I am ANGRY with Debian.
My name is Nic Ferrier. I am really ANGRY at Debian.
After 10 years of being a dedicated Debian user I have reached the
point at which I am so angry with what is being done that I want to
stop using it. I will start to look for viable alternatives to Debian.
A few weeks ago, as Emacs was nearing the end of it's long release 23
development cycle, I decided I would upgrade my emacs-snapshot.
Oh dear. emacs-snapshot is quite old and not recent at all. Hmmm,
what's happened to that I wonder? I go ask the maintainer of the
package. He tells me that Debian want him to remove the free
documentation from inside Emacs, a ludicrous suggestion frankly and
clearly detrimental to the package so he has stopped working on it. He
was quite right; in my opnion there is nothing else to do.
That was a serious blow to my confidence in Debian. I have still not
got a recent emacs because I don't have the time to build from the
CVS. I am an occasional Emacs contributor and I cannot, at the moment,
contribute effectively. So Debian has actively done something to
prevent the improvement of free software.
Pshaw... it's just emacs, right? No one cares about that.
Today, I came across a bug in the info version of the Bash reference
manual. So I went to upgrade. Oopsie. No more Bash reference manual in
Debian. The info just disappears.
Why? Same reason as with Emacs-snapshot:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=357260
Debian considers the GNU doc to have different freedom ideals to them
and they hate that so much that they have to remove it from Debian.
So now what am I supposed to do?
Over the 10 years (at least) I've been using Debian I have always held
it up to colleagues and clients as the ultimate in free software /
open source achievement. An entire operating system for the people
organized by the people. If anything went wrong I knew I could fix it
myself, or rely on a Debian developer to fix it in a sensible time
scale.
I knew that if I ever had any software to package I could
either become a Debian developer and do it myself or get someone else
I know to help out. I've come really close a couple of times to
packaging stuff for Debian.
I knew that if I recommended Debian to my clients I wouldn't get
screwed down the line; even if it was tons of work getting clients to
understand that the lack of legal contracts didn't mean it wasn't a
viable alternative.
I am no longer confident of any of those things. If political
decisions can so alter the package base it is not the operating system
for me.
It is just so ludicrous. It's all I can do to not swear in great big
capital letters at the people who made this decision.
If anyone wants to setup an alternative, GNU friendly, single software
package archive they should get in touch with me privately.
--
Nic Ferrier
http://www.tapsellferrier.co.uk
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