[debiandev]

A couple of healthy reminders to avoid drama and FUD:

1) People announce leaving publicly and the FLOSS community takes notice of it. This is a sign of health of Debian. In many other projects few people notices.

2) The number of Debian developers, projects, and packages has been increasing for decades.

3) For each person writing on mailing lists and blogs there are 10 people quietly contributing.

4) The same applies to the occasional flamewars. Vocal minorities are not representative of the thousands of DDs and contributors.

[zepto]

This seems like damage control and image management.

The piece was cogent, respectful, and constructive.

How about addressing his points?

[forty]

Exactly. I'm a long time Debian user, and after reading that piece I'm not worried that Debian is going to disappear, but I think he is raising good points that should be addressed.

[rstuart4133]

I'm a DD. His points left me scratching my head. Yes, Debian's infrastructure is old, but so is Big Ben and just a Big Ben still does an admirable job of broadcasting the time to the locals, Debian Bug Tracker does an admirable job of tracking bugs. I get it that he personally might prefer to interact with it via a more modern web page, but that wouldn't alter how well it tracks bugs or facilitates discussions. And besides, I find email easier to interact with automatically than a web page. Oddly he goes on to list not being able to automate things as a complaint.

The same goes for the rest of the things he lists. Yes, he might prefer to do them some other way, but the way they are done now has obviously been working very well for a long time.

As for Debian being incapable of making big changes - that's just rubbish. He's been there for 10 years for pete's sake, systemd was a big change requiring many packages to updated spanning several years and several releases, while still delivering a working system as it happened. That's not big? How about altering the source package format, or moving away from sha1 for signing, or making everything build reproducibly, or moving all developers using its collaborative development platform from FusionForge to GitLab? Sorry, he's just plain wrong on the "can't make big changes point". Debian regularly makes big changes every major release. In Bullseye they will have made big strides in migrating away from Python2. Changes of this scale are things other projects regularly struggle with, but not Debian.

His posts lists a whole pile of things about Debian he's discovered he no longer likes, which is fair enough. But as he says in his introduction it's him whose that's changed, he gone from a student with lots of time on his hands who was happy to be part of loosely collaborating group to being a member of a very focused and highly directed team at work, and he's discovered he prefers the latter. Great, I get it, happens to all of us. But that doesn't mean the Debian no longer works. It clearly works very well. It just means he's no longer a great fit for that way of doing things.

[zepto]

Very helpful response.

In particular mentioning systemd, which I was very happy to discover on returning to Linux after some time away made this answer very relatable.

[zepto]

Also:

Big Ben is a Victorian hand wound clock. It’s accuracy is maintained by moving a stack of old English pennies balanced on its pendulum. It must be wound by hand three times a week, and it takes one and a half hours to wind every time.

My guess is that the author of the piece we are discussing would find this to be an excellent analogy for the Debian processes he is complaining about.

[josefx]

At least one of his points is already addressed by the twitter thread he links: Debians bug tracker behaves correctly, Gmail just ignores the information included in the email headers to group them.

So he has been told that this is a Gmail issue, but insists on using it. Meanwhile he complains that the rsync package maintainer is blocking his changes out of personal preference. Double standards much?

[galgalesh]

Gmail is an immensely popular email provider with 1.5 billion users in 2018. It has 65% of US market and even on a global level it's the leading email provider.

This is not some esoteric email client that a handful of developers refuse to let go.

[josefx]

But it still is the source of the faulty threading behavior. The issues also seems minor enough that there is no point in adding a hack on Debians side to make the output on googles proprietary endpoint look better.

[npsimons]

You are both right; GP in that this isn't the end of Debian, and you in that the article author's points should be addressed.

[zepto]

Neither the GP, nor I, nor the original author mentioned the end of Debian, so it’s unclear how the GP can be ‘right’ about that.

[tlamponi]

I mean, I'm also not sure if his "FUD avoidant" post has the desired effect the way it is posted, but "damage control and image management" suggest that Debian would be a Company and a PR department doing such a thing.

That's simply not the case, and the OP is right that there were many Debian Developers in 2019 and there are many other Debian Developers now.

Not saying that does not mean that it won't be noticed, or just brushed over, if a prolific member decides to step down.

> The piece was cogent, respectful, and constructive.

Just for clarity, I agree with that.

> How about addressing his points?

Who, the OP? Even his nick name suggests affiliation with Debian, there is normally support and action of more people required to bring bigger change.

But yes, IMO Debian surely needs to continue to adapt or be doomed to frustrate more developers in the future.

Things like (from the blog post): > I tried to contribute a threaded list archive, but our listmasters didn’t seem to care or want to support the project.

Just seems baffling to me, he proposed to do the actual work (and with his record one could be certain that he'd follow through) of a feature where one can only win (i.e., don't like it? Just continue to use what you like).

Such resentment against unproblematic changes, bringing value to some group but not taking away value from others, is tedious and demotivating.

But who takes up the fight to change Debian? In the end it probably needs to come from within, i.e., a sizeable part of Debian Developers need to drive and push forward, or at least reduce the barriers for those who wish to do so respectfully, without breaking what is now.

[zepto]

> "damage control and image management" suggest that Debian would be a Company and a PR department doing such a thing.

No, damage control or image management in no way implies a Company or PR department. Any group can engage in these activities. Later you point out, the OP appears to be affiliated with Debian.

> Who, the OP? Even his nick name suggests affiliation with Debian, there is normally support and action of more people required to bring bigger change.

Yes, the OP. I perhaps should have used the words ‘commenting on’, or ‘responding to’ instead of ‘addressing’.

I am not expecting the OP to solve the problems, but I am suggesting that it would be more constructive to comment on the substantive content of the original article than to write innuendo about how many people are just quietly contributing, or implying that the author may be part of a ‘vocal minority’.

[tlamponi]

> No, damage control or image management in no way implies a Company or PR department. Any group can engage in these activities. Later you point out, the OP appears to be affiliated with Debian.

1. I said it seems he is affiliated, but anybody can nick name himself a variant of "debian developer" in any forum. 2. It implies that a formal body of the organisation, that can be a single person like the DPL, else it's not damage control by Debian like you suggest, but that of a single person - which can hardly be framed as damage control in this case, the blog did clearly refer to Debian as a whole, not a single person.

> I am not expecting the OP to solve the problems, but I am suggesting that it would be more constructive to comment [...]

That's what you say now, but not what you said originally. As said, change needs to come from Debian within, not some HN discussions - talk is cheap.

Thanks for the constructive down vote, though ;-)

[zepto]

“...else it's not damage control by Debian like you suggest”

Nowhere did I suggest Debian was doing damage control.

You are simply misrepresenting me.

“That’s what you say now, but not what you said originally”

Another misrepresentation. What I said originally, and my follow up comment are perfectly consistent.

I’m curious why you feel such a strong need to defend DebianDev and deny that there is any damage control happening.

[jancsika]

That's quite an impersonal, facile, and generic set of responses to a personal, respectful, detailed blog.

[debiandev]

I'm in no way responding to the blog, as you can see in my 4 points. I'm addressing the comments here.

Every time similar content is shared here there's a number of people making exaggerated claims around Debian being dead or in deep trouble.

The other comments accusing me of doing damage control are a good example.

I recommend attending Debian events in person (once COVID is gone) to see that 99% of interactions between people are very friendly.

[jancsika]

> I'm in no way responding to the blog, as you can see in my 4 points.

Your opening line in no way makes that clear:

> A couple of healthy reminders to avoid drama and FUD:

If your intent was to "in no way respond to the blog," you should have instead written something like this:

"Unlike the article, it seems like a lot comments here are intent on spreading FUD about Debian..."

> I recommend attending Debian events in person (once COVID is gone) to see that 99% of interactions between people are very friendly.

In the meantime, I'd recommend reading the blog: in it a Debian developer mentions having very friendly interactions with other Debian friends before diving into a technical, respectful, and detailed critique of the developer UX in Debian.

[debiandev]

Again, I'm talking about the article: "avoid drama and FUD" refers to HN.

Especially the word "avoid", knowing that the article is already written.

> In the meantime, I'd recommend reading the blog: in it a Debian developer mentions having very friendly interactions

And still, you keep assuming that I'm not talking in good faith and that I'm trying to subtly attack he article.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html