On Fri, Aug 14, 2015 at 8:20 PM James Powell <james4591@???> wrote:

> Slackware is maintained by 3 core people with extra help as needed. The
> rest of the packages are pushed by the community at large contributing.
> Devuan doesn't have to maintain every package possible. That's ludicrous to
> think so.
>
> Debian got in over its head by allowing this. Thousands upon thousands of
> packages that required a committee to oversee.
>
> They did, but out of all this design by committee, hidden between all the
political bullshit and bikeshedding, they also created the most brilliant,
most comprehensive set of standards for quality control, package
uniformity, license auditing, and of course. the most robust dependency
management, at least among binary distributions.

More importantly than that, they backed these standards up with automated
tools that are nearly as robust as the standards themselves. You don't see
packages interfering with one another very often in the Debian world,
because this is caught right away by scripts that check that every file
installed by a package, or automatically created by that package belongs to
EXACTLY ONE package, otherwise all the packages have to use some approved
mechanism to cooperate. You also see this effort it in difficult to
configure packages that set themselves up and work out of the box, and in
the modularized configuration that's common to many packages.

Most importantly, this rigid attention to detail is why for more than a
decade now, in place upgrades have been fully supported, officially
recommended and for the most part, Just Work(tm(. It used to be said, back
in the day that the installer was still horrible, "thank god you only ever
have to see it once"

With that said, Debian could have accomplished far more had it not been a
case of Design by committee, or if they had a competent BDFL with a firm
grasp on the overall vision stepping in from time to time when all that
process got out of hand, but I'm not sure if they'd have been ambitious
enough to create some of the architectural masterpieces they have with
different leadership.


Honestly, what is needed by a distribution? Look at Slackware or BLFS
> that's a lot of packages, but it's manageable by a small team. Why can't
> Devuan follow suit? There doesn't need to be a bagillion packages
> maintained by the main devs. If the rest need to be passed back to the
> community at large, then do it. This also hits the point of why do we need
> 5 different for things like, for example, SDL packages for -bin, -lib,
> -doc, -dev, -src, and such? One package is easier to maintain than five
> individual ones. It lightens the load significantly, especially for the
> poor soul having to make 5 or more different scripts for 5 packages from
> the same source tarball. Yes, it's nice to have small packages for embedded
> stuff and small disks, but do you really want to raise the workload of the
> maintainer that much?
>
>
The various -bin -lib etc packages raise the workload very little, if at
all - once it's properly set up, that part's effectively automated.