Comment by steve_rambo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steve_rambo | Hacker News Reader

Oh boy. Just as dh almost managed to push all other package helpers out of existence, at least for official packages:

https://trends.debian.net

I don't think it's fair to expect third-party developers to keep track of all this and produce fully compliant packages without resorting to hacks like fpm. I have a couple of staging servers running Alpine and am thinking of switching more serious workloads to it. Maybe switching fully some day if that works out fine. I was surprised how easy it is to write Alpine packages, they don't change formats every week so your knowledge stays current, and I wrap even basic shell scripts in packages now. Not something I ever did for Debian systems.

Have a look at official packages for an example:

https://git.alpinelinux.org/aports/tree/main?h=3.12-stable

https://git.alpinelinux.org/aports/tree/community?h=3.12-sta...

- debhelper: 1997-present

- dh: 2008-present

Building something on top of dh at this point, like dh was built on debhelper, does not seem to justify your rant. But what do I know?

If you are who I think you are, then the answer is "a lot".

I see shy Joe... ;-)

In other words, in 16 years of dh being a thing it still hasn't acquired decent documentation, and how you're pushing another solution which is going to be undocumented for another 16-18 years. It's not just "my" rant, look at comments in every Debian packaging thread, this one included. The opposite is the exception.

If we can push Ubuntu out of the pole position, then I think we can solidify Alpine as the next great Linux distribution. I am all for simpler packaging.

I do fear, though, that Debian packaging has absorbed some necessary complexity that Alpine packaging has not --- if only because Debian has been around so much longer.

Arch has a very similar package format and is 21 years old. Alpine is more than 18. They haven't accrued much cruft in that time. One could argue they have worse support for things like cross-compilation, but many (most?) of us don't need that, and I see no reason to pay for it in 99% of use cases.

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