Marco d'Itri <m...@linux.it> writes: > On Sep 15, Sam Hartman <hartm...@debian.org> wrote:
>> I have significant discomfort aligning what you say (pam is the last >> blocker) with what several people said earlier in the week. What I >> heard is that there was no project consensus to do this, and that >> people were running experiments to see what is possible. > Indeed. I did the experiments and they where unexpectedly positive: pam > is the only blocker for booting _the base system_. > I never expected that everything would immediately work just fine with > an empty /etc: my goal is to have support for this in the base system > and selected packages. This started as an experiment: you were going to try running the base system in this mode with existing packages and see what happens. You ran that experiment and got results: it doesn't work, but it appears to only work because of PAM. So far, so good. You ran an experiment, the result was that the thing you want to do doesn't work, and now you understand what changes would be required to move forward. However, and this is very important, *no one has decided that you get to do that work in Debian*. Insofar as this is just a personal goal, sure, that's none of the business of anyone else. But if you want this to be a *project* goal, you're skipping a few important steps. The biggest ones is that there is no *plan* and no *agreement*. By plan, I mean an actual document spelling out in detail, not email messages with a few sentences about something that is familiar to you but not to other people who haven't been thinking about this, what base system support would look like. And by agreement, I mean that the maintainers of base system components agree that this is something that we are working towards as a project and something that they would not break lightly. Right now, any base system package maintainer could decide that putting configuration files in /etc makes sense for reasons of their own limited to their specific package and further break support for booting a system in this mode, and there are no grounds to ask them not to do this. Because you don't have an *agreement*. I feel like there is a tendency to consider work on Debian to be purely technical. If you turn it on and smoke doesn't come out, it works, so we have implemented that thing, and the goal is accomplished. This doesn't work, precisely because other people break your goal later (because they were never asked or never agreed with that goal), and then they are very confused about why you're upset and why your problems are now their problems. Or, worse, their packages are broken as collateral damage in accomplishing some goal, and you then argue that it's their problem to fix their packages, even though there was no agreement about that goal. Accomplishing things like this in Debian has a large social component that I think is being neglected. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
