Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cosmic_cheese 139 days ago
Mindshare matters, too. A big reason why small distros manage to get a foothold is because they're highly visible in places that get traffic (which then kicks off a virtuous cycle further increasing visibility). When existing Linux users get an itch to try a different distro, the ones that will come to mind to try are those they saw on reddit/youtube/xitter/etc, and Linux newbies are also going to be inclined towards these high visibility distros.

Holing up in mailing lists definitely isn't going to help with pulling in users or devs.
1 comments
seanhunter 139 days ago
Speaking from personal experience which is admittedly quite old at this point, but it used to be the case that Debian definitely didn’t go out of its way to try to pull in devs. When I had a few small open source things myself I packaged them for RedHat (this is pre-fedora when RedHat didn’t have a commercial and free version, they just had “RedHat Linux”) and looked to package them for debian, given I was actually using debian for a few of my personal servers. I made the .deb packages just fine but found the Debian community were definitely not trying to attract devs[1]. I couldn’t get anyone from Debian to sign my gpg keys which if I recall correctly was a necessary part in getting my package upstreamed[2] and in the end I just gave up on it because I’m really not interested in joining a community that is so unwelcoming.

[1] although it was maybe specifically just me they weren’t trying to attract.

[2] to the point where I actually worked with someone in my day job who was a debian dev and he wouldn’t sign my key without me producing physical official ID like a passport or something. Just really bizarre level of paranoia like a government kyc process or something.

link
seba_dos1 139 days ago
> I couldn’t get anyone from Debian to sign my gpg keys which if I recall correctly was a necessary part in getting my package upstreamed

You recall it incorrectly. You need that for becoming a Debian Maintainer and gaining direct upload rights, but for contributing a package you only need to have it sponsored by a Debian Developer.

link
ramses0 139 days ago
[2]: https://www.debian.org/events/keysigning

People should only sign a key under at least two conditions:

The key owner convinces the signer that the identity in the UID is indeed their own identity by whatever evidence the signer is willing to accept as convincing. Usually this means the key owner must present a government issued ID with a picture and information that match up with the key owner. (Some signers know that government issued ID's are easily forged and that the trustability of the issuing authorities is often suspect and so they may require additional and/or alternative evidence of identity).

The key owner verifies that the fingerprint and the length of the key about to be signed is indeed their own.

--

...debian is INDEED old-school and slightly derpy (see their use of the condorcet voting method), but it has boded extremely well for their longevity. Debian exists for its users, and its users are generally developers.

link