> Supporting Manjaro has historically done very little to facilitate the development of the software stack which is necessary for these devices [Pinephone/Pinephone Pro] to work. In some cases the Manjaro involvement actually causes extra workload for the developers by shipping known broken versions of software and pointing to the developers for support. Which is why https://dont-ship.it/ was started.
So distros like Manjaro should stop calling themselves "rolling release" distros and start calling themselves "nightly" distros, so everyone is aware of the potential instability?
Is there any rolling release distro that already follows the suggestion of only distributing tagged releases?
I think this is asking that we avoid additional episodes like the Redhat gcc "2.96" issue where redhat took cvs head, and slapped a version number on it that would have been the next release and shipped it with their "stable" distribution. GCC devs got tons of complaints about their shipping a broken compiler that couldn't compile the kernel and tracked it down to redhat shipping pre-release WIP software as if it were the new release version. GCC completely skipped the 2.96 version number, so "2.96" ended up being a redhat exclusive-- the fake 2.96 would have been a recurring source of pain due to confused redhat users making bug reports to the gcc project.
It's not a "nightly" distro, it's a "let's take patches that are unfinished, release them into the wild onto unsuspecting users, and let the upstream developers deal with it" distro.
Which, to be fair, is pretty much what all upstream developers have been asking for for years and years because getting bug reports for 50 different builds of 15 different versions of your software all with different disto provided patches is exhausting.
The software that actually has good release hygiene pales into comparison to the software that is actually more stable by just pulling from main.
No. They asked distros to ship their latest release as default version instead of recreating Frankenstein's monster holding onto end of life releases for ages backporting random patches without understanding the code they're messing with and blaming the upstream projects when their patches inevitably introduce more regressions and less features than any well maintained upstream project.
Of course this is a very one sided view. I've been on the receiving end of reckless upstream projects far too often not to understand why distributions which are expected to maintain compatibility with releases for years dislike a fast moving upstream for anything too important.
Manjaro Linux is accused of something different far less justifiable: forking upstream projects in all but name by shipping heavily patched packages without supporting them and even worse putting the support burden and blame on the upstream projects when things break (and oh boy do they break).
It is generally not a problem, distributions are doing absolutely great things and I like working with distributions a lot more than dealing with something like flatpak.
It's just that some distributions make a huge mess of it, don't want to work with developers and actively push off all the work to the developers for patches that have not even shipped, not even been merged or most painfully: not even been reviewed yet.
> Which, to be fair, is pretty much what all upstream developers have been asking for for years and years because getting bug reports for 50 different builds of 15 different versions of your software all with different disto provided patches is exhausting.
Then don't do 15 different versions of your software.
I ask again: Why do i need GTK1, 2, 3 and 4 on my system ? Why KDE 5 is not compatible with KDE4 ?
> What if the whole point is about shipping unfinished patches?
Then make absolutely sure your users all realise this, and that they should come to you for support not the devs (unless they themselves are devs, have read the relevant documentation, all of it, and able to offer useful help with the matter).
> But also this should mean that the buck stops with the distribution, not with the developers.
The clarifying points further down the article, that is the thrust. The basic rule for releasing WiP code being “don’t” and the advanced rule being “don’t, unless you really know what you are doing and can support it yourself”.
Depends what you mean by unfinished. Does it work and need a style polish? Is the developer trying to debug some tests failing for reasons unrelated to the patch? Is the functionality still missing/broken? There can be lots of reasons why you'd want an unpolished patch rather than wait for a release. Especially with projects that release every few months rather than after each pr.
Here's one example where I've done it: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/350fd0044447ae8712392c... since new rust has already been merged and rbspy still has no release with the required patch, there are two options: a broken package or an unreleased patch.
It's a cost/benefit calculation for the maintainers.
In the case of manjaro which triggered this post, it's not that manjaro is fixing things. It's manjaro trying their absolute hardest to ship new features faster than the rest, even when those features are completely broken.
Like the fun example of manjaro shipping a merge request of the SMS/chat application on the PinePhone that causes a database upgrade that can't be rolled back. This code was not intended to be merged, even less shipped.
Yeah, it's a balancing act, and it's best when the users and maintainers are on the same page: I don't like maintainers futzing about with packages to fit to arbitrary standards (debian can be quite bad here, and the general policy of 'as close to as vanilla as possible' is something I like about arch), but on the other hand it's much appreciated when packages come with fixes for bad upstream decisions (of which there are many examples), or even important features which upstream has sat on for years (see pulseaudio support for high-quality bluetooth codecs for an example which eventually led to the patch author rage-quitting the project because they strung him along for years). As a user I'm generally happiest when I get the software with the features I want without the bugs which cause me trouble, and it's situation dependent whether the packager or upstream are working against me on that. Usually the biggest source of friction is who actually winds up supporting the result: for all that distros may encourage filing bugs on their own tracker usually users wind up going to upstream for support, even if the issue is caused by the distro's patches. Some badly behaving maintainers (and it sounds like manjaro have been far too aggressive in trying to pull in new features) have I think caused a general pushback from upstream developers as they wind up with a bunch of support requests from someone else's screw-up (see for example home-assistant's attitude to anyone else distributing their software).
If I understand your example, you are using your good judgement as a developer/maintainer to release a workaround that ideally would have been released as a bug fix by the maintainers of the root cause. This is not, however, the issue here, which is the judgement-free release of every work-in-progress as soon as it is made available to anyone, with the bag being foisted on the developers. If that solved your problem, and did so without introducing other problems, that would have been just a matter of luck.
I'm guessing that what you did fits within the article's guidelines so long as you could do it as a tagged release.
I understand the desire to get an early warning of breaking changes coming from elsewhere, but surely scraping together all work-in-progress is likely to raise a lot of false concerns?
> What is the use case for shipping unfinished patches?
I think the issue isn't an individual patch that hasn't been completed, such patches are unlikely to be checked-in anywhere.
It is patches that are part of unfinished work, or that have not been integration tested with the rest of the product, or are not stable/useful/safe without other work that has not yet been merged. Basically patches intended fr other project devs, not the general userbase yet.
But to answer the question directly, in case it is literally unfinished patches:
> What is the use case for shipping unfinished patches?
“Being the latest & greatest” willy waving in end-user aimed distributions.
I can see a use case for some dev communities, though mainly for proactive compatibility testing purposes, not for dev or non-test deployment environments.
I always thought that the whole point of Manjaro was to be the "more stable" Arch linux, since it holds the rolling updates and releases them at once every month. Is that not right anymore?
Yeah, but I can understand that the experience of the users (who generally don't see any issues) is different from the experience of the application maintainers (where the few users that do see issues report those issues).
Is there any rolling release distro that already follows the suggestion of only distributing tagged releases?