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A comment on Making Debian Responsible For Its Actions. Parent comment

Re:Making Debian Responsible For Its Actions by JoachimSchipper on Tuesday September 28, 2010 @07:41AM (#1735335)
Look, I understand that combining gcc/binutils/glibc is a complete clusterfuck that needs some patches (each of these projects is "individually" at least somewhat sane, but they don't like working together at all), and I understand that there is a lot of shitty code in the average desktop environment. Really, some patches probably are necessary. (Although there's a whole debate about feeding them upstream that you could have at this point.)

But why does Debian split up Postfix (well-written, actively maintained) into a zillion different packages stitched together by dynamic loading, instead of just configuring it properly? Why does Debian fuck up OpenSSL?

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Re:Making Debian Responsible For Its Actions by mariana on Tuesday September 28, 2010 @11:48AM (#1736041)
Disclaimer: Debian Maintainer here.

If you need plain old Postfix, you just aptitude install postfix.

If you need LDAP support in your Postfix instance, you just aptitude install postfix-ldap.

Is it really that hard?

And regarding OpenSSL, the problem is not in Debian. Just check http://people.gnome.org/~markmc/openssl-and-the-gpl.html

OpenSSL always had a problematic license.

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Re:Making Debian Responsible For Its Actions by JoachimSchipper on Tuesday September 28, 2010 @04:04PM (#1737048)
No, it's not hard at all - I don't think it took me more than one minute to figure out. It is, however, an example of a gratuitous change.

With respect to the OpenSSL stuff, I'm not talking about the GPL license - I'm talking about http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1571, one of the most painful security issues in recent memory and caused by a meddling maintainer. (Certainly, the upstream team could have more clearly warned him, but without the maintainers changes everything would have worked just fine.)

I understand you spend a lot of your free time working for free, and I appreciate your good intentions and the good that Debian and Debian's developers have done (e.g. writing lots of man pages for programs that have none) - but I do think Debian has some really questionable sides as well.

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