
An Abrupt End to Debian Live - conductor
https://lists.debian.org/debian-live/2015/11/msg00024.html
======
foxylad
Thanks for your service, Daniel.

I think there is a cycle to these things. You start by getting excited by an
idea, and work night and day on it. If it's useful, you attract attention and
users, and it slowly stops being either exciting or your project. You start to
grudge all the work people expect _you_ do to add _their_ ideas to the
project, and eventually someone is rude enough to make you call it a day.

The beauty of open source means that this isn't the end of the project. If
it's still usefull, someone will get excited by it and start working night and
day...

------
fencepost
A recap from someone who's not a Debian user but who read through the bulk of
the threads:

Debian Live has been around for 9+ years, and at least back in 2006 was
described as "an official sub-project" which seems supported by the existence
of live.debian.net (at least from an outside-Debian perspective).

Some folks on the debian-cd project, possibly unhappy with the level of
support they were receiving re: UEFI or possibly just because they had a new
shiny, decided to do a new (currently experimental) live CD building system
based on some other tools. Note: still experimental.

There's little evidence that the original debian-live folks knew anything
about this new initiative, though some have reported that it was discussed in-
person at conferences.

While the new project was still in the experimental stage, one of the debian-
cd developers decided to publish it as "debian-live-ng", and when politely
called on it (see thread: [https://lists.debian.org/debian-
live/2015/11/msg00003.html](https://lists.debian.org/debian-
live/2015/11/msg00003.html)) another of the Debian developers eventually came
back and said (my translation) "[you're not an official Debian project even
though you pretend to be, so we're proceeding as already stated. Consider your
concerns marked 'wontfix'.]"

The head of the Debian Live project, faced with this, announced that basically
due to the release of its replacement with no prior notice, clearly debian-
live had been supplanted so it was being shut down.

There were some places in the past where Daniel Baumann (of debian-live) came
off not so well, but in this case he politely pointed out "hey, you've just
announced something that collides with our namespace" and got what seemed like
an official "yes, we know. You're not needed anymore."

Update: I recommend geofft's much more informed comments in this discussion

------
voltagex_
[https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=754910](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=754910) is quite telling. This does not diminish the
importance of Daniel's work on debian-live, but there's always two sides to
every story.

~~~
DiabloD3
The way I interpret this is someone, instead of coordinating things with
Daniel, who is the upstream of that package and the maintainer of the package,
they just went and fixed it using an inferior fix that Daniel was trying to
ship in his own conflicting possible future version.

That is pretty ignorant, and I can't blame Daniel.

This is somewhere up there with Debian habitually backporting security patches
into an ancient version of Apache to the point its a broken unsecure mess, and
adding an unapproved patch to ssh that caused it to generate completely broken
and highly unsecure keys.

~~~
plorkyeran
AFAICT you have it backwards -- the other packager is the upstream developer
and maintainer of the pre-existing ubuntu package. The only thing that
Daniel's package had going for it was that he had submitted it earlier, but he
had not gone through the process of filing an ITP to tell other people that
they don't need to spend time on packaging it.

I find the whole thread somewhat cringey to read and I'm not sure why he
thinks it reflects well on him.

~~~
chris_wot
Is there an ITR process ("Intent To Replace")? Because the issues REALLY got
bad when the following was written:

    
    
      live-build has been deprecated by debian-cd, and live-build-ng 
      is replacing  it. In a purely Debian context at least, live-build
      is deprecated. live-build-ng is being developed in collaboration
      with debian-cd and D-I.
    
      I'm aware that I'm going to be upsetting people, but this has been 
      a long time coming and I'm not going to spend time bikeshedding
      over naming. I would rather spend that time on integration of live
      image creation into official Debian infrastructure and building 
      the best system for live image creation possible.
    
      Consider this thread marked as wontfix.
    

[https://lists.debian.org/debian-
live/2015/11/msg00008.html](https://lists.debian.org/debian-
live/2015/11/msg00008.html)

So in other words, there was an upset about Daniel not filing an ITP, and then
this casual email gets sent saying an _entire project_ has been deprecated,
that discussion is not needed as it was a fait accomplis and the hundred and
thousands of man hours people contributed to it weren't important?

Not good, and very poorly handled.

~~~
voltagex_
That one stood out to me - plus the other part that says that debian-live was
never an official project, which seems to be in contradiction to
[https://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2006/08/](https://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2006/08/)

~~~
chris_wot
Well, too late does that same guy realise that things have gone pear shaped!

He's gone from "this has been a long time coming" and "consider this thread
marked as wontfix" to the below:

[https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=155;bug=80...](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=155;bug=804315)

    
    
      original aim for this was that this new tool would be integrated 
      into the existing Debian Live project, and that we would bring 
      the Debian Live project into Debian. This is not the way it 
      has gone.
    

Except that is _not_ what he wrote. He didn't say anything about _integrating_
into the project. Instead he said the project a. Wasn't an official Debian
project (when actually it does look like it was), and b. They were about to
deprecate the entire project!

I have to call bullshit on this one. There was never any intent to integrate
with the project.

That's one dishonest email!

~~~
protomyth
Sadly, it sounds like the e-mail you get from mangers when they want you to
keep working until your replacements are ready to discard you properly. I
agree with you that those two e-mails say totally different things.

~~~
digi_owl
Sadly the Linux ecosystem seems to be getting a whole lot of that managerial
double talk lately.

------
gkop
Is this the end of Debian being available in a manner that fully boots from
the install media without requiring installation, or just the end of a project
called "Debian Live"?

("live" installers are widely useful; eg. Kali and Ubuntu I believe are based
on Debian and I can't imagine either of these projects abandoning the
possibility of a "live" boot)

Edit: thanks for answering, Wilya and maheart! If you two are right, then
maybe this topic really isn't important enough to merit the front page of HN
(I mean, Debian drama is nothing new)?

~~~
geofft
I'll also note that Daniel has for some time not been a Debian Developer
(there was some drama there, the details of which I wouldn't want to recall
even if I remembered), and "Debian Live" has been not an official Debian
project for a while -- it's running on live.debian.net (not .org), it's
running on servers personally run by Daniel (not by the Debian sysadmin team),
etc.

That said, IMO the distinction of "not an official Debian project" is less
about where the service is running (it's a volunteer project, anyway) than
about how integrated it is with the rest of Debian. For a while, Debian Live
has been showing strong signs of being Daniel's personal project -- with a lot
of users, to be fair -- and not really working with other Debian teams or
developers. I think that's what came to a head here.

It's been a while since I worked on this, but IIRC Ubuntu's live image is
based on Casper, which is a separate system from live-build (though live-build
supports using Casper).

Also, bear in mind that the specific reason this happened was that there were
features live-build didn't support, like UEFI boot, that the Debian project
needed. This entire kerfuffle came about because Debian wanted a _better_ live
boot system.

------
DiabloD3
This is rather depressing. Debian Live has been an important part of Debian
for quite some time, and I have used that guy's work quite a lot.

------
SFjulie1
Debian said the packager was not up to their standards of bureaucracy.

It does not respect the impossible requirements (multi-archi, grub2, UEFI
compliant).

So they are making a committee to fix the situation.

And maybe when all archi but x86 will have died and optical storage will do at
least 34gb, they maybe able to ship a 5 stages bootstrapper that ABI may boot
debian in one decade, and have emacs an optional requirements even if you have
only 640Mb RAM.

~~~
geofft
> It does not respect the impossible requirements (multi-archi, grub2, UEFI
> compliant).

Why do you think this is impossible? I maintained a commercial downstream
distro based on Debian Live that had all of these features working fine.

~~~
SFjulie1
Because of the bureaucracy...

I have invited people from debian to make conferences and know myself one of
the former DLP.

Debian has something scarily bureaucratic in its organization.

As an effect of conway's law (structure of the organization gets in the
product) the debian developer's guide is like hellish, their level of
indirection for forcing everyone in the LSB without breaking the change in the
"reasonnable" default conf are heavy. And not even close to correction : the
spliting package policy (avoiding too much dependency) makes installed python
or latex feels broken.

It is like the heaven of both former soviet idealism (comitee of workers
handling the positions), and engineers (debian can easily be considered an
example of the best practices of ISO 9001/ITIL process)

With good intentions.

I used to be a debian sysadmins for 15 years.

I mean, they really are trying their best to : satisfy everyone in choosing
the best default conf/options/requirements so that other packages integrates
well. The embedded world, x86, ARM, virtualisation.

But I think bureaucracy sometimes ends up like a cancer. Bureaucracy requires
to drains part of your effort into its sustainability, and sometimes the
energy involved in bureaucracy itself out sucks to much resources for even
getting the job done.

I think they try to hard to do what they think the right things. I am not even
sure they have a clear view of their monster blob distro.

Mozilla fundation is another new growing tumor in the world of open source. Do
we really need to had statefullness over a stateless protocol in order to
bring RT in a non realtime-able container ?

When will the brainwashing of the XUL team will end?

NO! the web browser is a terrible substitute for GUI especially in async
fashion.

And js is a terrible scripting language for GUI. Tcl/Tk should be back again.

------
darrmit
It doesn't reflect well on either side, to be honest. It's clear all involved
have contributed a great deal but all also struggle considerably with
communication. Seems to be a trend lately and I'm sure this won't be the last
time someone rage quits over a difference of opinion.

------
Paul_S
I always thought that debian's highly complex bureaucracy would keep things
like this from happening and make it the immortal distro you can rely on but
this is one in the series and I'm reconsidering my opinion. Maybe despite the
rock solid processes it's still just a bunch of guys writing code and having
arguments like any other project.

~~~
voltagex_
It's kept me away from maintaining any packages, that's for sure.

------
skrubly
Very interesting series of threads. I'm sad to see this happen. I switched to
Debian from RH as my personal choice back at Potato and have used the live
build a couple times that were a real help. Some of the thoughts I had while
reading this were 'Wow, I never want to get involved with anything to do with
package maintaining' and 'It seems like Ubuntu is pretty much just running the
whole show now'. Maybe that's an oversimplification but I really don't like
the entire direction that Ubuntu is going in which is why I stopped using it
as my default desktop OS. Now I kind of feel like I don't have a 'home base'
distro anymore. Sigh.

------
loginusername
So are the choices listed at the url below not going to be available in the
future?

I always liked that there are choices of different sized images (.img not
.iso), including xfce and especially the minimal "standard".

And also that the compressed kernel vmlinuz and ramdisk initrd are available
separately for each.

Are these choices going to disappear? What are all those downstream projects
going to use now?

[http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current-
live/i386/webboo...](http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current-
live/i386/webboot/)

------
monochromatic
Looks like a bunch of needless drama.

------
eridal
Call me suspicious, but taking over that project means that the replacement
will get run whenever downstream distribution are live booted

If you were evil .. Isn't that a nice project to hijack?

~~~
5ilv3r
What's that sonny? Canonical land grab?

------
andrew-lucker
Debian community is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

------
fctales
"We will not hide problems". What a lie.

------
redthrowaway
That's quite the rage quit.

