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Debian Package Maintainer Steps Down, Complaining About 'Old Infrastructure' (stapelberg.ch)
Michael Stapelberg, maintains "a bunch" of Debian packages and services, and says the free software Linux distro "has been in my life for well over 10 years at this point."
Today he released a 2,255-word essay explaining why he's "winding down" his involvement in Debian to a minimum, citing numerous complaints including Debian's complicated build stack, waits of up to seven hours before package uploads can be installed, leading to "asynchronous" feedback -- and Debian's lack of tooling for large changes.
The closest to "sending out a change for review" is to open a bug report with an attached patch... Culturally, reviews and reactions are slow. There are no deadlines. I literally sometimes get emails notifying me that a patch I sent out a few years ago (!!) is now merged. This turns projects from a small number of weeks into many years, which is a huge demotivator for me.
Interestingly enough, you can see artifacts of the slow online activity manifest itself in the offline culture as well: I don't want to be discussing systemd's merits 10 years after I first heard about it.
Lastly, changes can easily be slowed down significantly by holdouts who refuse to collaborate. My canonical example for this is rsync, whose maintainer refused my patches to make the package use debhelper purely out of personal preference. Granting so much personal freedom to individual maintainers prevents us as a project from raising the abstraction level for building Debian packages, which in turn makes tooling harder.
There's also several complaints about old infrastructure -- for example, "I dread interacting with the Debian bug tracker. debbugs is a piece of software (from 1994) which is only used by Debian and the GNU project these days." Stapelberg also complains that the "painful" experience of developing using Debian "leaves a lot to be desired," and adds that "It baffles me that in 2019, we still don't have a conveniently browsable threaded archive of mailing list discussions."
"My frustration level ultimately exceeded the threshold," Stapelberg writes in the essay, adding "I hope this post inspires someone, ideally a group of people, to improve the developer experience within Debian." He'll soon transition packages to be team-maintained "where it makes sense," but also "orphan packages where I am the sole maintainer... For all intents and purposes, please treat me as permanently on vacation..."
"I will try to keep up best-effort maintenance of the manpages.debian.org service and the codesearch.debian.net service, but any help would be much appreciated."
Today he released a 2,255-word essay explaining why he's "winding down" his involvement in Debian to a minimum, citing numerous complaints including Debian's complicated build stack, waits of up to seven hours before package uploads can be installed, leading to "asynchronous" feedback -- and Debian's lack of tooling for large changes.
The closest to "sending out a change for review" is to open a bug report with an attached patch... Culturally, reviews and reactions are slow. There are no deadlines. I literally sometimes get emails notifying me that a patch I sent out a few years ago (!!) is now merged. This turns projects from a small number of weeks into many years, which is a huge demotivator for me.
Interestingly enough, you can see artifacts of the slow online activity manifest itself in the offline culture as well: I don't want to be discussing systemd's merits 10 years after I first heard about it.
Lastly, changes can easily be slowed down significantly by holdouts who refuse to collaborate. My canonical example for this is rsync, whose maintainer refused my patches to make the package use debhelper purely out of personal preference. Granting so much personal freedom to individual maintainers prevents us as a project from raising the abstraction level for building Debian packages, which in turn makes tooling harder.
There's also several complaints about old infrastructure -- for example, "I dread interacting with the Debian bug tracker. debbugs is a piece of software (from 1994) which is only used by Debian and the GNU project these days." Stapelberg also complains that the "painful" experience of developing using Debian "leaves a lot to be desired," and adds that "It baffles me that in 2019, we still don't have a conveniently browsable threaded archive of mailing list discussions."
"My frustration level ultimately exceeded the threshold," Stapelberg writes in the essay, adding "I hope this post inspires someone, ideally a group of people, to improve the developer experience within Debian." He'll soon transition packages to be team-maintained "where it makes sense," but also "orphan packages where I am the sole maintainer... For all intents and purposes, please treat me as permanently on vacation..."
"I will try to keep up best-effort maintenance of the manpages.debian.org service and the codesearch.debian.net service, but any help would be much appreciated."
The problem is that fixing tool affects lots and lots of other people. Change the tools, and you break lots of other projects that many not thank you for it, even if it's for long term good. Or, alternatively, some of them use your new versions of tools and some of them do not. Then you have fragmentation.
It's not only debian which has these problems of course. Old mature projects are slow, slow, slow to change.
I read the article, and he did touch on the endemic issue I've run into of "that patch didn't come from us, so it's rejected (or ignored)".
> rsync, whose maintainer refused my patches to make the package use debhelper purely out of personal preference
I see this ridiculous attitude in docker, docker-compose, lxd, et al upstream maintainers as well.
They're in the container space because they don't understand packaging (or sane library/API design) so they got crushed by dependency hell. Their response? Run every single app in its own VM with its own copy of every single library under the sun. 500MB applications! YAY!
They refuse to take any packaging related patches.
Debian devs will drop one by one due to these people.
> When I joined Debian, I was still studying, i.e. I had luxurious
> amounts of spare time. Now, over 5 years of full time work later, my
> day job taught me a lot, both about what works in large software
> engineering projects and how I personally like my computer systems. I
> am very conscious of how I spend the little spare time that I have
> these days
Yes he has many good, useful and interesting points. The fact that his life has changed and can no longer dedicate the same amount of time, effort and energy as he could when he was a student with fewer responsibilities is the key non-sensationalist takeaway imo.
> Culturally, reviews and reactions are slow. There are no deadlines. I
> literally sometimes get emails notifying me that a patch I sent out a
> few years ago (!!) is now merged. This turns projects from a small
> number of weeks into many years, which is a huge demotivator for me.
Hardly a new problem. People have been complaining about this for a very long time. Part of what spawned Ubuntu. These really large, old projects with huge user install bases tend to be very resistant to change for good reason.
He has some valid points but also much of what he expresses is personal preference. Things that bug him others really prefer. Who can say which is right / how things should change? *shrug*
Only way I'd come help would be a guarantee we were getting rid of systemd.
You were a fruitful Debian Maintainer for a decade long so, with the best of my wishes, Michael...
When bugs are found, they do not get fixed. When you point out that a simple patch hasn't been applied in 8 months, then you get nothing but indignant whining about the nature of volunteer efforts and other older-person, boomer excuses; meanwhile another 8 months go by, at which point you decide it's not worth poking again.
So, you're right. That's exactly what's going to happen. All of these "working" packages are going to be re-written in Rust by pink-haired trannies, and thus the wheel will have been re-invented for the ten-thousandth time.
If there's one thing humans know how to do well, it's waste resources.
As a Debian to FreeBSD convert myself, it sounds like pretty much everything they're looking for is already solved in the FreeBSD ecosystem. It has been absolutely night and day as a user, administrator, and contributor working with FreeBSD compared to any Linux distro. It is so nice having one single ecosystem for the kernel, base OS, and 3rd party software, instead of each being handled by different communities with different objectives overall. if a breaking change needs to occur in the FreeBSD world, the entire kernel/OS/software stack is updated in unison with a new major version release.
One thing I love about my current job is that everyone takes this rule almost 100% seriously. You are almost forbidden to do anything while you have a review pending on you.
The reasons are fairly obvious -- reviews are a blocking operation. Sure, the developer can go work on something else, but if he's got a chain of dependencies to work through, things get hairy if he gets too far ahead of the reviewers.
Other benefits are more subtle. First, it encourages everyone to carefully pre-review, because they know that sending it up will interrupt everyone and they don't want to do so trivially. The second major benefit is that the longer things are pending, the greater the chances of merge conflicts, and even with the best of tools, 3-way merging is the enemy.
Of course, we aren't robots. And a huge change may take a week to read. But it's a good general default rule that you shouldn't be writing code or investigating bug reports if you've got a patch waiting on you.