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Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

> Debian is like democracy: the worst way of producing an OS, except all the others that have been tried from time to time.

How many of us would be happy working at a software company with a bug tracker from the 90s, artifact management done with FTP, little to no tooling to manage large changes and do code review, no standards around source control, etc.? Those are symptoms of a software development culture stuck in the past.

It would be pretty frustrating to go home from my day job, where we have a much better development workflow, and try to make a contribution to the Debian project using Debian's tools and processes. And I'm sure I'm not the only software engineer who would feel that way. That can become a real problem for the future of Debian if it's not addressed.

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Cannot say for a company, but in Debian it seems that source code control is being settled with https://salsa.debian.org. For upstream code it is pretty flexible and low expectations are set, a tarball is enough. It also works with git (branches and/or tags), cvs, hg, etc.

There is no need for complexity in order to transfer files, that is why File Transfer Protocol works well. If you refer to public FTP services, those were deprecated 3 year ago. See https://www.debian.org/News/2017/20170425

Funnily I feel the exact opposite. I see Debian as Stable while most other development these days are like webdesign: Learn a tool or framework and start using it - but wait! There's a better one out now and hey look at this shiny new tool. I like stable.

And to be honest, even if you do find that stack objectionable, the tools you wrote to work around the rough edges 20 years ago still work.

> How many of us would be happy working at a software company with a bug tracker from the 90s

How many of us would be happy deciding things in groups with processes defined 100 or 200 years ago? But that's what representative democracy effectively does, every day, in most of the West. People just find ways to cope and move on, since the process is just a mean to an end.

> That can become a real problem for the future of Debian if it's not addressed.

Yes and no. Yes, processes should be improved all the time. No, it's not a real problem in the long run - I've been hear more or less the same story basically since Debian started, but it's still arguably the biggest and most relevant Linux distribution in existence. People come and go, the ideal endures.

And on top of that you also have to involve yourself into endless political discussions about minor topics while dealing with "complicated" maintainers

Thanks but no thanks

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