Having Left Debian
It’s been over a year now since my last proper upload to Debian, and nine months since I announced my intent to put aside working on Debian for a while.
With Matthew Garrett’s resignation from Debian, several people have compared it to my own “resignation” from Debian. It has got my thinking about whether I currently intend to ever end my “Sabbatical” and return as an active Debian Developer.
I think that the end of my love-affair with Debian started at Debconf last year where several developers treated those of us who also worked on Ubuntu quite rudely. Someone was attacked for wearing an Ubuntu t-shirt at the conference, while someone else was applauded for wearing a “Fuck Ubuntu” t-shirt. That’s where I realised that maybe I didn’t have as much in common with these people as I thought I did.
I still don’t understand why Debian singles Ubuntu out for this kind of treatment, we’re still the only derviative distribution that makes all of our patches to Debian available, yet Ubuntu is claimed to not do anything at all.
Another example is that Ubuntu is being asked to change the Maintainer field of every package, something no other derivative is being asked to do or has ever been asked to do.
Martin Krafft has had some interesting things to say about this strange relationship in the past.
If that was the start of my falling out with Debian, I think that Debian considering removing documentation and firmware from the distribution, especially the documentation, was another point I started wondering whether I shared anything in common with the project anymore.
Call me strange, but I think that one of the fundamental purposes of a Linux distribution is to be useful to its users. If nobody can use the distribution because it doesn’t support their hardware, and even if it did, all the documentation has been stripped out; I started to wonder what it’s aims are. It became increasingly apparent that the only users Debian was considering a priority were its own developer.
And the third thing is simply a matter of Fun.
Fun for me, at the moment at least, has been to build a system that fits together extremely nicely with each component doing the right thing. For Ubuntu this has meant being a driving force for it being Linux 2.6 only, with reliance on udev for hardware, etc. Upstart is just a continuation of these goals, getting a system which all “just works”, even if it means throwing out a few things people were previously fond of.
All of these things would have been impossible to do in Debian itself. Getting upstart installable required changes to twelve different packages, including sysvinit itself; at a worst case, this would have required the agreement of twelve different maintainers in Debian. It’s often exhausting just persuading one of the reason for the change, persuading a dozen would have been a herculian effort.
Perhaps Matthew is right, what Debian lacks is a single leadership. There’s nobody in Debian I could have gone to for approval over the changes I wanted to make, whose decision developers cannot overrule. Ubuntu has such people (the Technical Board and sabdfl), which gives the project an obvious direction instead of a couple of hundred people all pulling in different directions.
In a way, I don’t feel that I’ve left Debian. I feel like I was happily going along, only to realise the mob had gone in a different direction and with no easy way of rejoining the group.
Turtle.net:
I’m a “nobody” in the Ubuntu community (in the sense that I’m not a developper or a very active member) so my point of view is maybe too restrictive. But I think that your post is a sad story (leaving a familly even if it’s only temporary) and a happy story at the same time (the interest of the people is more important than your own … nobody can be against this vertue
).
23 September 2006, 2:28 amHoward Coles Jr.:
I’m glad to see I wasn’t the only one who noticed Debian’s stupidity.
I really like Debian’s apt functionality, and their emphasis on stability, (even if it is a double edged sword ie distro stays up but by the time its’s released its too freaking old). However, their stubbornness and bloated egos are just too much to bear. they act as though they contain the universe and every one should bow to them. Crap on the users, its us developers who are important is the way they act to me. I’m not a developer, just a lowely user. I was exceedingly glad to have found Kubuntu as it provided apt functionality, and user focus.
6 October 2006, 5:27 pmGood luck, and thanks for the stand. There are many of us users who are voting for Ubuntu, which is why the Debian snobs are so ugly toward your distro. And, by all means keep the documentation IN the distro.
John Goerzen:
Scott,
I can totally understand why you are upset at those things. I’m a Debian developer, though not an Ubuntu one, and I agree that there are things from Debian’s side that haven’t been as they should.
I would also add, though, that these small handful of developers are not representative of the larger project. I appreciate the work Ubuntu has done. I know that communication between Ubuntu and Debian has not been the best, from either side, and both sides have already acknowledged that and seem to have been working to improve things.
To Howard Coles, Jr., I would say that please remember that Debian developers are responsible for a lot of what makes up Ubuntu, and as a Debian developer who tries to be responsive towards bug reports, to write useful software, and to make things Just Work for users, you are making an error by lumping thousands of Debian developers in single bin.
27 October 2006, 7:34 pmstolennomenclature:
In the end its a matter of ethics/morality versus fun/useability. One often has to make personal sacrifices when doing the right thing. RMS has stated that if he were not able to use free software, he would rather ditch his computer and go without rather than compromise his principles. On the other hand, Linus Torvalds seems to be very much in the fun camp.
Perhaps we should consider that if it were not for the decision made by Stallman based on morality and ethics, free software would not even exist in the first place. So our opportunity to have fun and make use of free software owes a debt to the struggle to do the right thing.
Then of course we can throw morality and ethics out of the window and go buy Microsft software. Thats quite useable and people have lots of fun with it.
Even though conflict in itself is a bad thing, I cannot help but admire people who stand up for doing the right thing - even if they might have made a mistake and actually be doing the wrong thing.
My biggest issue with Ubuntu is I dont see how you can make a reliable distro out of unreliable (SID) software. By definition its in SID because its bug ridden. Can someone explain how that works?
11 February 2007, 10:12 pmTommy:
> I dont see how you can make a reliable distro out of unreliable (SID) software. By definition its in SID because its bug ridden. Can someone explain how that works?
Surely NOBODY commits a package to SID “because” it’s bug-ridden. Committing a package is part of the process. I believe packages go into SID pretty soon after they’re committed, then they automatically promote to Testing if nobody has found a serious problem in a set amount of time (two weeks?).
I believe Ubuntu snapshots are generally based on Testing, though individual changes to packages bypass the Debian process when they’re important to a release.
Surely the situation is similar in MEPIS or Linspire or Knoppix or any other Debian “child” distro.
23 February 2007, 2:33 pmRobert Millan:
Hi Keybuk,
I remember when you were actively maintaining dpkg in Debian. I remember that, along with many other developers, you stopped dedicating your time to Debian when Ubuntu hired you. All in all, this left some key areas in Debian stagnating.
Of course, there’s absolutely no problem with that. As volunteers we decide how much time we want to spend on it, don’t we? I regret you lost interest in it, just like I regret due to personal reasons I had to put aside most of my work in Debian. But nobody is to blame because of that.
Things are as they are, but let’s put it clear: when there’s money around, you can’t easily just say you moved to Ubuntu just because Ubuntu is nice and Debian isn’t. I think the primary question you should ask yourself is: would you be working for Ubuntu if Debian was a company and you previously had been a Debian employee? Even if you believe that, it’s quite difficult to make it credible to others.
18 March 2007, 11:43 pmScott James Remnant:
Actually I left Debian over a year after I started at Ubuntu … I was working for Canonical for almost all of the time I was actively maintaining dpkg.
The two events (leaving Debian and joining Canonical) are completely unrelated.
11 June 2007, 4:01 pm