Hello, On Sat, Jun 17, 2023 at 08:55:24AM -0400, pa...@quillandmouse.com wrote: > Debian's capable of deciding that systemd is installed by default, > etc, even if such decisions occur after monumental > discussions/arguments.
It took literally years and is still hotly revisited from time to time by various aggrieved parties on both sides. It's highly unlikely you will get enough people to care about there being one true package management frontend to do the same thing for that. If you think I'm wrong, good news: Debian does have a procedure for making such decisions - the General Resolution! So just find a Debian Developer who's willing to call a GR on this subject and five others who are willing to second their call, and off we go. It will be interesting if that happens, and I will only hate it if it causes "apt" to change how it works in any way whatsoever. 😀 However, another of those tricky core principles of Debian is that a GR can't force volunteers to do work, so even if someone did succeed in passing a GR that said that there would be one way of package management, or that Synaptic has to have X, Y and Z done to it (I don't know anything about Synaptic, so can't give any concrete examples of missing features), it STILL won't happen without agreement by the upstream developer(s) of those packages. Debian has passed GRs before that tried to make people do things, and found that no one wanted to do them, so despite there allegedly being project consensus that "Something Must Be Done", the thing did not get done after all. > I'm not suggesting there should be one package manager to rule them > all. But when the various tools resolve dependencies in different ways, > we clearly have a problem. I guarantee you that there are people reading this who enjoy that their package management frontend of choice resolves things the way it does and would be bitterly upset if that were to change. But even they are not the ones who decide. The authors of the software decide. Once the upstream authors and the Debian package maintainers (these two groups may or may not overlap) have decided something, there is basically no authority within Debian that can overrule them. This is currently happening with dpkg by the way - its author objects to merged-/usr. This is a fundamental aspect of the Debian project and butting your head against it will leave you in the same place you started at, but with a hurt head. > A problem which could be resolved, at least in theory, by a > concerted effort on the part of Debian leadership. A read into the history of merged-/usr may be enlightening. Right now we have a project-wide consensus that it should be done, but the dpkg author fundamentally disagrees with it [being done in dpkg], so the dpkg patches that Ubuntu and other derivatives have carried for literally years are not in Debian. External means have had to be implemented to convert existing systems to merged-/usr because the dpkg author won't co-operate with the process and no one can force them to do so. So if Debian, with a project-wide consensus, can't carry out a major change that has already been done in its biggest derivative years ago, do you really think that it would be any easier to start mandating how package management frontends work, over the wishes of multiple upstream authors? > Getting someone to implement the solution would require an eager > volunteer. You understand that the eager volunteers that Debian has already are what resulted in there being multiple package management frontends, right? And that there isn't just one of them because there is no authority within Debian to tell the other n-1 of them that their ideas are unwelcome? As mentioned, a GR could do it in theory, but you will never get the support because of the ethos of Debian. It's just not that kind of project. > I'm not here to snipe at Debian. You are asking a lot of "Why can't Debian behave in ways it never has and would be a dramatic departure for it to start doing now?" style questions though. > As regards Synaptic, based on the discussion here, I'm guessing that > whoever is maintaining it has no particular desire to craft a Wayland > version, and that's why it hasn't been done. Still, Debian leadership > could put out a call for volunteers to work on this. It *could* be > done. Again, I don't use Synaptic so am not aware of what functionality is missing exactly, but yes, in general if there are volunteers and the upstream authors are amenable then of course it's just a simple matter of programming! You won't get a mandate from Debian leadership because Debian leadership doesn't tell volunteers what to work on. That it hasn't happened already suggests that there aren't any sufficiently motivated and skilled volunteers (or that there are and the author is blocking it for some reason - haven't looked). I mean, is there even a bug report for this and did the maintainers engage with it? That is the proper way to proceed with it. > I get that Debian doesn't want to mandate how VLC or Firefox handle > their software, but Debian-exclusive package management is a different > matter. I'm sorry but you are mistaken. Package maintainers in Debian are almost impossible to overrule. The fact that all these different packages exist is evidence that enough people have strong and conflicting feelings about how they should work, that the authors persist. Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
