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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it necessarily needs a monorepo, but having every package on Salsa (Debian's GitLab installation) would help.

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The move to GitLab was a glimmer of hope that one day I'll be able to help contribute to the project which I'm a heavy user.

I wish they went all in and used GitLab Issues for bugs and GitLab CI/CD to auto-build packages for both validation and pushing new packages into the Debian repositories.

I'm not following the situation but what's stopping them from improving their packaging system, except for being complicated?

If the systemd discussion has taught me anything about Debian governance, getting everyone to agree is going to be a pain. Far easier to let it be.

Loud minorities and trolls on public mailing lists are not representative of the community of DDs and DMs.

No, but they're representative of the decision process. "Should we do A or B" results in people popping up supporting A, B, C, D, and E, and the decision tends to be "let's support them all". And as the original article we're commenting on discusses, that "support" comes in the form of "hey package maintainers, here's what you have to deal with".

This is a misunderstanding of how Debian works.

I've participated in the Debian community for 18 years, since Potato (2.2). I have a fairly good practical idea of how Debian operates. The above description was based on many, many, many decisions over the years. On the rare occasions that Debian has to actually decide something rather than answering "X or Y" with "yes" (and the decision doesn't fall solely to a small number of developers responsible for the packages in question), it results in painful institutional friction.

I love using Debian, I care deeply about Debian Policy and Debian's procedures, I enjoy many aspects of the Debian community, and I'm also well aware of where Debian has difficulties.

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