Re:The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)
by lmm on Tuesday December 10, 2019 @07:32PM
(#21758342)
> packages are proposed and adopted by volunteers, thus what you've described as "OS maintainers" is pretty much any random person who simply wants a software to be available for download in the distro's official repositories
The entirety of the Debian project are volunteers, random people who simply wanted xyz. And Debian's raison d'etre is as a "distribution" of existing software.
More to the point, Debian packagers explicitly overrule "upstream" application developers; see the history of cdrecord or the ssh key generation bug for particularly spectacular examples. How can you say it's the responsibility of those working on the software project when they don't get to make the final decisions?
> packaging systems such as Debian's apt supports private package repositories, where anyone can make available their packages to the world.
Not really, because apt's approach to dependencies requires a central naming authority. In practice any private repository is necessarily a dead end: you can package additional software that depends on software from the central system, but not vice versa.
The entirety of the Debian project are volunteers, random people who simply wanted xyz. And Debian's raison d'etre is as a "distribution" of existing software.
More to the point, Debian packagers explicitly overrule "upstream" application developers; see the history of cdrecord or the ssh key generation bug for particularly spectacular examples. How can you say it's the responsibility of those working on the software project when they don't get to make the final decisions?
> packaging systems such as Debian's apt supports private package repositories, where anyone can make available their packages to the world.
Not really, because apt's approach to dependencies requires a central naming authority. In practice any private repository is necessarily a dead end: you can package additional software that depends on software from the central system, but not vice versa.