[HN Gopher] The most prolific packager for Alpine Linux is stepp...
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The most prolific packager for Alpine Linux is stepping away
Author : pantalaimon
Score : 182 points
Date : 2023-07-31 11:01 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.phoronix.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.phoronix.com)
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| [flagged]
| cocacola1 wrote:
| That was fun to sing along to.
| hackermeows wrote:
| Totally not written by an AI
| glckr wrote:
| It's a reference to Hamilton. Definitely reads like nonsense
| without the context, though...
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| Upvoted for rhyming. But to your comment, I'm sure Alpine will
| be fine. Just might be slightly behind while other maintainers
| pick up the slack.
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| Alpine's community has always seemed kind of "slap this together"
| combined with "figure it out yourself". I remember trying to
| contribute and it being a pain. Advice to the maintainers: spend
| a month or two finding ways to make it easier for us to
| contribute, and we will.
| copperbrick25 wrote:
| What issues exactly did you have with contributing? I found it
| very easy to contribute to alpine, I wrote an APKBUILD, created
| a pull request, someone reviewed my PR and pointed out an
| issue, I fixed it and my PR was merged. I can't think of a way
| that could be made any easier.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| Sounds like all the release engineering rigor of a 1 man, DIY
| hobby out for the path of least resistance.
|
| One person trying to do too much is no bueno. It needs to be a
| team effort and consumers need to step-up to be occasional
| producers as well.
| fluix wrote:
| Could you describe what you found difficult? I'm pretty new to
| packaging on Alpine, but found it to be easy to get into, only
| requiring a bit more effort than the AUR.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| I use alpine and on my desktop and I've seen that handle so much!
| Thanks for all your hard work, if you ever read this.
|
| As an aside, I really should learn how to package stuff for
| alpine.
| oneshtein wrote:
| - It's time for AI to replace the maintainer!
|
| - But AI costs money to run, while maintainers are working for
| free...
| phkahler wrote:
| Then we'd need someone to maintain the AI.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| Who then would maintain the AI maintainer?
|
| And who maintains the AI maintainer maintainer?
| pmontra wrote:
| Congratulations for all those packages and best wishes for
| catching up that year of sleep.
| derealized wrote:
| I've been in this situation at a couple of companies. Very
| prolific in the first year, only to burn out.
|
| At my new job, I'm taking it easy.
| nvahalik wrote:
| This isn't a sprint. It's a marathon.
| [deleted]
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| Except when everything is a sprint, back to back, forever and
| ever
| agumonkey wrote:
| I think burnout happens when people slow you below your
| marathon speed.
| agumonkey wrote:
| what was your motivation ? and what changed ? I like high
| output in jobs, it's tiresome at times but makes me tired is
| lack of freedom and lack of surroundings. You'd like to
| organize things to promote speed and quality but some companies
| don't care. Good colleague will allow you to find better ideas,
| bad colleague will make you regress.
| derealized wrote:
| I have intrisic motivation, I just like what I work with and
| like to do a good job. I often have high standards for my
| work.
|
| What changed? It's very tiresome to swim against the current.
| You can only care about so many things that your team doesn't
| until you get tired of barking at the tree.
|
| At my new job it's the same, as usual, but I'm not forcing
| things and just getting with the flow. If I can, I'll suggest
| some ocasional improvements but if it falls on deaf ears,
| I'll let it go.
| raybb wrote:
| At those jobs were you working on OSS? Curious how OSS
| maintainers that aren't at big companies find community and
| talk to each other.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Good point. I got into a few discord groups about that.
| But I've seen some issues, everybody is very motivated..
| but about incompatible things. So it doesn't work well
| (at least so far).
|
| To the point I was investigating the value of money
| (which I often despise).. because all of a sudden, people
| collaborate a bit more when there's a stupid material
| advantage in the end.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I just suffered the same fate. There's a thick fog of
| absurdity in teams where people who lacks knowledge, drive
| and desire to do great work waste time on nothing, bragging
| about nothing, while slowing everything you try down (even
| when done with a wide care about the team operations in
| general) [0].
|
| I lost the will to fight even though I think about it on a
| daily basis but now I just coast along. My issue is that
| time passes and I don't want to live my life like this so I
| keep dreaming of a way to sustain myself and then do better
| work for better purposes.
|
| [0] it's a common pattern in groups, I've seen that in many
| different jobs.. it can be jealousy, old age fatigue making
| you sour, mob think, lack of communication but in the end,
| there's a natural tendency to create friction. It's the
| complete opposite of childhood playtime.. where everybody
| had one goal : maximize fun together in some game
| (Intrinsic motivation 100%). Adult life makes this very
| rare.
| automatoney wrote:
| This is so relatable. I was looking forward to working on
| projects that I cared about more, but then when I got there
| I realized how much energy actually caring takes.
|
| Especially in terms of emotional investment - I've decided
| to save my passion more for personal projects instead of
| spending it all where it won't necessarily go anywhere.
| LargeTomato wrote:
| I know how you feel. It leads to burnout. People don't
| value what you're doing because it's not on their radar.
| Maybe I'm misaligned with the company, maybe they're
| unaware of the scope of what's going on.
|
| I'm at a new company now. I care but I keep my passion
| elsewhere. I can't keep getting burned out so I've just
| fallen in line with everyone else. People are more
| receptive to it. I spent my time drafting emails instead of
| commits. I make 4 tickets instead of one mega ticket. It is
| what it is and I'm happier for it.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I noticed that in teams without high pressure or high
| leadership, the tendency is minimal effort in all
| dimensions. People don't want to try.. maybe it's seen as
| being an idiot, or ambitious i don't know, but I often
| see a mediocre spirit and people bailing out at 5pm
| because the job is not worth staying (not that i
| encourage staying late).
| mrweasel wrote:
| This always fascinating to see a person that maintains a ton of
| package, knowing full well that there is no way that they
| actively use all that software themselves. At the same time there
| are millions of us that just expects a package to be available,
| but never think to offer to at least help maintain a something.
| Frequently it's not even that hard, sure there are a few
| specialized packages which require more skills, but packaging up
| a Python library is something most of us could easily do.
|
| Generally all of us needs to be better at pitching in where we
| can and not be depended on a few people overworking themselves.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| I don't know about Alpine specifically, but many distributions
| put a lot of red tape around becoming a maintainer (for good
| reasons). I just don't want to get into it. AUR from Arch Linux
| has an interesting take on this -- anyone can become a
| maintainer in a matter of minutes -- and while that results in
| some low-quality packages and the expectation that you're
| supposed to review everything you install (which is easy though
| thanks to the excellent package format, which Alpine also uses
| with minor modifications), most of them are fine, and AUR gets
| a lot more maintainers than any other distribution.
|
| You also don't put any obligations on yourself by becoming a
| maintainer on AUR -- you can always orphan a package in less
| than a minute, no questions asked. Some users actually place
| new packages on AUR and orphan them right away. If it's of any
| use, it usually get a volunteer maintainer within a few days.
| bombcar wrote:
| Gentoo makes it pretty easy to add an "overlay" to get
| packages that someone makes, and if they get steam it becomes
| simple to import them into "mainstream".
|
| ~x86 helps too, masking a package is a good way to say "maybe
| tested, maybe not so much".
| fluix wrote:
| I've found packaging for Alpine has been similarly easy.
| There is a review process in the sense that you file an MR
| instead of committing directly, but my experience has been
| really quick and easy. Also, not everyone with commit access
| does this, but psykose would also fix minor issues like
| indentation without requesting changes and doing the whole
| back and forth. I really appreciated it and noticed the
| changes for next time.
|
| The community and main repositories have some stability
| guarantees but that doesn't stop you from orphaning the
| package.
| freedomben wrote:
| Fedora is particularly bad at what you describe. It's
| basically just impossible for somebody who isn't already in
| the system (or doesn't know somebody who is already in the
| system) to get into the system. Between hard to find
| documentation and requirements like, "just join the mailing
| list and ask for people to sponsor you" (which nobody wants
| to do when they don't already know you) you have to _really_
| want to do it. I could have easily maintained several
| packages that I built, but after sinking 4 hours into it
| (building the packages only took an hour or so), in the end I
| just threw them on my COPR and called it a day. I 'm not
| going to spin my wheels trying to jump ridiculous non-
| technical hurdles and try to navigate needlessly opaque
| processes.
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| > Fedora is particularly bad at what you describe.
|
| Thank goodness. There is no other free Linux distro out
| there which gives the benefits of both a stable release
| with great support for most of the latest hardware AND
| rapid package/kernel updates (approaching a rolling
| release). This must not be easy since its so rare. Whatever
| they are doing regarding maintainership is working very
| well from what I can tell.
| lannisterstark wrote:
| That's...not what they meant. That's not what's happening
| either. It discourages newer maintainers. older
| maintainers eventually retire.
|
| What a strange POV. "Thank goodness x and y are blocked
| off."
|
| It's easy to make the same argument for proprietary
| software. "Thank goodness x or y don't allow just randos
| to touch their source code and make PRs. That'd be
| DISASTROUS!"
| crznp wrote:
| I don't think it is a strange point of view: Fedora is a
| good outcome, so don't question how the sausage is made.
|
| Maybe it is shortsighted in the long run? We'll see. I'm
| glad that we have choices -- AUR on one hand, Fedora on
| the other (and Debian, Alpine, etc)
| unmole wrote:
| OpenSUSE Tumbleweed says hi.
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| Maybe so. You wanna hear something crazy? I'm still salty
| over MS partnering with SuSE to offer Linux
| indemnification from SCO's legal action in 2004. But I'm
| not entirely impractical. Most how-tos and tutorials
| cover the Debian and RedHat descendents but only
| occasionally cover rolling distros or SuSE derivatives.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _There is no other free Linux distro out there which
| gives the benefits of both a stable release with great
| support for most of the latest hardware AND rapid package
| /kernel updates (approaching a rolling release)._
|
| This has nothing to do with that. They could absolutely
| make it easier for new people without harming their
| quality. For God's sake just better _documentation_ would
| help, and I don 't see how they're going to lose hardware
| support because they wrote _one_ canonical page with all
| the info you need. The process should be more of a
| checklist to complete, and less of post-crime forensic
| investigation where tons of details and tips are missing
| and people have to draw flow charts and hunt for missing
| information just to figure out what the next step should
| be. Your reply is a (very) shallow dismissal of an actual
| issue and (assuming you 're not alone) probably the
| reason this is such a problem in the first place.
| teddyh wrote:
| In Debian at least you can become a Debian "Maintainer"
| more easily than you can become a Debian Developer.
| bfrog wrote:
| Sure, but building debian packages is akin to needing to
| read lord of the rings before doing anything. There's so
| many deb helpers and various files/file formats that need
| to be understood. How and where files should go. It's
| horrendously complex compared to PKGBUILD and makepkg.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Yup, been there and walked away from it all.
| ibotty wrote:
| It's not as bad as you make it to be. There are bugzilla
| categories like needs-sponsor that will usually attract a
| sponsor pretty soon.
| raverbashing wrote:
| but you know what? I think Alpine is right
|
| If you see the distros with more red tape ( _cough_ debian
| _cough_ ) , you have people "reigning in their little
| Package Kingdom" which also can end up with orphaned (or at
| least severely neglected) packages
| bfrog wrote:
| It's really hard to beat the PKGBUILD + makepkg ease of
| packaging. I really hope nix flakes kind of become simple and
| easy as time goes on. They kind of are, but nix having so
| many features and flexibility also means that super simple
| makepkg type program is sort of intertwined in a few other
| things.
|
| Ideally? nix build someflake would just work. Reality is
| there's a few hoops at the moment which is kind of a
| disappointing aspect.
|
| If nix build someflake Just Worked I could see a lot more ad-
| hoc type contributions happening. Better still unlike makepkg
| its _very_ easy to customize a package so presumably fewer
| same-but-slight-variant type things tha aur has a lot of
| would be consolidated.
| wpietri wrote:
| My dad knew a mail carrier. Tall, lanky, energetic, and a bit
| of an odd duck. When he started a new route, he'd go through it
| quickly, finishing early. An early finish meant they'd add more
| to the route. He'd take that as a challenge, working even
| harder to get through it early. They'd extend the route again,
| creating another challenge.
|
| This would repeat until he was nearly running to get the route
| done in time. At this point things got boring, so he'd use his
| seniority to switch to a new route. That mean some poor low-
| seniority sucker would get assigned his very demanding route
| and struggle desperately with it, finishing very late.
|
| My point being that some people like being heroes, at least for
| a while. It seems to me kinda like the way I like running
| races: fun as an occasional challenge partly because doing
| something unsustainable causes me to push myself.
| pengaru wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Jeff Vogel of Spider Web Software would
| describe this as someone being a Viking, based on his great
| GDC talk.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| After long stints with Slackware, RedHat, SuSE, and Debian, I
| got very much into Gentoo Linux. Kept a local copy of the
| portage tree. Ran a dozen servers out of my house. That sort of
| thing. Then, I found a new job with a very-small, highly-
| technical company, which had built a successful business on the
| back of a custom physical testing software written by the young
| guy who was my boss. They used Gentoo for everything. It was
| probably a year into the job before I went to look up something
| about a package, and found my boss' name listed as the
| maintainer. That made sense, because it was a vital package
| that our custom software stack depended on. Then I noticed his
| name on something else. Then I grepped the portage tree, and
| discovered that he was the maintainer of MANY HUNDREDS of
| packages in the distro. I believe it takes a special skill set
| to want to do that, but this guy was on another level. He is
| the most talented, yet most modest, person I've ever seen.
| wvh wrote:
| Whenever I tried to get into packaging something during the
| years, I've bumped into politics and policy issues associated
| with each project to a lesser or greater degree. Technical
| knowledge is not enough, you must also really get into each
| project's rules and mindset, find a sponsor/mentor, adhere to
| its standards, gain trust, attend meetings, learn a specific
| tool set, all of which is a whole different ballpark compared
| to throwing a working technical solution over the wall.
| cinntaile wrote:
| I think that's the purpose, you want to filter out anyone
| that is not highly motivated because otherwise you'll have to
| invest a ton of time into many different people and you don't
| have that kind of bandwidth.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| > otherwise you'll have to invest a ton of time into many
| different people and you don't have that kind of bandwidth.
|
| but _who_ is investing this time and bandwidth?
|
| It seems like this sort of governance model allows politics
| to replace egalitarianism or meritocracy. I could have
| become a Debian contributor/packager many times over, but
| it always seemed not worth it for a thankless job which is
| mostly dealing with bureaucracy and red tape instead of
| actually solving technical matters.
|
| (To be fair, I've since moved on to Funtoo, which, like
| Gentoo, is very egalitarian -- but requires a certain,
| rather high, level of technical interest and expertise
| which is its own filtering function. On the other hand,
| Debian's packaging policies are very strict, and many
| distributions have much less strict packaging policies.)
|
| How do the less-difficult distributions such as Arch or
| Alpine do it with less overhead (and is that better or
| worse?)
| novok wrote:
| I always kind of wonder why self packaging isnt a better
| supported thing in general? Like if i use macos, why not
| read the brewfile from the repo directly and so on. Your
| are already trusting the software to not mess with your
| system to a certain extent anyway
| daniel-thompson wrote:
| 13K commits over the past year works out to almost 40 commits per
| day. Curious what the workflow is to accomplish that and the
| nature of the commits. Irrespective of that, that is super
| intense, sounds like she's getting a well-deserved rest.
| pcdoodle wrote:
| does that mean it's getting apt-get? A big win in my opinion, i
| can only remember so many cooky terminal commands.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Why would a person stopping making packages lead you to
| conclude that they would replace the package manager?
| seeknotfind wrote:
| Lock herself out - sounds like an addiction.
| alias_neo wrote:
| It may have been a poor choice of words intended to suggest she
| was "relinquishing privileges".
|
| It's good operational and operational-security practice to
| ensure people don't have access to things they don't need when
| they no longer need them.
|
| When I put a request in to access production to debug
| something, I immediately relinquish that access by way of
| removing my privileges, or asking operations to do so, as soon
| as I'm done with the task at hand.
| wpietri wrote:
| It might have been. But but the other factors make me take it
| at face value. In each of the last 3 quarters, psykose had
| more commits than everybody else _put together_. Going from
| that to doing zero while saying she needs to sleep for a
| year, plus specifically dropping mantainership of everything
| is not just putting away a tool you don 't need for the
| moment. It's locking in a major lifestyle change.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| With your help I'm now seeking counciling for my addiction to
| previous homes where I had keys, and returned them when moving
| out
|
| I'm glad they had the sense to disable their ability to publish
| since they don't intend to use it
|
| What a weird speculation
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Possibly, but also unhelpful and irrelevant.
| seeknotfind wrote:
| Hmm. Well I'm surprised to hear this actually. Figure I'll
| reply here. I work on a lot of open source projects and have
| done authorship analysis, and they do tend to follow a power
| distribution.
|
| The thing is, I'm one of those authors that loves to make a
| bunch of changes. Fix this, fix that. I'll throw up a commit
| before I'll send an email about it. I love fixing things. I
| consider myself a programmer through and through. When I
| entered management, I don't get that "fix" at work, so I
| might code 9hr on a Saturday building something fun.
|
| I've always viewed it as a good thing. An escape, a joy,
| cathartic, and pleasurable. Perhaps sometimes, it's gone too
| far. I left a birthday party last summer to go back and code.
| Though, you see, I'm also trying to build something, to do
| something.
|
| So to see the full blown addiction behavior. It's like
| looking over the edge of a cliff. I don't think I would go
| that far, but for me the most important takeaway from the
| article was this too can be an addiction.
| wpietri wrote:
| I disagree entirely. If we want to solve problems like "make
| sure packages have maintainers" we need to think very hard
| about human impact and human motivation.
|
| People can be addicted to work. People can be addicted to
| anything that provides relief from pain while increasing the
| likelihood of future pain. This very site has the
| "noprocrast" feature, something that recognizes we can get
| hooked on things that can be productive.
|
| When somebody goes from doing 6x what anybody else is doing
| to quitting cold turkey and saying that they're going to lock
| themselves out and catch up on a year of sleep, that's pretty
| clearly an unhealthy, unsustainable relationship. If we want
| to keep this from happening again, seeing what the addiction
| model can tell us is both helpful and relevant.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Sure. But surely you can admit that "we need to discuss
| maintainers mental health" is an entirely different thing
| than "wpietri is having a mental health episode, let's
| discuss"
| wpietri wrote:
| I don't think that's what seeknotfind did. And I don't
| think somebody going cold turkey on an addiction is
| having a mental health episode; if anything, it's the
| opposite. But even if it were, if the article is "wpietri
| suddenly quits doing half of all Alpine maintenance,
| wants to sleep for a year", then yeah, I'd rather people
| discuss that then not even acknowledge the impact on me.
| blueflow wrote:
| I'd rather have more talk about maintainer mental health than
| less.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Agreed. But whether or not a particular maintainer has a
| particular mental health issue is not the forum nor topic
| for such a discussion.
| newswasboring wrote:
| Random speculation about someone's mental health is not
| talking about mental health.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| [flagged]
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| bro. don't be the person you don't like.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| Some programming behaviour is addiction-like. A lot of
| programmers I know have spent >50 hours in front of a computer,
| barely going even to the toilet, to code something they're
| obsessed with. Don't know what to make of that really but it's
| not uncommon.
| mmastrac wrote:
| The blessing and curse of having a prolific contributor (mostly
| the former). The trick is to manage burnout and figuring out
| continuity for these individuals to avoid massive upset in the
| open-source project if they decide to move on or take an extended
| break.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> The trick is to manage burnout and figuring out continuity
| for these individuals to avoid massive upset in the open-source
| project if they decide to move on or take an extended break.
|
| Another good trick would be to get more maintainers. If a bunch
| of people would just handle _one_ package each...
| mmastrac wrote:
| If it was easy to get more volunteer maintainers, a lot of
| open-source projects would be very happy. :)
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