Re: Why Debian

[Thorsten Glaser <tg@mirbsd.de>]

Alberto Salvia Novella dixit:

> Why you choose to develop in Debian over any other distribution?

First of: why “instead”? Many developers are active in other
distributions and/or operating systems. So am I.

I came to Debian for a number of reasons:

• it was the last GNU/Linux I used before switching to BSD,
  and it’s somewhat decent (though the systemd switch killed
  all of that appeal… people, just use IceWM as standard DE
  and good is)

• I am upstream for a lot of software, and “if it’s not in
  Debian, it doesn’t exist”, so I packaged it (not just for
  Debian but for many distros and OSes), sometimes by myself
  (mksh), sometimes by requests of actual users (rs, jupp)

• lots of architectures; I have got lots of nōn-x86 hardware
  and most of my friends do or at least used to do

• choices: architectures, shells, init systems (hah!), kernels,
  window managers, JPEG implementations (did you know that
  libjpeg-turbo doesn’t build on all platforms of Debian?), etc.

• friendliness (especially the Grml crowd)

• lots of people I know are “in the Debian family” already

• Debian people use Thinkpads, not Macbooks like way too
  many (IMHO) BSD people… even my MirBSD co-developer…

• small installations (mostly) that don’t stomp on my
  foot when using text mode stuff (except loading my own
  keyboard layout for the Linux text console is hard, I
  ended up throwing several files into /etc/console-setup/
  that are all copies of it)

• large base of readily usable applications

• suitability for use at the workplace (which was also
  the deciding point to become a DD: “if I have to use
  a GNU/Linux at work, it better be *good*!”; most of
  my other work was possible as DM already), which was
  partially because we were using Debian already (and
  Kubuntu and CentOS) and partially due to some of the
  other reasons and partially because I pushed it even
  more since I started here (as I like RPM much less)

• learning/fun (I expected to help out the kfreebsd-*
  ports and ended up resurrecting the m68k port instead)

• the packaging stuff is over-documented… it took me
  two whole days, about 15 hours, to make my first,
  working, mksh package, but now I love being able to
  just *look* at the/a Policy and know how to do some
  thing in my packages, unlike with specfiles where
  you have to guess; also, packages.d.o and archive.d.n
  availability (to look up package names and the likes)
  helps; packaging *one* source package to be able to
  work on sarge‥sid and dapper and hardy and lucid‥quantal
  simply rocks (cross-distro packaging in RPM is hell)

• oh, and can’t forget the whole OSS and DFSG stuff,
  which is just right (I did have some issues with the
  firmware thing, but fully understand and support the
  Debian position on it being in non-free, although I
  use slightly different stances on it (and the GFDL)
  in MirBSD)

• nice cross-toolchain building too (m68k-linux, m68k-mint,
  but also others)

• it runs with mksh as /bin/sh (well the lksh binary
  nowadays, but that is still mksh)

• I can package stuff to use myself, and then either
  upload it to Debian on user request later (jupp),
  or even take over the Debian package (cvs, pax),
  or just keep using my own repo for stuff which others
  can also use (I’m seriously considering packaging BSD
  init for use with “most common” Debian services!)

• lots of tools for use as developer, admin, etc.
  often in different implementations which livens it up
  (dput/dupload, for example)

• even if I disagree with maintainers (things like bugs
  in mc), I can mostly live with it (although, when I was
  m68k porter, some pissed me *seriously* off)

• do-ocracy would be nice, but there is still Cabal
  sometimes, and some attempts to break it go into
  the wrong direction… but despite some loud and
  influential minorities, I receive enough private
  messages from other DDs and nōn-DDs to like it

• on the other hand, Debian is a tad conservative,
  which I like… recently, unstable has been the most
  stable Debian release ever ;-)

• Debian doesn’t seem to overly mind my critical
  thinking, my “Devil’s advocacy”, my totally different
  and sometimes contrary point of view, which is cool
  (people know I’m mostly a DOS/BSD person, and accept it)
  as I still get listened to (occasionally), because
  I still have some technical skills ;-)

• pragmatic approaches usually

Just some of my motivation, braindump (I’m tired…).
My current mood is better described as “I hate IT”,
I was sleeping, cooking and geocaching *only* this
weekend, and people (Mozilla!) are still wrong on
the internet, but inertia is ruling more and more…
still wondering if I should be more active against
the init system thing… I’d prefer to just support
a GR for keeping the freedom of choice (then I even
could live with a bad default, as long as I manage
to convince the coworkers to not install systemd)…

bye,
//mirabilos • MirBSD founder • Debian Developer • lots more…
-- 
13:37⎜«Natureshadow» Deep inside, I hate mirabilos. I mean, he's a good
guy. But he's always right! In every fsckin' situation, he's right. Even
with his deeply perverted taste in software and borked ambition towards
broken OSes - in the end, he's damn right about it :(! […] works in mksh