Re: Debian for third party (read: propietary) apps/vendors

[Wouter Verhelst]

On 29-03-13 18:03, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Wouter Verhelst  writes:
> 
>> I agree with this. This is why I proposed[1] a while back to look into
>> clarifying which parts of policy really only apply to "packages uploaded
>> to Debian", as opposed to "packages for local use", which may have
>> different requirements in some cases.
> 
>> There wasn't any response to that mail, however, which lead me to think
>> there wasn't much interest in that proposal.
> 
> For the record, I'm extremely interested in doing this, but it's a lot of
> work and I have approximately zero time right now to work on Policy
> things, so I can't (at the moment) help.  I probably should have said all
> of that instead of not saying anything; sorry!

No worries. I realize it's a lot of work, and I probably don't have
enough time myself, either. I did want to bring it up, and I will want
to help out if we ever decide to do this, but I definitely can't do it
alone.

> It strikes me as something that's best done as part of the long-delayed
> larger restructuring that we've wanted to do when changing formats.

Yes, I agree.

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Re: Debian for third party (read: propietary) apps/vendors

[Russ Allbery]

Wouter Verhelst  writes:

> I agree with this. This is why I proposed[1] a while back to look into
> clarifying which parts of policy really only apply to "packages uploaded
> to Debian", as opposed to "packages for local use", which may have
> different requirements in some cases.

> There wasn't any response to that mail, however, which lead me to think
> there wasn't much interest in that proposal.

For the record, I'm extremely interested in doing this, but it's a lot of
work and I have approximately zero time right now to work on Policy
things, so I can't (at the moment) help.  I probably should have said all
of that instead of not saying anything; sorry!

It strikes me as something that's best done as part of the long-delayed
larger restructuring that we've wanted to do when changing formats.

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)   


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Re: Debian for third party (read: propietary) apps/vendors

[Wouter Verhelst]

On 29-03-13 10:45, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> As Moray said, we should advertise more heavily why it's useful to
> package for Debian. But I think that we should also aim at making it
> easier to:
> - package that software as proper Debian packages
> - distribute that software inside Debian (when it is legally possible)
> 
> That means:
> - providing more/better documentation about packaging

I agree with this. This is why I proposed[1] a while back to look into
clarifying which parts of policy really only apply to "packages uploaded
to Debian", as opposed to "packages for local use", which may have
different requirements in some cases.

There wasn't any response to that mail, however, which lead me to think
there wasn't much interest in that proposal.

> - providing easier access paths to Debian (e.g. facilitate finding a
>   sponsor)

[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-policy/2013/01/msg00081.html

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add a voucher, and save on postage.


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Re: Debian for third party (read: propietary) apps/vendors

[Lucas Nussbaum]

Hi,

On 24/03/13 at 15:47 -0300, Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer wrote:
> There are third party vendors (read: propietary) that support the 
> installation 
> of their software in Debian, but mostly because selfish reasons: they need to 
> be present everywhere for their business model to work. A clear example of 
> this is Skype.
> 
> Now there is a second class of apps/vendors which do not need to be ubiquitous
> for their business model to work. Most of the examples that come to my mind 
> are CAD-related: Synopsys [0], Cadence [1] and Mentor [2] are examples of 
> propietary vendors that give support for Linux but just on Red Hat and 
> sometimes, Suse. And they are a PITA to make them work on Debian. This makes 
> IT workers need to have RH/Suse/CentOS boxes even if the rest of them run 
> Debian.
> 
> Sometimes the Debian support is a *.deb made from the RPM packages with 
> alien, 
> but this is just a small rant :-)
> 
> [0] 
> [1] 
> [2] 
> 
> Now my question is: without going against the Social Contract, is there 
> anything Debian can/should do wrt this situation?

First, I'd like to extend the question a bit.
- Yes, not everything is packaged in Debian
- Yes, some people are providing software by other means:
  + Debian packages distributed outside Debian
  + static binary packages
  + scripts that download and install the whole world
  + etc.

As Moray said, we should advertise more heavily why it's useful to
package for Debian. But I think that we should also aim at making it
easier to:
- package that software as proper Debian packages
- distribute that software inside Debian (when it is legally possible)

That means:
- providing more/better documentation about packaging
- providing easier access paths to Debian (e.g. facilitate finding a
  sponsor)

(I elaborated on that in other mails, so I'm not going to do it here
again :) )

Lucas


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Re: Debian for third party (read: propietary) apps/vendors

[Moray Allan]

On 2013-03-24 12:47, Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer wrote:

There are third party vendors (read: propietary) that support the
installation
of their software in Debian, but mostly because selfish reasons: they
need to
be present everywhere for their business model to work. A clear 
example of

this is Skype.

Now there is a second class of apps/vendors which do not need to be
ubiquitous
for their business model to work. Most of the examples that come to 
my mind
are CAD-related: Synopsys [0], Cadence [1] and Mentor [2] are 
examples of
propietary vendors that give support for Linux but just on Red Hat 
and
sometimes, Suse. And they are a PITA to make them work on Debian. 
This makes
IT workers need to have RH/Suse/CentOS boxes even if the rest of them 
run

Debian.


I'm not sure that the two groups are categorically different.  In both 
cases there's a "critical mass" kind of effect -- people will provide 
Debian packages if it's an expected thing to do.



Sometimes the Debian support is a *.deb made from the RPM packages
with alien,
but this is just a small rant :-)


I've seen low-quality third-party packages for Debian and low quality 
non-packaged installers, from both proprietary vendors and free software 
projects.


I suspect this only seems more of an issue with proprietary apps 
because those are the third-party packages that people who otherwise 
just use official Debian packages end up trying to install.


However, when I have been forced to use some piece of proprietary 
software on Debian, I have actively preferred using a statically 
compiled distribution-agnostic version rather than trusting the packages 
to behave sanely.  And I don't want non-free software to start itself 
except when I ask explicitly, to override existing configuration, etc.


I realise that static builds aren't a good solution for all software 
(it only really works for "leaf" applications, though all the examples 
you give fall into this group), or for all users (it requires more 
knowledge, and aren't a good solution for deployments wider than a 
single machine), but they may reduce the number of people who ask for 
Debian packages from proprietary vendors.


Note equally that sometimes there are problems that aren't from the 
original packaging work, but because packages are left for years without 
updates to support newer distributions.  The situation is parallel with 
the situation for proprietary drivers for Linux.


Now my question is: without going against the Social Contract, is 
there

anything Debian can/should do wrt this situation?


Well, we could advertise more heavily to such third parties the heavy 
use of Debian derivatives as well as Debian itself, and try to persuade 
them that providing a package that works on Debian allows them to reach 
all these users.  However, this might lead to disappointment when the 
packages didn't install on a large proportion of the 
derived-distribution users' machines.


In principle we could solve that by getting more certainty about common 
base packages with derived distributions, but it seems to me that a lot 
of effort would be needed to give even a small probability of this 
happening in a useful way, probably involving significant compromises on 
Debian's side.


A more practical way to mitigate this problem would be to provide a 
tool that checks a package for its installability on different Debian 
versions and on derived distributions and suggests solutions to increase 
installability, which would only require collecting data rather than 
reaching social agreements.


--
Moray


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Re: Debian for third party (read: propietary) apps/vendors

[Gergely Nagy]

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer  writes:

> There are third party vendors (read: propietary) that support the 
> installation 
> of their software in Debian, but mostly because selfish reasons: they need to 
> be present everywhere for their business model to work. A clear example of 
> this is Skype.

Most proprietary packages exist for the same reason: there's demand for
it, demand that can be turned back into money. Very few (if any at all)
proprietary vendors package up their software for distributions just to
be nice.

> Now there is a second class of apps/vendors which do not need to be ubiquitous
> for their business model to work. Most of the examples that come to my mind 
> are CAD-related: Synopsys [0], Cadence [1] and Mentor [2] are examples of 
> propietary vendors that give support for Linux but just on Red Hat and 
> sometimes, Suse. And they are a PITA to make them work on Debian. This makes 
> IT workers need to have RH/Suse/CentOS boxes even if the rest of them run 
> Debian.
[...]
> Now my question is: without going against the Social Contract, is there 
> anything Debian can/should do wrt this situation?

The difference between Debian, RedHat and SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise
Server) is that there's commercial support behind the latter two,
there's a company where vendors can turn to if they need
support. There's no such entity behind Debian. There are companies that
do sell Debian support, but that's not quite the same.

This status quo means that vendors rarely invest into preparing Debian
packages, because only a very small percent of their users are running
Debian (due to their business requiring support contracts from the
vendor, which is much easier and straightforward to obtain in the
RHEL/SLES cases, for example), and investing into making proper Debian
packages is simply not worth it.

As such, there's nothing Debian can or should directly do.

On the other hand, we have downstream distros where the parent company
does provide similar support guarantees that RHEL and SLES do. If third
party vendors start creating packages for these distributions, that may
very well make it easier to run said software on Debian too (like how
the RPMs are often run on CentOS instead of RHEL). This would help
Debian users who, for some reason, need to run said proprietary
software.

But even then, I would not wish Debian to go to great lengths to
accomodate non-free software. We should not make it unnecessarily hard,
either, but that's about it. If vendors don't provide Debian packages,
there's nothing we - as a project - can or should do to change
that. We're not the users that matter for the vendor, we're a target
platform, and it's not the platform that matters, but whether there's
enough users to make the effort of supporting the platform worth it.

(It's not like it's hard to make debian packages. It most definitely is
not. It isn't particularly hard to support Debian stable, either [my
employer provides packages for one of our propriertary tools for Debian
Sarge(!) too, it's not terribly hard].)

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Debian for third party (read: propietary) apps/vendors

[Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer]

There are third party vendors (read: propietary) that support the installation 
of their software in Debian, but mostly because selfish reasons: they need to 
be present everywhere for their business model to work. A clear example of 
this is Skype.

Now there is a second class of apps/vendors which do not need to be ubiquitous
for their business model to work. Most of the examples that come to my mind 
are CAD-related: Synopsys [0], Cadence [1] and Mentor [2] are examples of 
propietary vendors that give support for Linux but just on Red Hat and 
sometimes, Suse. And they are a PITA to make them work on Debian. This makes 
IT workers need to have RH/Suse/CentOS boxes even if the rest of them run 
Debian.

Sometimes the Debian support is a *.deb made from the RPM packages with alien, 
but this is just a small rant :-)

[0] 
[1] 
[2] 

Now my question is: without going against the Social Contract, is there 
anything Debian can/should do wrt this situation?

Kinds regards, Lisandro.

-- 
~/ sweet ~/

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer
http://perezmeyer.com.ar/
http://perezmeyer.blogspot.com/


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