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by gnramires 1696 days ago
This is not bikeshedding, at least as I see it. Debian is used in millions of systems and many may rely on the exact output of 'which' command. Their job is to make these systems incredibly reliable, make improvements and make sure those improvements are rolled out as smoothly as possible. This is unsexy like plumbing and maintenance is unsexy, but still absolutely instrumental to society.

Linux overall has an amazing separation of concerns structure (inherited from the POSIX tradition). The user-facing details you might be worried about like the interface design etc. are all handled by separate teams that expect their base to be reliable and stable so they can make other changes.
2 comments
gnramires 1695 days ago
On speed of change: There is of course too slow (too stable) and too unstable. The job of a good maintainer is also to weight possible gains against the downstream effort. Each project has also its own promises -- if you project advertises stability, big changes will cause a lot of grief downstream. If your project advertises instability, users will be more ready for changes.
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dangerface 1696 days ago
> Their job is to make these systems incredibly reliable

They why did they switch to systemd? It seems like linux developers have nothing better to do than just rename stuff with no obvious advantage to the new standards but breaking backwards compatibility with the old standards.

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