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The Debian project has suffered from a long string of negative events recently, ranging from severe discontent over the inclusion of systemd, to talk of forking the project, to a grave bug affecting the important 'wine' package, to the resignation and reduced involvement of long time contributors.
The latest strife affecting Debian revolves around a request for a Debian package of the GPC-Slots 2 software. This request has been rejected with little more than an ad hominem attack against the software's author.
In response to the request, Stephen Gran wrote,
This is code by someone who routinely trolls Debian. I doubt we want any more poisonous upstreams in Debian, so I at least would prefer this never get packaged.
Jonathan Wiltshire proceeded to mark the request as 'wontfix', and closed it.
While Debian does strive to maintain high standards regarding the software it packages, the negative and personal nature of this rejection, without any apparent technical or licensing concerns, appears to conflict with Debian's own Code of Conduct. Such a personal attack could be seen as contradictory to the Code of Conduct's mandate that Debian participants "Be respectful", "Be collaborative", and most importantly, "Assume good faith".
Given its recent troubles as of late, many of them concerning the poor treatment of Debian developers and users alike, can Debian really afford to get embroiled in yet another negative incident?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Sunday November 23 2014, @09:53PM
To try and screw Linux through the Caldera debacle, a decade ago.
The dirty tricks departments in commercial technology vendors are a sophisticated as any "false flag, psyop" conspiracy speculation about national governments and foreign policy. Plausible deniablity is the second string of defense, behind their first position: "You've got to be joking! The very idea is patently absurd!".
MS spent hundreds of millions over years - buying and investing in selective rivals, sponsoring marketing efforts that re-channeled money into legal attacks. They would spend money just to deny certain vendors access to markets, even those that MS themselves had no possibility or interest in capitalizing themselves. "Just to put a stick in their spokes"
So? When I see what's happened to Debian and Mozilla? I know what real corporate double dealing and subversive efforts look like. I have little or no doubt that there are also government actors in aligned and independent efforts. RedHat was co-opted a few years back - after SuSE. Then the next target to use RedHat hegemony of commercial Linux development against was naturally Debian. Debian has been almost synonymous with GNU, and upstream of any viable distribution that asserted corporate software independence.
Like the corrosive hollowing-out of your Republics, with their democratic foundations and institutions - those acting in actual good-faith never really stood a chance. For Debian, Apahche and Mozilla? It was all just a matter of time...
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Sunday November 23 2014, @09:57PM
So when the Gates Foundation wants to "help promote a vision for education and healthcare that leads to a better future" you should best re-read the parts from Homer, where Odysseus suggest building a large, wooden horse at the gates of Troy...
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 0, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @10:26PM
I find it really strange how quickly Debian has gone from the best open source distro around to one of the worst so quickly. I'd used Debian for 15 years, using the most cutting edge version that I could most of that time. I very, very rarely ran into problems. They were so good at what they did that even their unstable version was more stable than I found the supposedly 'stable' versions of so many other distros to be. Then systemd was integrated, and an update caused my system not to boot for the first time ever. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe how many other people had experienced similar problems. And I couldn't believe at how Debian still forged ahead with systemd, even after it became obvious that it was a bad idea. I don't know if there's a 'conspiracy' or what, but I do know that I just can't use Debian any longer.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by rleigh on Sunday November 23 2014, @11:56PM
It's unbelievable even for many Debian developers such as myself. However, as I'm sure you're aware of if you've been reading the mailing lists and news sites I think it's fair to say that it's essentially impossible to have any constructive discussion on the issue. Back when this started to be pushed, maybe three years or so back I did bring up the downsides, as did others. It doesn't bring me any pleasure to have been right about many of these things. But I stopped participating in the discussion about 18 months back, and ended unsubscribing from the lists about 9 months back. There's only so much of this you can take before your motivation is completely sapped, and when the discussion is entirely unproductive it's not like your contribution to the discussion will result in any positive change.
The ironic part is that if systemd had stuck to just simply replacing init, and integrating well with existing systems rather than trying to take over the world, it wouldn't have been controversial at all. After all, it's quite clear that while sysvinit is venerable and well tested, it isn't perfect and there are improvements to be made. For example, initscripts could have been replaced with openrc; start-stop-daemon could have got cgroups support. These could have all been done with zero impact; we already transitioned to dependency-based parallelised initscripts without too much trouble. If systemd had replaced this and no more, it would have been just fine.
The "failing to boot" bugs are IMO the absolute worst part. Any failure to boot should be a critical bug, and previously would have been a critical bug. Now the systemd people and their associated fans argue that failing to boot when an fstab entry can't be mounted is in fact not only desirable but essential, to prevent the system running without the configuration being "correct". Maybe from a certain perfectionist standpoint that's OK. But in the real world most people I suspect would rather their system booted successfully with a warning rather than not booting at all. It's not perfect, but then the world isn't a perfect place and doing the best you can in the fact of non-ideal conditions might be in fact preferable. Even this can't be discussed rationally; I've been told that not failing hard is unconditionally wrong, but what's so awful about different people having different perspectives and priorities? While the initscripts might have provided certain default policies we never dictated such fundamental stuff; if you wanted to do things differently, go right ahead and do so with our blessing, and the number of tweakable defaults shows how accommodating maintainers were to differing requirements. Another bad failure is when the system fails to start because it gets stuck, due to the massively overcomplicated dependencies and/or races and bugs. In the old world, insserv/startpar would order things according to the LSB headers. But if the metadata was inconsistent it would tell you before adjusting things, and if it was wrong at boot time at worst you'd have some services fail to start, but it would still attempt to start as much as possible. The system would still boot and bring itself up to a usable state unless things were seriously wrong in rcS. But we always tested those prior to every upload (I personally would test in a VM in various configurations, then on amd64 bare metal and on powerpc bare metal, and also on kFreeBSD).
Regards,
Roger
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday November 24 2014, @03:52AM
It's sad. I think we may very well be seeing the end of Linux as a viable OS. I really can't help thinking there's external elements trying to kill it.
(Score: 2) by fnj on Monday November 24 2014, @12:01AM
Pretty much any organization is vulnerable to a hostile takeover by toxic elements with an axe to grind. It has happened to numerous countries. Often this seems rapid but is only the result of years of dogged infiltration.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @05:11AM
How the hell is the parent "redundant"? It was one of the earliest comments here! It can't be redundant, because it was the first to express these ideas!