On Debian frustrations

Michael Stapelberg writes about his frustrations with Debian, resulting in him reducing his involvement in the project. That’s sad: over the years, Michael has made a lot of great contributions to Debian, addressing hard problems in interesting, disruptive ways.

He makes a lot of good points about Debian, with which I’m generally in agreement. An interesting exercise would be to rank those issues: what are, today, the biggest issues to solve in Debian? I’m nowadays not following Debian closely enough to be able to do that exercise, but I would love to read others’ thoughts (bonus points if it’s in a DPL platform, given that it seems that we have a pretty quiet DPL election this year!)

Most of Michael’s points are about the need for modernization of Debian’s infrastructure and workflows, and I agree that it’s sad that we have made little progress in that area over the last decade. And I think that it’s important to realize that providing alternatives to developers have a cost, and that when a large proportion of developers or packages have switched to doing something (using git, using dh, not using 1.0-based patch systems such as dpatch, …), there are huge advantages with standardizing and pushing this on everybody.

There are a few reasons why this is harder than it sounds, though.

First, there’s Debian culture of stability and technical excellence. “Above all, do not harm” could also apply to the mindset of many Debian Developers. On one hand, that’s great, because this focus on not breaking things probably contributes a lot to our ability to produce something that works as well as Debian. But on the other hand, it means that we often seek solutions that limit short-term damage or disruption, but are far from optimal on the long term.
An example is our packaging software stack. I wrote most of the introduction to Debian packaging found in the packaging-tutorial package (which is translated in six languages now), but am still amazed by all the unjustified complexity. We tend to fix problems by adding additional layers of software on top of existing layers, rather than by fixing/refactoring the existing layers. For example, the standard way to package software today is using dh. However, dh stands on dh_* commands (even if it does not call them directly, contrary to what CDBS did), and all the documentation on dh is still structured around those commands: if you want to install an additional file in a package, probably the simplest way to do that is to add it to debian/packagename.install, but this is documented in the manpage for dh_install, which your are not going to actually call because dh abstracts that away for you! I realize that this could be better explained in packaging-tutorial… (patch welcomed)

There’s also the fact that Debian is very large, very diverse, and hard to test. It’s very easy to break things silently in Debian, because many  of our packages are niche packages, or don’t have proper test suites (because not everything can be easily tested automatically). I don’t see how the workflows for large-scale changes that Michael describes could work in Debian without first getting much better at detecting regressions.

Still, there’s a lot of innovation going on inside packaging teams, with the development of language-specific packaging helpers (listed on the AutomaticPackagingTools wiki page). However, this silo-ed organization tends to fragment the expertise of the project about what works and what doesn’t: because packaging teams don’t talk much together, they often solve the same problems in slightly different ways. We probably need more ways to discuss interesting stuff going on in teams, and consolidating what can be shared between teams. The fact that many people have stopped following debian-devel@ nowadays is probably not helping…

The addition of salsa.debian.org is probably the best thing that happened to Debian recently. How much this ends up being used for improving our workflows remain to be seen:

  • We could use Gitlab merge requests to track patches, rather than attachments in the BTS. Some tooling to provide an overview of open MRs in various dashboards is probably needed (and unfortunately GitLab’s API is very slow when dealing with large number of projects).
  • We could probably have a way to move the package upload to a gitlab-ci job (for example, by committing the signed changes file in a specific branch, similar to what pristine-tar does, but there might be a better way)
  • I would love to see a team experiment with a monorepo approach (instead of the “one git repo per package + mr to track them all” approach). For teams with lots of small packages there are probably a lot of things to win with such an organization.

 

2 thoughts on “On Debian frustrations

  1. > I would love to see a team experiment with a monorepo approach (instead of the “one git repo per package + mr to track them all” approach). For teams with lots of small packages there are probably a lot of things to win with such an organization.

    The Haskell team has been doing that for a while, with very good results.

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