
20 years as a Debian maintainer - BuuQu9hu
http://suihkulokki.blogspot.com/2017/01/20-years-of-being-debian-maintainer.html
======
cixin
In case the author reads this, and as I can't comment there: Thank you.

Debian is an awesome and somewhat under-rated distribution. Being a maintainer
always seems like a thankless and slightly forgotten role. Thanks for having
the persistence to keep going so long.

~~~
elsurudo
Is it under-rated? Perhaps its marketing isn't as strong, but it's the
"father" of a lot of distros today. Personally when I want a server distro, I
still go with Debian. Simple and solid. No nonsense.

~~~
new299
Personally, I feel like Ubuntu gets a lot more attention, perhaps more on the
client-side. Sometimes, the foundational work Debian provides isn't fully
acknowledged.

~~~
elsurudo
Yeah, Ubuntu probably is the best-marketed distro today. And I agree that
Debian probably doesn't get the praise it deserves – IMO the nicest things
about Ubuntu come from Debian.

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rxlim
Thank you for all your work.

I installed Debian for the first time almost 13 years ago and have enjoyed the
"Debian way" every second.

But as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. Due to various
decisions by the Debian community, Debian Wheezy will be the last version I'm
going to install and for the last few years I have been in the proccess of
migrating thousands of servers away from Debian.

~~~
neuromute
What are you migrating to, if you don't mind my asking?

~~~
rxlim
FreeBSD, so the migration is not just away from Debian but also Linux. Of
course problems always arise in such operations, but in general we have been
very happy with the change, and I'm just as excited about FreeBSD as I was
with Debian before.

~~~
gkya
Do you migrate you workstation to FreeBSD too, or your servers and the like
only?

In any case I want to take this opportunity to note that FreeBSD is quite nice
as a daily driver on your workstation. The only missing thing is bug-free
suspend/hibernate, which works for some and for some doesn't.

edit: added missing adverbs.

~~~
nerflad
In my experience, you're also rolling the dice when you suspend Linux. My x99
workstation, z77 workstation, and XPS 13 have all failed to resume before. But
Windows has done the same. I guess ACPI is a mess.

~~~
Fnoord
> But Windows has done the same. I guess ACPI is a mess.

Of course, you don't mention macOS. I never had issues with suspend on any of
my MBPs. _If_ I did, it turned out that was my battery got empty, and the few
times this happened I did think about suspend failing. Turned out I was wrong.

~~~
nerflad
Good for you. I've never owned a MBP, and this thread is about switching from
Debian to FreeBSD.

~~~
Fnoord
You completely missed the point. If ACPI is a mess, how come macOS doesn't
suffer from the issue?

~~~
nerflad
Look, I'm sure the macOS implementation of ACPI is great.

I said "I GUESS ACPI is a mess", because most implementations I've used (and
I've only used it; I know nothing low-level about it at all) have had some
problem or another.

How wrong of me not to have any experience with your preferred platform, and
leave it out of the discussion.

~~~
Fnoord
That is why I told the reader (anecdotal) evidence which suggests the
contrary.

> How wrong of me not to have any experience with your preferred platform, and
> leave it out of the discussion.

No need to feel so overly offended.

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lamby
Riku is 10 years ahead of me!

[https://chris-lamb.co.uk/posts/10-years-of-debian](https://chris-
lamb.co.uk/posts/10-years-of-debian)

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ausjke
Even though I use ubuntu on my desktop, it is from Debian, and I ran Debian on
my servers for years. Debian is the most important software for me for
decades. For that I thank you, Riku, and everybody else contributes to Debian!

~~~
shmerl
What prevents you from using Debian on the desktop? I'm using Debian testing
for quite a while already, and it works rather well. The only annoyance is the
the freeze period, but it got shorter lately.

~~~
ausjke
Too many software development environments are using ubuntu out-of-the-box
these days, I thus follow that to save some setup time. If I use desktop for
simply surfing or office needs then yes Debian will be my preference.

~~~
dromen
Are there specific things you had issues with? Debian Testing still feels more
stable and as feature-filled as Ubuntu Xenial to me.

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bostand
Thanks Riku, debian has become an excellent distro thanks to the hard work of
people like you.

At the same time, it is sad to see how much work you guys need to do for
things that should have been automated or done by the original developers...
Let's hope AppImage changes that

Edit: Changed flatpak to appimage

~~~
grhmc
Packaging is a complicated task and isn't as automatable as you'd think, It is
important to consider how changes impact other tools. AppImage depends on
maintainers too. Consider for example how appimage recipes depend on wget and
bash and thusly openssl and libidn and glibc and libdl and git too, which
brings with it libz and, and, and ...

PS: Thank you, Riku. I never understood the sheer amount of effort involved in
being a packager / maintainer until I started doing the same task for NixOS. I
regularly depend on Debian's excellent patches and CVE details to do my work.
May you not be bogged down by nirvana fallacies :)

~~~
xorfish
> Packaging is a complicated task and isn't as automatable as you'd think

I think the Solus guys would have a word with you. Even with no packaging
experience it is pretty simple to create a package for Solus Project.

Here a short intro:

[https://wiki.solus-project.com/Packaging](https://wiki.solus-
project.com/Packaging)

~~~
infinity0
Come back when they have done this for 24000 third-party packages.

~~~
xorfish
I don't see the connection. I didn't say that they have more packages, just
that they have very good packaging tooling that makes it simple to make
consistent packages.

~~~
BuuQu9hu
When you package 24000 things, you find significant diversity in build
systems, languages, source code, testing etc. It isn't easy to package all of
that in simple ways.

~~~
xorfish
I don't know exactly to what the 24000 number refers to. Solus Project does
already have 5000 packages in the repos. I think that is quite an
accomplishment for a pretty small team of 3-4 people with some help from the
community.

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zitterbewegung
Thank you for your service to the Debian community. I have only run Debian
based distributions on all of my installs of Linux.

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isopickle
Thank you Riku!

I used fte as my primary editor on OS/2, and when I started using Debian I was
happy to find it available there as well.

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AceJohnny2
A couple of weeks before they got accepted? Wow!

I considered become a DD about 10 years ago, but a friend was going through
the process and it took them _over a year_ with at least one restart-from-
scratch because the bureaucracy had been lost or something.

> _Regis NM did start somewhere in 2003. There was a period of him being on
> hold, in 2006 we did continue the process, which used some time, but most of
> the delay up to now is, again, my fault. Seems like all the few NMs left in
> my AM queue do have some huge level of patience available somewhere..._

[https://lists.debian.org/debian-
newmaint/2007/08/msg00046.ht...](https://lists.debian.org/debian-
newmaint/2007/08/msg00046.html)

I wonder if Debian has improved their process or replaced the ineffective
people since. Do they still have the second-class-citizen system (whose name I
can't remember offhand)?

~~~
opk
I went through a similar experience with the NM process some ten years ago
except I ended up giving up on the whole thing. After being told I absolutely
had to answer a load of questions within a week for a week that happened to be
very inconvenient, my answers then got completely ignored. I carried on
maintaining the one package until a few years ago when I gave up because
nobody would sponsor an upload until the freeze at which point I was being
told I had to backport bug fixes to the old release. I actually ended up
jumping to FreeBSD before the whole systemd mess hit and I've found it to have
a friendlier community.

~~~
BuuQu9hu
These days the questions thing has been replaced by a more streamlined
process, basically if you have been contributing for a while you'll be
accepted.

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epynonymous
thank you much for your work on debian, i love the stability of debian linux,
20 years is a lifetime!

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Gusbenz
Thanks. Debian is all I've ever really known in regards to Linux distros.

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faragon
Thank you very much, Riku! Kudos and glory! :-)

Debian muscle is behind many other Linux distributions, and Debian maintainer
work is fundamental.

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necessity
The site doesn't even load without javascript.

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jwilk
Version that can be read without JS enabled:

[https://suihkulokki.blogspot.com/2017/01/20-years-of-
being-d...](https://suihkulokki.blogspot.com/2017/01/20-years-of-being-debian-
maintainer.html?m=1)

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rxlim
I cannot comprehend why on earth Javascript is required just to show some
text. This must be the height of web design silliness.

~~~
suihkulokki
I just switched to a simpler theme, I didn't realize the one I had chosen was
so dependant on javascript.

