> It is built in the simplest way, using Devuan debootstrapped system with kernel, dtb, u-boot, and board support packages from Armbian
By the way, reading this, an idea just hit me. It persistantly seems evident distro maintains often struggle to maintain huge repositories in both well-tested and up-to-date state. Why don't we separate OS distribution and apps repos into separate independent projects? Perhaps it could be enough for distro authors to concentrate on maintaining the actuall OS (system packages). Probably also a humble number of essential apps. Everything else could be then maintained in form of PPAs by whoever is interested.
Even existence of distro "flavours" focusing on specific DEs always felt a quirk to me. An operation of installing and choosing a specific DE should never have been requiring any attention from the distro author. The fact it does suggesrs there are quirks which have to be addressed, these should better be polished away globally than worked around in every installation script.
that's the way the "immutable" distros are going. they provide a base system and then a ton of packages come from containers or flatpaks. Like things based on OpenSuSE's MicroOS or Fedora's Silverblue and Kinoite but it does require the flavors currently, since the DE are considered core packages.
Can't we still have traditional repositories though? I personally dislike snaps and flatpaks because they usually are shipped with libarries hard-baked in rather than using separately-updatable libraries in the OS, using them also often means app duplication on per-user level and at least Snap didn't support Guest sessions (because of non-standard home directory path) the last time I checked.
If you don't want to use something like snap/flatpak then all the distributions using your PPA repository have to provide the same libraries packaged the same way, and at that point what are they going to even gain from being different distributions in the first place? If someone wanted to make a fork of Ubuntu but all the packages and contents are exactly the same as mainline Ubuntu then they'd just use Ubuntu.
It evidently isn't working well enough - why are snap and flatpak a thing at all if source packages are good enough? Why do users want programs to get picked up as part of a distro's repositories?
As user, I want application to be tested and integrated with my distro by a competent maintainer. As application developer, I want to deliver latest version of my application to all users without additional testing, integration, and discussions with maintainers of all Linux distributions.
> As user, I want application to be tested and integrated with my distro by a competent maintainer.
Do you though? Most users just want the latest upstream release, packaged up so they don't have to deal with compiling or dependency management themselves (and have a chance of a clean uninstall), not any extra testing or integration. Hence the popularity of PPAs, Snap/FlatPak, etc..
Most users just want the properly working latest upstream release, which just works from the first try. It means that somebody must properly recompile, test, fix bugs, integrate, and package the software package into existing distribution. Fedora often publishes even pre-release versions of some software packages, if you want to talk about "latest" version.
> It means that somebody must properly recompile, test, fix bugs, integrate, and package the software package into existing distribution.
Recompile, yes. The rest, probably not - upstream usually does that better than any distro. Distro-specific bugs are usually caused by that distro's changes made to "integrate" the package into the distro, which are usually not something the user wants. Again, hence the popularity of PPAs and Snap/FlatPak.
> Fedora often publishes even pre-release versions of some software packages, if you want to talk about "latest" version.
Fedora has the resources to do that because they're managed by a huge company, and they're big enough that upstream will likely make changes to accommodate them. Most distros aren't on that level.
That's Okay. What I meant was just reorganizing an OS and its nonessential apps repository/ies into 2 (or more) separate projects, not making a repository compatible with every distro out there.
How would that solve the issue of keeping repositories in a both well-tested and up-to-date state? It seems to me it would only make the problem worse because we'd have different, possibly incompatible or unmaintained PPAs
It would just let the OS engineers concentrate on the OS. Potentially making better OSes, maybe also more OSes to choose from, these being actually diverse with original ideas rather than making different app/version choices their key differences. "Just don't do what you can't really do well with reasonable ease, better just do the job which actually is yours".
The point of an OS is to facilitate the applications; there's an old law of project management that improvement happens mainly at the interfaces. The idea of making an OS that will run the same applications with the same interfaces but somehow be better is fundamentally incoherent.
Not really. I just meant that an OS team probably should only work on engineering and shipping the actual OS and should not dedicate a minute of their time to running a repository with Audacity or Wesnoth in it (I like and use both). Someone else should (as long as they feel interested).
For one like the other comment pointed out different people internally often already work on different packages.
For the other external repositories are a thing.
But they are often not trusted, and if a package is maintained by upstream often it is only for one or two repos.
So it fix it you would need a repository which can work across distributions. Where maintainers exist independent of the distributions but also the organization is big and reputable enough so that people do trust it.
But to have that you need to use technology which abstracts over differences in distros especially wrt. .so dependencies. Like nix, flatpack or snap.
Or in other words I believe you either have what we have today. Or you have a core OS (which still needs packages and package managing!) and the rest is using technology similar to nix, flatpack or snap to provides package repos across distros.
> By the way, reading this, an idea just hit me. It persistantly seems evident distro maintains often struggle to maintain huge repositories in both well-tested and up-to-date state. Why don't we separate OS distribution and apps repos into separate independent projects
Because applications rely on libraries in the distribution and need to be in sync for when they change.
Ways around this are Flatpak, where those shared libraries for applications are shared runtimes that are distro agnostic.
By the way, reading this, an idea just hit me. It persistantly seems evident distro maintains often struggle to maintain huge repositories in both well-tested and up-to-date state. Why don't we separate OS distribution and apps repos into separate independent projects? Perhaps it could be enough for distro authors to concentrate on maintaining the actuall OS (system packages). Probably also a humble number of essential apps. Everything else could be then maintained in form of PPAs by whoever is interested.
Even existence of distro "flavours" focusing on specific DEs always felt a quirk to me. An operation of installing and choosing a specific DE should never have been requiring any attention from the distro author. The fact it does suggesrs there are quirks which have to be addressed, these should better be polished away globally than worked around in every installation script.