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by latchup 171 days ago
Well, there are big differences in how aggressively things are patched. Arch Linux makes a point to strictly minimize patches and avoid them entirely whenever possible. That's a good thing, because otherwise, nonsense like the Xscreensaver situation ensues, where the original developers aggressively reject distro packages for mutilating their work and/or forcing old and buggy versions on unsuspecting users.
2 comments
dima55 171 days ago
Huh? I contribute to Debian; I don't aggressively patch anything. You can too.
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lionkor 171 days ago
It's "let's patch as little as possible" vs "let's enforce our rules with the smallest patch possible"
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latchup 171 days ago
Well good for you. Then I suppose you don't speak for the Debian maintainers responsible for trainwrecks like this:

https://research.swtch.com/openssl

There seems to be a serious issue with Debian (and by extension, the tens of distros based on it) having no respect whatsoever for the developers of the software their OS is based on, which ends up hurting users the most. Not sure why they cannot just be respectful, but I am afraid they are shoveling Debian's grave, as people are abandoning stale and broken Debian-based distros in droves.

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lelanthran 171 days ago
> nonsense like the Xscreensaver situation ensues, where the original developers aggressively reject distro packages

I didn't know about this. Link?

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latchup 171 days ago
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/04/i-would-like-debian-to-stop...

and

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=819703#158

Needless to say, Zawinski was more than a little frustrated with how the Debian maintainers do things.

But honestly, this took 30 seconds to Google and was highly publicized at the time. This whole "I never heard of this, link??" approach to defend a lost argument when the point made is easily verifiable serves to do nothing but detract from discussion. Which, you know, is what this place is for.

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lelanthran 171 days ago
I wasn't defending anything; searching for xscreensaver debian debacle yielded links that might or might not have been what you were referring to, They did not, however, yield a link to the JWZ site.

I genuinely wanted to know what this was about.

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