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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

This always fascinating to see a person that maintains a ton of package, knowing full well that there is no way that they actively use all that software themselves. At the same time there are millions of us that just expects a package to be available, but never think to offer to at least help maintain a something. Frequently it's not even that hard, sure there are a few specialized packages which require more skills, but packaging up a Python library is something most of us could easily do.

Generally all of us needs to be better at pitching in where we can and not be depended on a few people overworking themselves.

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I don't know about Alpine specifically, but many distributions put a lot of red tape around becoming a maintainer (for good reasons). I just don't want to get into it. AUR from Arch Linux has an interesting take on this — anyone can become a maintainer in a matter of minutes — and while that results in some low-quality packages and the expectation that you're supposed to review everything you install (which is easy though thanks to the excellent package format, which Alpine also uses with minor modifications), most of them are fine, and AUR gets a lot more maintainers than any other distribution.

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.

I've found packaging for Alpine has been similarly easy. There is a review process in the sense that you file an MR instead of committing directly, but my experience has been really quick and easy. Also, not everyone with commit access does this, but psykose would also fix minor issues like indentation without requesting changes and doing the whole back and forth. I really appreciated it and noticed the changes for next time.

The community and main repositories have some stability guarantees but that doesn't stop you from orphaning the package.

Fedora is particularly bad at what you describe. It's basically just impossible for somebody who isn't already in the system (or doesn't know somebody who is already in the system) to get into the system. Between hard to find documentation and requirements like, "just join the mailing list and ask for people to sponsor you" (which nobody wants to do when they don't already know you) you have to really want to do it. I could have easily maintained several packages that I built, but after sinking 4 hours into it (building the packages only took an hour or so), in the end I just threw them on my COPR and called it a day. I'm not going to spin my wheels trying to jump ridiculous non-technical hurdles and try to navigate needlessly opaque processes.

In Debian at least you can become a Debian “Maintainer” more easily than you can become a Debian Developer.

Sure, but building debian packages is akin to needing to read lord of the rings before doing anything. There's so many deb helpers and various files/file formats that need to be understood. How and where files should go. It's horrendously complex compared to PKGBUILD and makepkg.

Yup, been there and walked away from it all.

It’s not great, true, but it’s not quite that bad. There are tools to generate templates, and “lintian” will complain about the package for most everything which is possible to get wrong.

> Fedora is particularly bad at what you describe.

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.

> 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 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.

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed says hi.

Maybe so. You wanna hear something crazy? I'm still salty over MS partnering with SuSE to offer Linux indemnification from SCO's legal action in 2004. But I'm not entirely impractical. Most how-tos and tutorials cover the Debian and RedHat descendents but only occasionally cover rolling distros or SuSE derivatives.

That's...not what they meant. That's not what's happening either. It discourages newer maintainers. older maintainers eventually retire.

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!"

I don't think it is a strange point of view: Fedora is a good outcome, so don't question how the sausage is made.

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)

It's not as bad as you make it to be. There are bugzilla categories like needs-sponsor that will usually attract a sponsor pretty soon.

but you know what? I think Alpine is right

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

Gentoo makes it pretty easy to add an "overlay" to get packages that someone makes, and if they get steam it becomes simple to import them into "mainstream".

~x86 helps too, masking a package is a good way to say "maybe tested, maybe not so much".

It's really hard to beat the PKGBUILD + makepkg ease of packaging. I really hope nix flakes kind of become simple and easy as time goes on. They kind of are, but nix having so many features and flexibility also means that super simple makepkg type program is sort of intertwined in a few other things.

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.

My dad knew a mail carrier. Tall, lanky, energetic, and a bit of an odd duck. When he started a new route, he'd go through it quickly, finishing early. An early finish meant they'd add more to the route. He'd take that as a challenge, working even harder to get through it early. They'd extend the route again, creating another challenge.

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.

I'm pretty sure Jeff Vogel of Spider Web Software would describe this as someone being a Viking, based on his great GDC talk.

Sounds like a really terrible programmer! Too bad it at least seems to be sometimes pretty much the only way to go certain things when nobody else wants to.

After long stints with Slackware, RedHat, SuSE, and Debian, I got very much into Gentoo Linux. Kept a local copy of the portage tree. Ran a dozen servers out of my house. That sort of thing. Then, I found a new job with a very-small, highly-technical company, which had built a successful business on the back of a custom physical testing software written by the young guy who was my boss. They used Gentoo for everything. It was probably a year into the job before I went to look up something about a package, and found my boss' name listed as the maintainer. That made sense, because it was a vital package that our custom software stack depended on. Then I noticed his name on something else. Then I grepped the portage tree, and discovered that he was the maintainer of MANY HUNDREDS of packages in the distro. I believe it takes a special skill set to want to do that, but this guy was on another level. He is the most talented, yet most modest, person I've ever seen.

Gentoo has a special place in my heart... watching 2 days on a AMD Athlon 1Ghz to compile the system. I learned a lot from it not the watching part but everything else.

Whenever I tried to get into packaging something during the years, I've bumped into politics and policy issues associated with each project to a lesser or greater degree. Technical knowledge is not enough, you must also really get into each project's rules and mindset, find a sponsor/mentor, adhere to its standards, gain trust, attend meetings, learn a specific tool set, all of which is a whole different ballpark compared to throwing a working technical solution over the wall.

I think that's the purpose, you want to filter out anyone that is not highly motivated because otherwise you'll have to invest a ton of time into many different people and you don't have that kind of bandwidth.

> otherwise you'll have to invest a ton of time into many different people and you don't have that kind of bandwidth.

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?)

I always kind of wonder why self packaging isnt a better supported thing in general? Like if i use macos, why not read the brewfile from the repo directly and so on. Your are already trusting the software to not mess with your system to a certain extent anyway

Honestly I'm not so sure the arch packaging situation _is_ that healthy these days. More cases of updates being long delayed for stuff like glibc and some security fixes. I hope the gitlab migration ultimately opens up more contributions to a more nixos-like contribution model

Good luck doing it without starting a cult or a monastery, though.

How does one start a successful monastery, by the way?

This is really the barrier for me. I’ve written plenty of (company) internal packages that end up getting moderate adoption, but trying to open source is an exercise in personal marketing. It’s insufficient that your project solve a problem. You have to convince people to use it and make PRs to other repos that would use it, monitor SO for questions, etc.

If NixOS were the standard distro everyone used, then I'd agree, packaging would be easy. But constant breaking changes that devs like to make complicate matters.

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.

It is the same kind of entitlement that makes many refuse to pay for the work of others, while fully expected to be paid for their own work.

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