Proposal "Devuan User Repository"

exponentialmatrix · 2026-02-01 11:43:48

speaking of pessimism. We are going through the human equivalent of the "mouse utopia experiment". Depending on your politics, you'll explain it differently. The important part is that it can't be stopped and it's irreversible. You can see it repeat through out history and no on ever solves it.

About the subject. They are several reason to do this. And having the official logo on it is a plus.

1. It can be used to groom future maintainers.

2. You can put their lesser quality packages, for whatever reason. Instead of having crappy private packages, you can dump them there for others to use.

3. New packages can be pumped from there.

4. Tech news will talk about it. Should see a spike of interest

5. The official endorsement is important. It should be part of the distro.

6. The new source format is important. Auditing is easier and lowers the barrier to entry.

7. The biggest selling point of Arch, is the AUR.

8. Can try and do an embrace, extend and extinguish on debian. Debian is decaying, we need a post debian plan.

9. That Arch and the AUR exists is an institutional failure of Debian.

10. The AUR is a resounding sucess, You can't pretend that it's irrelevent even if personally don't care.

pcalvert · 2026-02-01 11:51:43

Devuan-username wrote:

The DUR will only have the recipes. A user would need to build the package themselves with the recipes. The built packages will not be added to the main archive. Security will be on the users.

In that case, perhaps this could be hosted on something like GitHub or GitLab? That way, you don't need anyone's "permission" to do it. You simply do it, and whoever wants to use it can use it.

ralph.ronnquist · 2026-02-01 12:56:30

It may be less than known and understood, but in fact almost anyone may register at git.devuan.org and use it as repository for their public projects. If it's aimed at sharing, then documentation is essential.

When you have a binary package to publish you may drop in at #devuan-dev (at libera.chat) to discuss how that may happen; although first and foremost of course you'd publish your package to Debian. Though in some cases it may be warranted to have a trial publishing at Devuan/experimental.

tux_99 · 2026-02-01 13:31:56

@exponentialmatrix ralph.ronnquist suggestion seems sensible, proceed step by step, DUR requires 'easydeb', so first get 'easydeb' into Devuan, that way the fundamental requirement is available in the Devuan repos, after that it's only a matter of making the DUR repo an official part of Devuan.

Last edited by tux_99 (2026-02-01 13:32:51)

exponentialmatrix · 2026-02-01 22:40:49

for those that think that they have no use of this.
an example with the git version of yt-dlp https://gitea.com/DUR/yt-dlp-git
it often breaks and often it's slow to get the new backport from the distro. Instead, you can build the latest package in a few minutes.

i have a few small games where the recipe does the various crap needed to make them work on debian (wine, exotic compilers, .config etc). For example i have violated heroine (yes, it's naughty), that's normally a huge pain to collect all the necessary crap to make it run on lnux. When i was on bookworm, i would also download libraries from sid and bundle them with binary apps that needed them. grid wars 2 is a nice little game too.

I'm currently hosting my 150 examples on gitea https://gitea.com/DUR . Long story short, i think that's the best option.

this is a new source package format. It's not as simple as just uploading a source package. easydeb uses easydeb to package it self. I see debian as too bureaucratic to accept changes of this sort... If they really wanted a debian AUR they would have already done it a long time ago. Given they removed fortunes-off and they will rewrite apt in rust, i think they are moving in the opposite direction. There was a long time ago a package with a cartoon girl on the desktop that lost more of her clothes the hotter the CPU was... I don't believe today debian would ever accept such a package ever again. Debian, has become a product to be sold to companies.

i have a few other packages that i would propose, but they too have the new source format. if some one cares about rtv, try the tuir recipe.

tux_99 · 2026-02-01 23:57:52

exponentialmatrix wrote:

I see debian as too bureaucratic to accept changes of this sort... If they really wanted a debian AUR they would have already done it a long time ago.

@exponentialmatrix please re-read ralph.ronnquists message he was talking about the steps to get easydeb into DEVUAN, not Debian!

brocashelm · Yesterday 01:13:18

exponentialmatrix wrote:

There was a long time ago a package with a cartoon girl on the desktop that lost more of her clothes the hotter the CPU was... I don't believe today debian would ever accept such a package ever again.

That's Hot Babe (hot-babe). I got the last DEB binary from Medibuntu working just fine on Daedalus...

exponentialmatrix · Yesterday 09:53:16

although first and foremost of course you'd publish your package to Debian

beh...

@brocashelm
Ahh, a man of culture. Here for your education https://gitea.com/DUR/violated-heroine-en (you'll need 2 external build dependencies and 1 external run dependency)

@ralph.ronnquist
ok, i registered.... https://git.devuan.org/exponentialmatrix

On gitea i organized DUR and easydeb in orgs though... i don't have the rights to create an org...
i would like to migrate the orgs https://gitea.com/easydeb and https://gitea.com/DUR

brocashelm · Yesterday 10:31:17

You can also use EasyRPG Player to play those games natively.

exponentialmatrix · Yesterday 10:37:36

i'm indeed using easyrpg for those games. The wine games are other.

ralph.ronnquist · Yesterday 11:23:21

Yes, Devuan's git store doesn't have "user organisations" enabled.

The git store is only intended for users keeping and sharing their "source code".

Though, obviously life is full of change. Perhaps you (or someone) will make a sufficiently compelling argument that organisational shrouding is a necessary or at least significantly useful feature for this purpose, and so make us re-open that discussion about its enabling.

But there is no formal vetting here, about the software a user keeps and shares; merely the ordinary care-taking spot reviews that rests heavily on community feedback as means of maintaning relevance and quality.

exponentialmatrix · Yesterday 12:29:58

i'm not arguing to allow orgs in general. That's too big of a discussion.

Specifically here, i have easydeb relevant stuff organized in easydeb org and the DEBBUILDs in a DUR org. The DUR org is ~150 tiny repositories (5MB total?) plus eventually other users DEBBUUILDs. It's meant to be decentralized with a lot of freedom for maintainers, emulating the AUR inside gitea.

In my OP, i had something like this in mind, using a gitea instance to host them. This is perfect, you already have a gitea instance.

ralph.ronnquist · Yesterday 13:49:46

I suppose it's obvious I don't know what AUR is or how it's used, but off hand I see no compelling argument against the principle setup to have a single "DUR project" to house the ~150 thingies, beside the one or a few infrastructrual projects. But I can also understand how that setup thought might not gel too well with your vision.

But I need to leave this for tonight, though; in fact it's already tomorrow here

exponentialmatrix · Yesterday 14:21:42

Having them side by side with the other orgs is very reasonable to me.

The AUR is basically a bunch of scripts to build packages for Arch. It's one per package, they are not generic. The DUR/easydeb project does something similar with debian systems. In the AUR, individuals manage their own scripts in individual git repos. To emulate this ability, the project needs to allow users to upload their own scripts inside an org. Having just one git repo will cause excessive centralization. The alternative of just letting separate repos entirely, will cause difficulties searching them and moderating them.

greenjeans · Yesterday 14:37:46

Have you ever contributed any code directly to Devuan? Please remind me. smile If lack of needed hands-on begins to negatively impact Devuan's viability, you could just pick up your Vuu-do marbles and move to another base . . .
Obviously, I am in a mood . . .

Wow, don't know what I did to deserve that after 10 years with Devuan.

Pretty sure I made some contributions along the way, but as I don't keep score I couldn't give you a breakdown or a total.

Also pretty sure i've mentioned multiple times that I have accelerated my learning curve by many orders of magnitude this year, with one of the goals of that being able to help more, maybe maintain some packages at least.

fsmithred · Yesterday 15:42:20

Having just one git repo will cause excessive centralization. The alternative of just letting separate repos entirely, will cause difficulties searching them and moderating them.

Suggestion: Separate repos for each user's contributions, and name the repo something like DUR_fsmithred/ and if I want someone else to have upload privs to my DUR, I can just add them in my settings. Explore repos with search string "DUR" and they will all be listed (by "DUR_username" which may not be helpful) or search by project name, and all projects by that name will be listed (DUR* or otherwise).

exponentialmatrix · Yesterday 17:08:48

I'm following the AUR architecture. It's over 20 years old, i doubt you'll do better.

Users can orphan or adopt repos, so having their names in the repo name doesn't work.

I'll also need special restrictions, for example users shouldn't be able to change git history

brocashelm · Yesterday 19:24:49

greenjeans wrote:

Wow, don't know what I did to deserve that after 10 years with Devuan.
Pretty sure I made some contributions along the way, but as I don't keep score I couldn't give you a breakdown or a total.
Also pretty sure i've mentioned multiple times that I have accelerated my learning curve by many orders of magnitude this year, with one of the goals of that being able to help more, maybe maintain some packages at least.

And you have, and will (hopefully) keep doing that! I don't currently have a use case for the software and scripts you've released at this time, but it's seriously cool to see more love for YAD (I see you're a regular at the BunsenLabs forums, too ).

golinux · Yesterday 20:49:19

Wow, don't know what I did to deserve that after 10 years with Devuan. sad

Hey greenjeans . . . We go back even further than that. Remember the rebel Debian forum created around the time of the rigged Resolution vote that changed the course of Debian forever?

You have always done your thing to provide your local community and other De***n users with your alternative re-spin Vu-Doo. I know what a re-spin is because I use Refracta myself. Sometimes, you might find a bug but afaik are not contributing to or maintaining critical chunks of Devuan infrastructure itself. You scratch your own itch. I know that well because I scratched my itch to give Devuan an integrated visual identity to all of its user-facing content. But - and please correct me if I'm wrong - neither of those Devuan derivatives would survive for long if Devuan ceased to exist.

Currently too many critical tasks are SPOF due to lack of developer redundancy so I really don't get why we are expanding options to distract users from focusing on essentials. Seems a bit like "fiddling while Rome burns" . . .

greenjeans · Yesterday 21:46:36

And you have, and will (hopefully) keep doing that! I don't currently have a use case for the software and scripts you've released at this time, but it's seriously cool to see more love for YAD (I see you're a regular at the BunsenLabs forums, too wink).

Appreciate that good buddy, yeah I hang out over there sometimes, great group of folks who do some really interesting work.

brocashelm · Yesterday 21:46:48

Sorry, but playing with CSS files is not at all congruent with making Devuan a usable OS -- any more so than what Greenjeans has already provided to the community out of his own kind efforts.

Three years ago, we had a user who put in the effort to help Devuan by creating a DVD set production script and a survey of user-made content. There was a lot of potential to help the project out in both cases, but of course, he was bullied and driven away by a few people in position of power over a non-issue (source). Not long after, one of the staff members unilaterally removed the quote-to-reply functionality without consulting the active userbase first, just because of said non-issue that bothered said staff member.

Had said incident not happened, he would have likely contributed directly to the releases of Daedalus and now Excalibur, as well as the next testing version Freia. Instead of throwing all this bureaucratic crap on regular users offering to volunteer in SOME form, maybe consider that they (we) are the ones who keep Devuan's wheels spinning, and without these users, Devuan loses users to another distro like Artix or even Gentoo.

greenjeans · Yesterday 22:07:21

golinux · Yesterday 23:14:05

HA! You just gave me an opportunity to fire up my image blocker. A bit annoying but thankfully doable.

ralph.ronnquist · Yesterday 23:26:37

@exponentialmatrix: perhaps my suggestion doesn't fit your purpose.

golinux · Today 01:22:34

brocashelm wrote:

Had said incident not happened, he would have likely contributed directly to the releases of Daedalus and now Excalibur, as well as the next testing version Freia.

We have always consulted very different crystal balls. At least you get credit for qualifying and hedging your "conclusion" . . .

The officially official Devuan Forum!

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