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Comment by brnt | Hacker News Reader

I've also heard criticism of .deb being much more cumbersome than .rpm. Fedora is not my first choice, Debian is, but they are more new-dev friendly.

Maybe Debian needs to port itself to use rpms and Fedora tooling.

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Debs are very easy to make and their structure is easy to understand for anyone who's been using Linux for at least a couple months. They're just tarballs with a couple special text files. What's hard is Debian's official tools to make debs, which are geared towards people who want to become maintainers of packages in official Debian repos. If you don't aim to become one, there are third-party tools which make it easy, such as cargo-deb or holo-build. If you don't want to use them, you may also even write a shell script which will produce a good package. Just use lintian to double-check whether everything is alright.

RPM on the other hand is an over-engineered mess: <https://xyrillian.de/thoughts/posts/argh-pm.html>. Tangentially, YUM and DNF were the slowest package managers I've ever used. They're a real pain.

> RPM on the other hand is an over-engineered mess: <https://xyrillian.de/thoughts/posts/argh-pm.html>. Tangentially, YUM and DNF were the slowest package managers I've ever used. They're a real pain.

I like OpenSuse but man zypper is possibly the slowest package manager ever!! Can't even download in parallel. I think they are now moving to dnf.

Making the package generally isn't very difficult in comparison to flatpak, appimage, rpm. The problem is the old dusty path to getting a mentor/sponsor for your little insignificant utility to get introduced into the repos. Every doc/page you see will have swaths of (sometimes old) information that outlines endless procedure and arcane incantations required to find someone who may be online and not idle, who might just vouch for you... or they might endlessly critique your code and license.

This whole process worked great back in the day, but now the kids will just go somewhere else or release outside of repositories.

I know Ubuntu loves the smell of their own codes, but part of me thinks PPA was Canonical's way to address how difficult and crusty the process to get software into Debian is. To this day if you can get in Debian repos, Ubuntu will include you in theirs 'for free'.

I feel so bad saying this.. Debian was supposed to be The One, imo. I've been at this linux thing since the mid 90s, I could not have predicted the current state of things decades ago. It truly disappoints me that things have gone this wrong with modern Linux, but I can't say it had a chance to play out any other way. You see the same with cryptocurrency (gasp!) where in order to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of the opposition a novel industry sought to emulate the legacy systems enough to be familiar and charm the opposing users, but ended up gaining users sold on that dream who lo and behold demanded an effigy to their old systems. We brought this on ourselves.

Now we have Ubuntu aiming to be the new Microsoft at an org level, aesthetically emulating MacOS at a UI level, and meanwhile pretending to be a crossplatform user experience perfect for phone and desktop. I call bullshit. Ubuntu took the dark path after 10.04 and 10.10 when Ubuntu Netbook Remix first reared its ugly head. Someone misunderstood the instructions, fed it after midnight, and now it's achieved its final form- Unity.

This is 100% our fault, my generations fault. We didn't keep with the times and I don't see that changing fast enough.

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