", the tool, that consolidates those separate tools you
mention. Before it had aptitude (since at least 2006 or so, I'd say) but it
wasn't used much, but now apt is installed by default and you can use it. No
more "apt-get", "apt-cache", etc.

So today, nothing makes one of them substantially better, IMO.

------
joshstrange
> Since Debian developers are famously an agreeable and non-argumentative
> bunch, there should be no problem with that aspect of things.

Is this sarcasm? I don't read LWN enough to know if they are dryly joking and
I don't read Debian listserv's to know if it's true or not.

~~~
smhenderson
Before, when Debian Wheezy was the current stable version, I would have read
this and assumed no sarcasm and agreed wholeheartedly. But these days, I'm
with you, I just can't tell.

Given the recent article by Michael Stapleburg[1] that made it to the front
page of HN the other day and now this it seems like things are a bit rocky at
Debian these days.

A shame too because even though I don't use it that much any more I still
consider it one of, if not the, most important Linux distributions available.
Hopefully this is just a glitch that will get sorted sooner than later!

[1] [https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-
windin...](https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-winding-
down/)

~~~
geofft
I actually think things are a lot _less_ rocky these days - nothing in Michael
Stapelberg's post is new, it's just a difference of scale and perhaps the
developer population getting a bit older and more committed to their day jobs.
There are a lot of things helping with scale: Alioth (running a fork of
SourceForge's code) was replaced with Salsa (running GitLab), which
effectively collapsed the options for version control from CVS, SVN, Git,
Darcs, etc. to just Git. Debhelper 9 standardized a ton of workflows. Team
maintenance is a lot more common than individual maintenance, and uploading
packages owned by unresponsive maintainers has gotten a lot more socially
acceptable. But a lot of the old problems have scaled more quickly than
solutions: if you're doing an archive-wide change, there are more packages you
need to touch, more people you need to contact, etc., so each old problem
happens more.

(I also don't think any of the problems in that post are about developers
being disagreeable or argumentative - just about Debian having a lot of
technical debt and no easy way to pay it down.)

~~~
smhenderson
Fair enough and based on what I read yesterday your comments about problems
scaling faster than solutions makes a lot of sense. You seem to be more on top
of it then me.

As someone who no longer uses it but has a lot of history using Debian I hope
you are correct and that this latest issue of not finding a leader according
to the standard schedule is just something they route around. Based on the
tone of the end of today's article it sounds like that's the case.

------
baldfat
I know how loved Debian has been for the community and all that has been built
on it but as a user I kind of always felt that Debian was always doing their
own thing, at their own pace and their own requirements. Maybe this is a sign
that that way of running a Linux community is over? We really have a fairly
robust ecosystem and development has become much more refined? I might be
missing the inner politics of the community that has caused this?

~~~
zzzcpan
Maybe this is an effect linux ecosystem fragmentation of recent years has on
communities.

~~~
baldfat
I would say the opposite. Things have been consolidating in companies and in
technologies. It used to be that you had 10 options for everything. Now things
are getting more and more standardized. I like to think we are much better
today in Linux than when we were 10 years ago. You use to pick out what
applications were important and see what version was supported by what distro.
That isn't a thing anymore.

------
exabrial
I would hope an Amazon, Google, Digital Ocean, Rackspace, or other major vps
player could get someone involved for an oss project critical to their
business.

I guess as a user I frequently take this for granted.

~~~
a012
Amazon has Amazon Linux which is based on CentOS, and Google has invested in
CoreOS which also based on CentOS just for K8s. I don't know if other vendors
like DO would invest in any specific distro tbh.

~~~
smueller1234
Additional data point: The Linux that runs Google corp Linux machines is a
debian derivative:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLinux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLinux)

------
wtmt
> The good news is that this possibility, too, has been foreseen in the
> constitution. In the absence of a project leader, the chair of the technical
> committee and the project secretary are empowered to make decisions — as
> long as they are able to agree on what those decisions should be. Since
> Debian developers are famously an agreeable and non-argumentative bunch,
> there should be no problem with that aspect of things.

Even if nobody puts their name this week or the next or the week after, and
even with the sarcastic remark in the last sentence, it looks like this is not
such a big deal after all.

> In other words, the project will manage to muddle along for a while without
> a leader, though various aspects of business could slow down and become more
> awkward if the current candidate drought persists.

Why should it muddle along or slow down? All the responsibilities listed (and
linked to in a mail in the mailing list) seem to be things that others could
take up, either individually or as smaller groups. It's something that could
be worked out over a period of time.

> One might well wonder, though, why there seems to be nobody who wants to
> take the helm of this project for a year. _The fact that it is an unpaid
> position requiring a lot of time and travel might have something to do with
> it._

The last sentence is probably the issue. Couldn't sponsorships help? The last
thing we need is Debian to become corporatized.

Donate to Debian at
[https://www.debian.org/donations](https://www.debian.org/donations)

~~~
lamby
> Couldn't sponsorships help?

As implied and cited by the article itself, money and Debian are uneasy
bedfellows.

> The last thing we need is Debian to become corporatized.

I highly doubt this will be a likely outcome here.

------
patrickg_zill
I am switching to Devuan which is Debian without the service manager known as
systemd (not trying to flame about systemd but it is no longer my preference)
.

So far it has worked great for me on my test laptop and I will be rolling out
some VM's shortly.

~~~
51lver
I run KVM VMs on devuan and could not be happier. (flame backspaced out,
you're welcome...)

------
Tomte
I've just browsed
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Debian_project_leade...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Debian_project_leaders)

There are quite a few names I've never heard of, and some that I've heard of,
but not as DPL.

The last six (after Hocevar) are total blanks for me.

Have my interests changed so much, or did the recent DPLs keep a much lower
profile?

~~~
bureado
Chris Lamb is a remarkably active and outgoing DPL. But yes, I've been active
in Debian for well over a decade and I've seen both a lot of people leave and
new people that I don't know or get to know as I used to. All 5 DPL candidates
ring a bell for me, though.

------
gekkeboom
What whould be the case today anno 2019 to use Debian over CentOS, Ubuntu or
one of the other distro's?

~~~
towaway1138
Arguably rpm/yum is still a kludge compared to dpkg/apt.

~~~
bionsystem
It's not, although I would admit that it's painful to learn. I spent my fair
share of time learning it, and can now understand what's wrong with my configs
in a split second when it doesn't work. Overall it's faster and easier to
search with than apt, from my (very small, I admit) experience with apt. The
dependancy system works really well, even when messing around with
upgrades/downgrades/uninstalls too.

And I admit that a few years ago I would rank apt as much better than yum.
Matter of preference / habit I guess.

------
pulse7
I wonder how this will affect the Raspbian as default Raspberry Pi distro...

~~~
flowless
I wish it gets obsolete as it's an abomination.

~~~
the_trapper
How is it an abomination?

It seems to have served its purpose well so far. It is relatively easy to use
and hasn't gotten in the way of anything I've wanted to use it for yet.

~~~
mikepurvis
Am not the parent, but RPi is the only ARMv6 target of any significance;
supporting an outdated architecture has non-trivial costs, which is why Ubuntu
and other distros dropped the support.

------
z3t4
This could be a great opportunity for someone looking to step into a
leadership role.

~~~
altfredd
It is not: [https://danielpocock.com/what-does-democracy-mean-in-free-
so...](https://danielpocock.com/what-does-democracy-mean-in-free-software-
communities)

The current Debian "developers" have reached uniform agreed that:

1) Neither of them will participate in election

2) People outside of "developer" circle (including major contributors, who do
most of actual work on Debian) can't participate in election

The whole "crisis" is artificially created. Not like that matters, — most of
decision making is already done by corporate employees, not some fictitious
"community leader".

~~~
z3t4
Reading through those articles it indeed seems like a political nightmare.
When you have both volunteers _and_ paid members, politics will be inevitable,
as those getting paid will do everything in their power to keep it, while
those not getting paid will do everything they can to gain it. Just like in a
startup, money can kill relations. Money is really the root of all evil. In
any organization there will be politics, so as a leader you have to learn how
to deal with it. You do not necessary need any power, as you do not lead by
giving orders, you lead by showing. I think solving the inequity problem would
be a top priority, maybe dedicate 50% of your own FAANG salary and give it to
people that do the same job as you do, but doesn't get paid. It's probably a
really bad idea, but it's just an example, the purpose is that others will
follow.

------
hlnas
Has the number of candidates been decreasing steadily, or has this happened
out of the blue? If so, what has happened? Are there more responsibilities to
this position, making it harder to do now than it was years ago? Is the
interest in Debian dwindling?

~~~
debiandev
> Is the interest on Debian dwindling?

On the contrary, the project is growing in terms of contributors, packages and
internal projects.

[https://reproducible-builds.org/](https://reproducible-builds.org/) mostly
came out from Debian (see
[https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds](https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds)
)

Despite the name "leader", the role of DPL is close to an ambassador with no
power to tell other people what to. The DPL appoints a handful of roles, then
hand-on work is delegated and done by other people.

The drama on blogs and mailing lists is in no way representative of how most
DDs feel about the project.

