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✧✦✶✷Catherine✷✶✦✧

@hailey the biggest counterargument to the distro mode of software delivery that I know is that it's not uncommon for distro maintainers to just break packages, or to be hostile to upstream efforts--I've been told to not bother maintaining a debian/ because the first step in Debian is to `rm -rf` it

since if they break it, it's on me to fix it, why would I want them to package it?

31 August at 15:32 | Wall-to-wall | Open on mastodon.social
4 comments
Hailey

@whitequark I dunno about this one, if distro maintainers are breaking packages that sucks, and if they're hostile to upstream effort that's as bad as if upstream is hostile to distros. debian has problems for sure, their tooling is complex and the steep learning curve makes it difficult for newcomers (me included) to get involved. I do fundamentally believe that collaboration and efforts to build consensus is important though, and at the end of the day, I appreciate having a mediator between upstream and me to apply back-pressure against economic forces which are increasingly pushing devs towards a move-fast-break-things sling-shit-over-the-fence model

@whitequark I dunno about this one, if distro maintainers are breaking packages that sucks, and if they're hostile to upstream effort that's as bad as if upstream is hostile to distros. debian has problems for sure, their tooling is complex and the steep learning curve makes it difficult for newcomers (me included) to get involved. I do fundamentally believe that collaboration and efforts to build consensus is important though, and at the end of the day, I appreciate having a mediator between upstream...

31 August at 15:38 | Open on hails.org
Hailey

@whitequark I think it's worth noting that the distro mode of delivery isn't for everything. it's for everything on the system that I expect to work and don't want to be responsible for. I'm happy to take on responsibility for the 'application tier' - like building my own ruby - but I don't really want to build my own zlib or gcc or most of the rest of it.

31 August at 15:42 | Open on hails.org
Dr. Mastodonocologist

@whitequark @hailey
This is the kind of thing which is making devs only support their software in a container, and now when shit breaks I (sysadmin) am forced to trouble shoot both containers and the applications packaged within the container. Especially when it's a single container on a hardware machine, when I would have just had that one app directly on hardware. Looking at you, #Ceph. Don't tell me it makes my life easier, I know what makes my life easier, and it ain't that.

31 August at 16:12 | Open on mastodon.social
chozu
@whitequark @hailey I mean it sucks that when software is already a bunch of "having to take responsibility for things that aren't your fault" and bad distro stuff causes even more of that

but, we find enough bugs doing things like "running upstream's tests" that I don't think in general we're at the point where distros don't need to exist (especially since I'm at the end where we're testing and fixing stuff before it gets into arch or whatever)

to be clear I have no objection to your logic in your case

maybe we'll evolve to a point where distros as an experience are no longer necessary but rather a concept we use to enrich our understanding of what software being broken was like
@whitequark @hailey I mean it sucks that when software is already a bunch of "having to take responsibility for things that aren't your fault" and bad distro stuff causes even more of that

but, we find enough bugs doing things like "running upstream's tests" that I don't think in general we're at the point where distros don't need to exist (especially since I'm at the end where we're testing and...
31 August at 16:33 | Open on fedi.absturztau.be
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