Hi,
I like Debian very much. The package management is one of the best and
most to all of the packages I use are well enough maintained and work
and update as expected when using the buster-backports repository.
It pains me to read, not for the first time, that the Debian BaseX
package seems to be on a kind of less maintained base than the files
downloadable at basex.org and no one cares about updates or better
backports. Pure unmodified Debian stable has a tendency of aging. But
may be some people develop their code exclusivly for Debian 10 stable
packages. That is a valid approach.
I have no clue if there is any list of packages activly maintained
during the Debian stable lifecycle. I guess not.
Ubuntu has such a list and a tool to check the setup for the maintenance
state for each package. The ubuntu list of mnaintained packages is
surprisingly short if you look at the over all huge number of packages
available.
For me this is less about the well maintained vanilla distribution of
BaseX, which I use with any JDK on any OS, including Debian 10, then
with the BaseX Debian package 9.0.1+ds-1 that is not part of the regular
release process of basex.org and so outdated and furthermore created in
a manner that is especially hard to understand and maintain seperately
from the rest of Debian.
Maybe I am wrong, but is the current maintainer of the Debian packages
actually on this list? It seems to me we get error reports here which
are totally lost on the person who might do something about the problems.
Best regards
Omar Siam
Am 17.03.2021 um 19:06 schrieb Joris Lambrecht:
Thanks for the perspective. Here's what i hope comes across as a polite
rant as a reply. It aches me and i notice it aches others everywhere.
I spent 20 years on and off with Linux, starting with a CT magazine CD
somewhere late 90's. I've really grown stone cold tired of the package
management nonsense with unmaintained, poorly maintained software.
Except for the big packges like desktops that is for which no sane
compilation procudure exists.
Also get irritated with the so called distro specific narrative. There
are exactly 2 systems, Debian and RedHat of which Debian is universally
compatible and Redhat is not so much. It should not be an issue really.
This implies developing compatible with the RedHat system is alwasy
going to work on Debian, not vice versa.
When it comes to package managers almost none of the work well or if
they work well there is no sensible package maintenance happening. Or
they build a great set of software like Sabayon Linux and stop the
disro.
The times i found myself downloading source and compiling from scratch
to have all features and flags enabled became too many. Yet every time
i go back almost to not using package managers. Such as I end up with
now with BaseX 🙂
By now i'm contemplating a no-package manager custom Linux distroy with
update scripts for my personal choice of tools. Simply to avoid the
cruft and 99% meaningless software in most distributions. Maybe i build
it all on BaseX to manage configuration, compilation and other stuff.
I'm a niche user who also happens to be picky and mostly atypical as an
IT profile. The future will probably bring hard choices and hard work
for me because of it.
Br,
Joris
