[HN Gopher] Leaving Debian
___________________________________________________________________
Leaving Debian
Author : tut-urut-utut
Score : 136 points
Date : 2021-11-02 13:44 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (corecursive.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (corecursive.com)
| seanhunter wrote:
| In my experience Debian has always had it's share of community
| drama and static. Around 2002 I used to publish a couple of RPMs
| and since I used to use Debian myself for some of my own servers
| I decided to publish .debs as well. So some debian folks asked me
| to "make them official". I found becoming a Debian dev such a
| pita I just abandoned the attempt. Literally at one point one
| Debian dev _who was a co-worker of mine in real life_ refused to
| sign my key because he said "how could he really sure of my
| identity". Dude, we work together, for a regulated financial
| institution that does background checks. How could I get away
| with having some kind of secret identity?
|
| I just decided to avoid the friction and not bother publishing my
| .debs.
| cryptonector wrote:
| First thing I did: ^F which
| throw63738 wrote:
| If you ever read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"... Debian feels
| very far from this original vision, endless drama and politics.
| Similar to Gnome and Mozilla.
|
| I am very happy with OpenSuse.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| I just saw that Debian might remove the "which" command
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026623), apparently
| with little reason? Which is bonkers
| Taywee wrote:
| There was a proposal, disagreement, and a vote, which ruled
| in keeping the "which" command where it is for at least the
| next major version. "which" is in no danger of disappearing
| at the moment.
|
| The discussion went approximately:
|
| "`which` is nonstandard and doesn't always work the same.
| Maybe we should remove it and have everybody use `command -v`
| instead, which is standard. Also, in testing, I've added a
| deprecation notice to prepare for it."
|
| "Let's have a vote to see. A lot of people use `which`, and
| that deprecation notice breaks some builds.
|
| ...
|
| Vote says no. Remove the deprecation notice and leave `which`
| where it is for the next release"
|
| Later, on Hacker News: "Debian might be removing "which"! Why
| are they doing this?"
|
| Most of the commenters, it seems, never actually read the
| entire story.
| cryptonector wrote:
| It's stupid. An immense and completely unjustified waste of
| time. which(1) requires maintenance no more than once per
| decade. In terms of the amount of maintenance that which(1)
| requires, the entire debate took centuries' worth of the
| maintainer's time to settle, and much more of everyone
| else's time. The entire effort to get others to switch from
| which(1) will take untold amounts of _their_ time.
|
| In conclusion: Debian couldn't care less about their users'
| time. No respect for the users.
|
| I'm trying to make my real thoughts on this palpable.
| Idiotic doesn't even begin to cover it.
| md8z wrote:
| I think it may benefit to take a step back before
| assuming bad faith. The issue was (and still is) that
| "which" is not portable and it's difficult to detect what
| version you have installed.
| Karunamon wrote:
| Depraved indifference (we don't care how much this will
| annoy users) rather than bad faith. Given the lack of
| maintenance burden and the amount of stuff that would
| break in $bignum scripts, the idea that removing it was
| seriously even considered speaks volumes.
| md8z wrote:
| I'm not sure what "volumes" you're talking about. Those
| scripts already risk being broken and causing maintenance
| burden by depending on the non-standard behavior in the
| first place. If you actually had this specified in your
| dependencies then it would be easy to spot the necessary
| change and fix it.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Is debian supposed to be a cathedral or a bazaar?
| cryptonector wrote:
| A cathedral around the bazaar.
| hyper_reality wrote:
| Inspiring interview, as the interviewer says there's a zen about
| Joey where he's dedicated himself to producing great open source
| software (git-annex, debhelper, ikiwiki) instead of trying to
| make millions.
|
| Surely he can look back over the last few decades and feel proud
| of his work and the benefit it has brought to so many users. The
| tech treadmill can cause us to lose focus on the things that
| really matter or that really inspired us to begin with, so this
| is a refreshing perspective.
| codeflo wrote:
| Debian is my preferred distribution for servers, I'm simply in
| awe of what the community has achieved. Most of the good features
| that people associate with Ubuntu are actually in Debian, with
| none of the proprietary weirdness that creeps into Ubuntu year
| over year.
|
| The project does, however, sometimes have its share of people who
| dogmatic/pedantic to the point where it really doesn't help the
| cause. This might be expected from something that's a passion
| project for many of its contributors, and to Debian's credit,
| they've always been able to resolve these conflicts eventually.
|
| The article mentions the systemd drama. The recent kerfuffle
| around the 'which' command might be a smaller example of this
| kind of thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026623 And
| note: As silly as that discussion was, when it got widespread
| attention, it was actually already resolved.
| fstrthnscnd wrote:
| > Most of the good features that people associate with Ubuntu
| are actually in Debian, with none of the proprietary weirdness
| that creeps into Ubuntu year over year.
|
| A lot of what you find in Debian also comes from what Ubuntu
| does. In fact, I believe that many people hired by Ubuntu in
| the early days were experienced maintainers for Debian.
|
| 20 years ago, the problem was all about getting Linux consumer
| desktop friendly. On the server side, it was mostly OK, people
| there were not afraid of a TTY, because it was the primary
| entry point to learning Linux, and Unix in general, whereas in
| the Windows world, people first approach was (and still is) the
| GUI. Debian wasn't as good as it is today in the desktop area.
|
| Ubuntu appeared on the market mainly to solve that problem
| (they were not the first ones to do that), and "leverage" on
| the acquired expertise to make money.
|
| Nowadays, the money is in servers and IoT, so they are focusing
| to that segment of the market.
|
| The nature of open source meant that of course, Debian benefits
| from their work.
| jjav wrote:
| Personally I'm sad about debian. I've been debian-only user
| since ca. 2000. It was always the model for a stable, no
| nonsense distro where everything worked. People complained
| about slow change but to me that's a huge feature. I want the
| system to continue working for years, not constantly break with
| the latest API-breaking updates.
|
| The systemd drama of a few years back really soured me on
| debian though. On the plus side, it has made me explore OpenBSD
| and FreeBSD, both of which I use these days. Also I'm using
| Devuan where I need or want Linux.
|
| Still, I miss having the old debian which eschewed trendiness
| and valued stability more.
| krzyk wrote:
| Regarding systemd, I'm not sure if majority wanted it. The fact
| that it heats the temperature means that it is not true, more
| like 50/50 are for/against.
| throwawaymanbot wrote:
| I was for SystemD(isaster) initially. Then its "scope" turned
| in to a Poettering Vanity Project.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| https://lwn.net/Articles/585319/
|
| I didn't follow this at all at the time and thought it was
| something like 90% for. Turns out, it was closer to 50/50:
|
| > The vote came down much as expected, with a 4:4 split
| between systemd and Upstart proponents. Anthony Towns
| analyzed the votes and declared a tie between systemd and
| Upstart, which left it up to the chairman to decide by using
| the casting vote. Garbee did just that, voting for systemd,
| which makes it the Debian Linux default init for jessie.
| secondaryacct wrote:
| Thank God for that !
| rektide wrote:
| I'm very much in the "Thank God"-ish camp (if ya'll
| welcome others, non denominations & non-believers),
| but... wouldn't it be interesting if. It's convenient
| that we've consolidated down, but that famous freedom of
| choice seems to be circumscribed now by a ellipse with
| systemd at one focus point, and refusenik shell-script-
| only minimal pid1s at the other.
|
| Having a more active & ongoing paradigmatic discourse
| would have been interesting.
|
| So I kind of want a synopsis for upstart. These threads
| might provide some of that material. I'd touched upstart
| a couple times back so long ago, & the words "event-
| based" keep flashing before me, but I don't have much
| recall on upstart. What was it bad at? What didn't people
| like? What did people like? What was novel & interesting?
| What had potential but didn't quite work out? What was
| the best operational parts of it? There's so much tech in
| the world that doesn't quite make it, or which did make
| it & fell (CORBA), & we really need more Speakers For the
| Dead, people who can try to tell us the story of the tech
| earnestly, who can help us memorialize something by
| drawing together as much understanding, from as many
| points of view as they can.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _I don 't have much recall on upstart. What was it bad
| at?_
|
| The author of systemd addresses this question in the
| original blog post which announced the systemd project
| (look under the heading " _On Upstart_ "):
|
| http://0pointer.net/blog/projects/systemd
| robocat wrote:
| What a great summary! In my words: systemd works from a
| dependency graph, and upstart uses procedural events
| (dependencies implicit in code).
|
| Upstart is still used by ChromiumOS:
| https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-
| docs/...
| app4soft wrote:
| > _The article mentions the systemd drama._
|
| Solution: switch to antiX, MX Linux or Devuan.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Or Gentoo.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I've been using Debian for both server and desktop work for
| years (wow, actually decades) now. I like that I don't have to
| fiddle with it. Once set up, it just works well, basically
| forever. No fear of running apt-get dist-upgrade and having to
| shave yaks for an afternoon getting everything working again. I
| have no need to live on the bleeding edge of every package
| update, and not a big fan of some of the choices made by Ubuntu
| and other Debian-based distributions, so Debian is perfect for
| me. I didn't even know Drama among the project maintainers
| existed, so they seem to have managed to keep personnel issues
| out of the actual software distribution, which is also a bonus.
| npsimons wrote:
| > I've been using Debian for both server and desktop work for
| years (wow, actually decades) now.
|
| Same; I've yet to find anything more stable and well put
| together.
| matmatmatmat wrote:
| 10x this. Install it. Set autoupdates. Come back in 3 years
| when it's time to think about upgrading to the next major
| release. Maybe don't upgrade, because, why? Everything works.
| I just want to keep things working.
|
| To be honest, Desktops reached their peak for me with Gnome
| 2. I'm using MATE and I'm good.
| winrid wrote:
| You can also use gnome-flashback which looks like Gnome 2.
|
| https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeFlashback
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| This is the key fragment:
|
| _> I was perfectly happy with systemd myself. I did empathize
| with people who didn't like it for whatever reason, but it was
| clear to me that every Linux distribution except for one or two
| would be switching to systemd eventually. And I felt that I was
| pretty good at prognosticating, this kind of thing. So I was, if
| Debian can't make the obvious decision without all this much
| drama, it's too much for me._
|
| His way is thinking is basically the same as of all Systemd
| supporters. "I see no problem, it is obvious, everybody is doing
| it so we will do it sooner or later, anyway."
|
| But this is not, and never has been the point. The crux of the
| matter was very technical[0]: by gluing GDM to Systemd, the
| Systemd developers made it very difficult for distributors to
| support other init systems. They basically forced everybody to
| switch, and Systemd was not bug-free - it gave sysadmins around
| the world quite some work, and in some cases, also caused
| unforeseen problems.
|
| In hindsight, we can see it was unnecessary. Devuan should never
| have to exist. Debian is offering some support for System V init
| now. All this drama was completely redundant if someone had not
| made one controversial architectural decision. Yes, we would have
| probably transitioned anyway - but on our own terms and at the
| time we could choose. And Joey would probably be part of Debian
| still.
|
| [0] Maybe it was also political, but this is beside the point and
| doesn't change anything.
| md8z wrote:
| "...by gluing GDM to Systemd, the Systemd developers made it
| very difficult for distributors to support other init systems.
| They basically forced everybody to switch..."
|
| I'm sorry but I don't buy this, I think you and those sysadmins
| missed something. The situation with consolekit was so bad that
| something had to be done about it, if you were blindsided by
| it, you probably weren't paying attention to that area until it
| was too late. That's unfortunate but it doesn't really make
| sense to blame the systemd developers for "making it difficult"
| when they were the only ones trying to actually solve the
| problem at that time. IIRC the upstart developers never made
| progress on this.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| GDM depends on logind which is normally provided by systemd,
| but Debian has packaged elogind since the Jessie release in
| order to support other init systems.
| shrubble wrote:
| I am learning about FreeBSD and its jails system precisely
| because of systemd. I don't intend to ever again install a
| systemd based OS for lightweight virtualization.
|
| So in that sense, systemd is helping retain some diversity in
| Unix like systems...
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| > I did empathize with people who didn't like it for whatever
| reason
|
| This is a pretty clear indicator right here that influential
| people weren't listening on the issue. Any time you state "for
| whatever reason" is a clear sign you don't care for their
| reasons.
| md8z wrote:
| I've heard quite a lot of these reasons. In my opinion, most
| of them either come from a place where the person is missing
| some key piece of information, or their use case was already
| better served by other tools anyway. So the reasons seem to
| be not particularly important. If you know something that you
| think everyone else missed, then you can mention it.
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| > So the reasons seem to be not particularly important. If
| you know something that you think everyone else missed,
| then you can mention it.
|
| Is the existence of Devuan not a good example of a
| conglomeration of reasons so that I don't have to spend
| time doing research for this request you probably don't
| want answered? You're still pushing the reasoning aside and
| saying "those reasons weren't good enough so we put them in
| the whatever catgory". I understand it's often easier to
| hand-wave away well after the fact and the damage has been
| done. The Debian community didn't move on from it, it
| split.
| md8z wrote:
| Well no, it's still not entirely clear to me what Devuan
| does process-wise that is actually different from Debian.
| I understand that they have a different set of base
| packages but so does every other modified version of
| Debian, of which there are several, it's not like Devuan
| was the first group to split off. What makes this one
| special? Why are these reasons any more important than
| any other time somebody shipped a Debian derivative for
| niche purposes? I honestly don't want to hand wave it
| away but I've never received good answers for this from
| Devuan people that themselves weren't hand-wavey, and you
| don't seem to want to discuss it either so... I guess
| that answers my question? I don't know, you tell me.
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| > I understand that they have a different set of base
| packages but so does every other modified version of
| Debian, of which there are several, it's not like Devuan
| was the first group to split off.
|
| So does every other version of Linux. If this enough to
| dissuade that there is no difference of opinion or
| difference in values and process handling and isolation
| then I cannot help you on this topic.
| md8z wrote:
| You are misunderstanding, I'm asking what those
| differences of opinion or values are. That part has not
| been explained to me. It doesn't appear to be about init
| systems anymore, because Debian also has sysvinit and
| openrc and all that stuff.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| What's funny is that some of these technical details are
| irrelevant now (some bugs have been fixed, some
| components decoupled etc.). But at that particular point
| in time, you had a very strange situation where one
| crucial system component was being completely replaced by
| another without supporting both for an extended period of
| time. Normally it takes years like with Xorg and Wayland
| etc. Once the new kid on the block gets mature, everybody
| is switching anyway. All that drama was totally avoidable
| with some imagination.
| md8z wrote:
| I don't really see how that's the case, systemd was
| always intentionally backwards compatible with sysvinit
| scripts. I'm not sure what other issues you're referring
| to but in most cases it seems one could probably just
| fall back to a shell script to implement a workaround
| like it would have been done previously anyway.
| Iolaum wrote:
| A lot of people hate systemd. However as a user who came into
| Linux after systemd was established. I m pretty happy with it.
| The more I learn about it and use it the more I appreciate it.
|
| This may be wrong but it feels like people were stuck in a local
| maximum and don't realize that if they move more than a little
| from where they were, then they'd actually be in a better place.
| On the other hand, solving again a problem you 've already
| solved, is not the most enticing part of the linux experience ;)
| dsr_ wrote:
| On the contrary: most people who had an opinion were interested
| in something other than sysvinit.
|
| It's just that we all have different ideas about what that is.
|
| daemontools-style supervisors are what I prefer, myself. I also
| acknowledge that there isn't a clear winner in that space.
|
| What I object to are people enforcing systemd by making it a
| requirement for other projects.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| One of my major objections to systemd is precisely that it
| sticks us forever at a local maximum, since it ate a bunch of
| other low-level components, so now if you come up with a
| superior service manager... good luck; nobody will ever use it
| since 1. everyone's just decided to support systemd and will
| never consider an alternative, and 2. you will have to provide
| replacements for all the other stuff that systemd does. And the
| continued EEE ensures that it will only get worse.
| npsimons wrote:
| > A lot of people hate systemd.
|
| I did. I'm still not _happy_ with the way it was forced in, and
| how the predictions of teething pains of a from scratch init
| system being developed by inexperienced developers came true. I
| still remember the growing pains from PulseAudio, the previous
| project by the same developers.
|
| But SystemD was a response to the _definite_ problems of past
| init systems. It might not be the optimal UNIX philosophy
| architecture, but it 's grown into something stable and
| powerful.
|
| At the end of the day, as a working IT or SWEng professional,
| you just want to get shit done, so you learn a new abstraction
| for the zillionth time, put it to practice, and get on with the
| problem you were trying to solve. Having moved from MS-DOS, to
| OS/2, to Slackware, to RedHat, then Debian (and staying on
| Debian for decades, for desktop and server), I trust the Debian
| devs to put out the most stable and reliable OS I've ever seen.
| alexjplant wrote:
| I started using Linux professionally on the cusp of the change
| (RHEL 6 to 7). I've never had any trouble with the init system
| but journald isn't really my jam, nor is any of the other
| creeping overcomplexity brought about by systemd's component
| interdependencies.
|
| In other words: I'm not a fan on ideological grounds but from a
| practical standpoint it seems to work just fine.
| matmatmatmat wrote:
| Just like any other complex, tightly-integrated system, systemd
| had its share of bugs, quirks, and new ways of doing things
| that forced people to change. It's not hard to imagine why it
| faced some resistance.
|
| Eh, it's been a while now, though, and I guess most of that has
| gotten worked out.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Joey left Debian in 2014. When was this podcast posted?
| idoubtit wrote:
| According to the microformat inside the HTML, it was published
| today: "datePublished": "2021-11-02 00:00:00
| +0000"
|
| But the resignation email of Joey Hess was sent on 2014-11-07,
| seven years ago.
|
| Unfortunately, this kind of mistake on dates is usually a plain
| lie to fool the SEO and get more visits. It's so frequent it's
| not even surprising.
| asddubs wrote:
| I don't think it is a lie. If you click "all episodes", it's
| the last one listed, dated Nov 2 with a "New!" badge. The
| prior episode was posted october 4th
|
| https://corecursive.com/category/podcast/
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| Host here.
|
| I knew of joeyh from hn and a previous hn post is how we ended up
| talking[1].
|
| The episode is a lot about the experience of being in the Debian
| community in the early days and the experience of being a free
| software developer, or at least that is the part of of his story
| that was most interesting to me and that I tried to highlight.
| How communities form and how they build up a shared understanding
| and culture is something I'm trying to understand.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27721883
| egberts1 wrote:
| Reasons why I left Debian:
|
| 1. go ahead and pull that Ethernet cable, your precious networked
| daemon will restart thus having to lose whatever cached or
| learned data. This is a major problem for designer of custom
| daemons.
|
| 2. Try and interface with Juniper DHCP servers at major ISP using
| systemd-networking and /etc/systemd/network settings. You'll be
| forced to revert back to ISC DHCP server and/or NetworkManager.
|
| 3. Bootup and actually making your IP-address-senstitive daemon
| croak because your custom Ethernet NIC requires 'ip addr/link up'
| in /etc/rc.local
|
| 4. Bootup and get to network-online state only to find out that
| your netdev really hasn't gotten a dynamic IP address yet, your
| networked daemon that requires those IP address to be defined on
| the netdev will croak if not handled properly.
|
| 5. You cannot firewall against PID 1.
|
| For UNIX box that are true server or not cloistered behind an
| ISP-provided gateway/router, that was more than enough to ditch
| systemd and go Devuan distro.
| arpa wrote:
| What do you mean you can't firewall against PID 1?
| josephcsible wrote:
| If you use a firewall to restrict systemd, your system
| breaks.
| md8z wrote:
| I don't understand why you would do that or what you would
| expect to happen, systemd itself is the tool that
| implements service-level firewalling.
| 1_player wrote:
| You firewall against network connections, not against PIDs.
| What is PID 1 connecting to/accepting connections from that
| blocking them breaks the system?
| egberts1 wrote:
| dig in the code
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| You do realize that using systemd-networkd/systemd-resolved is
| entirely optional, right?
|
| Most of the issues you raise sound like you simply didn't want
| to investigate in depth even though you knew you had an exotic
| setup.
| petre wrote:
| Yes, they're optional. But I don't want to waste my time
| disabling annoying stuff which shouldn't have been enabled in
| the first place.
| vbernat wrote:
| systemd-networkd is not the default method to get network
| (this is still ifupdown). systemd-resolved is not installed
| by default.
| spenczar5 wrote:
| It sounds like you stopped _using_ Debian. Were you also a
| contributor and had trouble fixing these issues because of the
| governance issues described in the article?
| egberts1 wrote:
| precisely. and every six month, Id take a peek to see if
| RedHat employee or Debian maintainer fixed it.
|
| You cannot operate without systemd in Debian 11+. It's now a
| REQUIRED "feature" and a veritable albatross around Debian's
| neck for those serious server needs.
| andrewshadura wrote:
| This is untrue, Debian can still be used with sysvinit +
| sysv-rc or openrc.
| kelnos wrote:
| Are you sure? I know this is the case for Debian buster
| (I am using sysvinit on buster on a low-RAM NAS), but on
| bullseye on my laptop, if I try to install sysvinit &
| sysv-rc, it wants to remove things like network-manager
| and lightdm.
|
| Installing openrc doesn't do that, but also doesn't
| remove any systemd components, so unclear what would
| happen if I tried to do that.
| egberts1 wrote:
| but the systemd library is mandatory along with systemd
| and many services that. various services did not used to
| REQUIRE them but now do so.
|
| you just cannot unplug systemd 100% thereby contaminating
| the disk with useless stuff.
| md8z wrote:
| The systemd library is just another library on your
| system, it won't interfere with your init just to have it
| installed.
|
| If you could mention these services that require it, we
| could look at the services and see what needs to be done.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| I LOVE how this has accurate transcripts. My spoken/heard English
| isn't great, and I'm able to follow up by reading as well.
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