The most prolific packager for Alpine Linux is stepping away
phoronix.com
phoronix.com
Generally all of us needs to be better at pitching in where we can and not be depended on a few people overworking themselves.
You also don't put any obligations on yourself by becoming a maintainer on AUR — you can always orphan a package in less than a minute, no questions asked. Some users actually place new packages on AUR and orphan them right away. If it's of any use, it usually get a volunteer maintainer within a few days.
The community and main repositories have some stability guarantees but that doesn't stop you from orphaning the package.
Thank goodness. There is no other free Linux distro out there which gives the benefits of both a stable release with great support for most of the latest hardware AND rapid package/kernel updates (approaching a rolling release). This must not be easy since its so rare. Whatever they are doing regarding maintainership is working very well from what I can tell.
This has nothing to do with that. They could absolutely make it easier for new people without harming their quality. For God's sake just better documentation would help, and I don't see how they're going to lose hardware support because they wrote one canonical page with all the info you need. The process should be more of a checklist to complete, and less of post-crime forensic investigation where tons of details and tips are missing and people have to draw flow charts and hunt for missing information just to figure out what the next step should be. Your reply is a (very) shallow dismissal of an actual issue and (assuming you're not alone) probably the reason this is such a problem in the first place.
What a strange POV. "Thank goodness x and y are blocked off."
It's easy to make the same argument for proprietary software. "Thank goodness x or y don't allow just randos to touch their source code and make PRs. That'd be DISASTROUS!"
Maybe it is shortsighted in the long run? We'll see. I'm glad that we have choices -- AUR on one hand, Fedora on the other (and Debian, Alpine, etc)
If you see the distros with more red tape ( cough debian cough ) , you have people "reigning in their little Package Kingdom" which also can end up with orphaned (or at least severely neglected) packages
~x86 helps too, masking a package is a good way to say "maybe tested, maybe not so much".
Ideally? nix build someflake would just work. Reality is there's a few hoops at the moment which is kind of a disappointing aspect.
If nix build someflake Just Worked I could see a lot more ad-hoc type contributions happening. Better still unlike makepkg its very easy to customize a package so presumably fewer same-but-slight-variant type things tha aur has a lot of would be consolidated.
but who is investing this time and bandwidth?
It seems like this sort of governance model allows politics to replace egalitarianism or meritocracy. I could have become a Debian contributor/packager many times over, but it always seemed not worth it for a thankless job which is mostly dealing with bureaucracy and red tape instead of actually solving technical matters.
(To be fair, I've since moved on to Funtoo, which, like Gentoo, is very egalitarian -- but requires a certain, rather high, level of technical interest and expertise which is its own filtering function. On the other hand, Debian's packaging policies are very strict, and many distributions have much less strict packaging policies.)
How do the less-difficult distributions such as Arch or Alpine do it with less overhead (and is that better or worse?)
How does one start a successful monastery, by the way?
This would repeat until he was nearly running to get the route done in time. At this point things got boring, so he'd use his seniority to switch to a new route. That mean some poor low-seniority sucker would get assigned his very demanding route and struggle desperately with it, finishing very late.
My point being that some people like being heroes, at least for a while. It seems to me kinda like the way I like running races: fun as an occasional challenge partly because doing something unsustainable causes me to push myself.
The stuff that's not already packaged tends to have 50 dependencies that aren't packaged, and need a version of Node that isn't packaged yet, etc.
For existing stuff, people are probably afraid the current maintainer is gonna do a better job than them, they don't want to mess something up, since breaking changes filter in from every package.
Android solves this by putting stuff in the os itself maintained by paid people, and not doing package management like Linux.
Nix solves it by making it easy to package stuff and allowing multiple versions. You can go from never used Nix to writing packages in hours to days.
Other distros put much more work on humans.
At my new job, I'm taking it easy.
What changed? It's very tiresome to swim against the current. You can only care about so many things that your team doesn't until you get tired of barking at the tree.
At my new job it's the same, as usual, but I'm not forcing things and just getting with the flow. If I can, I'll suggest some ocasional improvements but if it falls on deaf ears, I'll let it go.
Especially in terms of emotional investment - I've decided to save my passion more for personal projects instead of spending it all where it won't necessarily go anywhere.
To the point I was investigating the value of money (which I often despise).. because all of a sudden, people collaborate a bit more when there's a stupid material advantage in the end.
I lost the will to fight even though I think about it on a daily basis but now I just coast along. My issue is that time passes and I don't want to live my life like this so I keep dreaming of a way to sustain myself and then do better work for better purposes.
[0] it's a common pattern in groups, I've seen that in many different jobs.. it can be jealousy, old age fatigue making you sour, mob think, lack of communication but in the end, there's a natural tendency to create friction. It's the complete opposite of childhood playtime.. where everybody had one goal : maximize fun together in some game (Intrinsic motivation 100%). Adult life makes this very rare.
I'm at a new company now. I care but I keep my passion elsewhere. I can't keep getting burned out so I've just fallen in line with everyone else. People are more receptive to it. I spent my time drafting emails instead of commits. I make 4 tickets instead of one mega ticket. It is what it is and I'm happier for it.
One person trying to do too much is no bueno. It needs to be a team effort and consumers need to step-up to be occasional producers as well.
No system built by committee will ever be trivially reckonable/navigable by a single person. Therefore the only people who will derive benefit from it will mostly be committees/orgs.
When one builds for oneself, or a single person, one builds under a set of constraints that truly allow for peak accessibility.
You've only got 1 person to do the whole shebang. And if one person can do it, you're on a much better footing from which to then allow anyone to do it.
As someone in the midst of building out a lab, it's been humbling, and in a way invigorating to return to grappling with building cohesive, single operator systems.
Another good trick would be to get more maintainers. If a bunch of people would just handle one package each...
- But AI costs money to run, while maintainers are working for free...
And who maintains the AI maintainer maintainer?
As an aside, I really should learn how to package stuff for alpine.