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exponentialmatrix

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Registered: Yesterday

Posts: 2  

easydeb deb packager

repo: https://gitea.com/easydeb/easydeb

easydeb, is a fork of makedeb, that in turn is a fork of makepkg from arch. It takes recipes and builds deb packages. It's very similar to PKGBUILDs in the AUR.

The goal, is to have a packaging tool that is more accessible. It's written in bash, and the recipes are in a single bash file. Long term the goal would be to have an "AUR" but for debs. Currently i have a bunch of examples here: https://gitea.com/DUR you are welcome contributing your own recipes (expect minor bugs, i made a mass migration).

Debian packaging is just bad at several levels. Technically is overly complicated. For example, links have to be declared in a special file, here, you just use ln -s. It uses makefiles, here it's just bash. The barrier to entry for packaging in debian is just too high, from too much bureaucracy to very high quality requirements. Yes, high quality is a problem here. Especially since there's no place like an AUR to allow people to be bad until they gain experience and stop being bad. While debian maintainers are typically overworked while the docs tell you immediately don't bother people with questions, just rtfm. And there's a heavy bureaucratic procedure to get admitted. The whole thing is very intimidating to interested future maintainers. This is really terrible, any institution that doesn't prioritize the new generation, is guaranteed to die. With wikipedia, you can see a drop in the number of admins, while old admins say they would never had become admins today because of the very high standards. I don't know if they are statistics somewhere about debian maintainers, if they do, they should be showing alarming trends. If you think about it, arch shouldn't have existed, sid should have been arch and we should had have a DUR.

It has basically 20 years of development from arch devs, it's not alpha quality, but i made a bunch of changes lately. So expect some bugs.

I'm proposing that devuan makes easydeb the official packager and creates a AUR clone. You must have extra server capacity, you could use gitea to keep it simple and lean and a lot of you are sysadmins so you know how to do it securely. An official announcement would be picked up by tech news, and we would see an initial spike of interest. This will lower the barrier to entry for new maintainers. And also allow a place to put less polished packages.

I think debian is slowly dieing and we need a realistic long term strategy to fork it. I think the rust/Wayland/systemd bullshit will cause a bsds type of split in the linux world. debian has become a product.