Debian PPAs (please no)

[Deshapria]

excuse me, hello? - what is so definitelly new in a Plant dock?
What I can say - it's just another dock...

It was just an example of a simple useful app.
Regards!

[Head_on_a_Stick]

We do not learn from other peoples faults and mistakes. We have to make them ourselves.

Only a fool learns from their own mistakes

[spacex]

We do not learn from other peoples faults and mistakes. We have to make them ourselves.

Only a fool learns from their own mistakes

Most people are fools

[stevepusser]

When I saw the thread title, my first thought was that the OP should have linked to this.

I wonder if there's some way to embed that in a post; it would be quite useful

[Sarge-in-charge]

and Debian will be mistaken for one of those pass-time OS's where the aim is not actually to get anything productive done but to kill boredom while you wait for a new cat video on YouTube to be uploaded.

Debian already has become not much more than that. Serious systemd work is and will be done on Fedora/RedHat, and Debian will forever play catch-up with them.

Systemd is enough of a black-box critical piece of software, that no one doing serious work will take it from any place other than the place it is being hacked on: Fedora and RedHat. And that puts Debian with systemd in the toy category.

Sorry, systemd fans!

[somebodyelse]

^Yawn. You're as bad as Linadian.

[spacex]

and Debian will be mistaken for one of those pass-time OS's where the aim is not actually to get anything productive done but to kill boredom while you wait for a new cat video on YouTube to be uploaded.

Debian already has become not much more than that. Serious systemd work is and will be done on Fedora/RedHat, and Debian will forever play catch-up with them.

Systemd is enough of a black-box critical piece of software, that no one doing serious work will take it from any place other than the place it is being hacked on: Fedora and RedHat. And that puts Debian with systemd in the toy category.

Sorry, systemd fans!

No need to say sorry. Just leave for Fedora, Redhat or Windows as you see as a viable option again. Nobody will cry, nobody will be missed. People not liking Debian anymore shouldn't be using it. Easy as that. Staying here with bad intent only to cause grief as some kind of revenge because Debian has chosen something you don't like, IS NOT in anyway constructive. It's a waste of everyones time, including your own.

So Systemd-haters, take the consequense of your opinions and leave for something you like more...

[Deshapria]

and Debian will be mistaken for one of those pass-time OS's where the aim is not actually to get anything productive done but to kill boredom while you wait for a new cat video on YouTube to be uploaded.

Debian already has become not much more than that. Serious systemd work is and will be done on Fedora/RedHat, and Debian will forever play catch-up with them.

Systemd is enough of a black-box critical piece of software, that no one doing serious work will take it from any place other than the place it is being hacked on: Fedora and RedHat. And that puts Debian with systemd in the toy category.

Sorry, systemd fans!

No need to say sorry. Just leave for Fedora, Redhat or Windows as you see as a viable option again. Nobody will cry, nobody will be missed. People not liking Debian anymore shouldn't be using it. Easy as that. Staying here with bad intent only to cause grief as some kind of revenge because Debian has chosen something you don't like, IS NOT in anyway constructive. It's a waste of everyones time, including your own.

So Systemd-haters, take the consequense of your opinions and leave for something you like more...

The question is whether PPAs are OK for Debian. The OP says "please no." I find PPAs quite useful. There was a one CD Debian based distro, which also used Debianized Ubuntu PPAs. Finally, it appears that the developer of that distro had taken your advice, dropped Debian and moved to Windows.

(Asking everyone who disagrees with you to go to another OS is sort of Arch forum attitude, not Debian I believe.)

Yesterday, just for fun I'd been (re)creating everything (and little more) of that little distro in Ubuntu Testing. I could do that quite easily, as Ubuntu had all the apps in its repos. I didn't even have to look in Launchpad for PPAs. I won't ever move to Windows.

[somebodyelse]

^I find chairs quite useful but they have no place in Debian. My main concern is a watering down of the core value of stability. I don't see a problem for example with PostgreSQL providing a repository since the user is aware he is going outside the distribution and caveat emptor.

Once PPAs in Debian arrive, Debian's reputation will be that of Debian + PPAs.

We know this happens because many people consider non-free to be part of Debian.

[spacex]

(Asking everyone who disagrees with you to go to another OS is sort of Arch forum attitude, not Debian I believe.)

Yesterday, just for fun I'd been (re)creating everything (and little more) of that little distro in Ubuntu Testing. I could do that quite easily, as Ubuntu had all the apps in its repos. I didn't even have to look in Launchpad for PPAs. I won't ever move to Windows.

It's perfectly fine to disagree with me. But if Systemd is a dealbreaker for anyone, then the obvious and logical solution is to move to something without Systemd. It's pure math. Because the battle is lost in Debian. So it's not that people can not disagree with me, but it serves no purpose to continue to fight a lost battle. At some time people need to accept that Systemd is the default in Debian, and make their choices based on that fact. The fight is over.

[Randicus]

I seem to have missed something. What does systemd have to do with a Debian version of PPAs?

[Deshapria]

I seem to have missed something. What does systemd have to do with a Debian version of PPAs?

I was just about to ask that.

>On topic<
I notice that first the PPAs come to Launchpad, then someone Debianize them to Debian one way or another. Debian is sort of lagging in getting new apps.

[Danielsan]

Well... PPA is one of the reason I left Ubuntu, however with PPAs hide behind the corner these adivices are going to be completely useless: https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian ... nkenDebian

I used to frequent the Italian Ubuntu Community and I remember well cleary after the introduction of the PPAs the forum started be flooding of requests of broken system because the PPAs.

It is true: PPA, Systemd, it seems that Debian is completely in disarray...

[stevepusser]

Plenty of people have broken their Debian Systems by unwisely adding Ubuntu PPAs already.

We have a sort of super-PPA in the MEPIS/MX repo, but we have a testing section that packages have to go through first before graduating to the main repository. Maybe Debian could try something like that.

[spacex]

I seem to have missed something. What does systemd have to do with a Debian version of PPAs?

Sarge-in charge introduced it into this thread, and I responded because I'm tired of the anti-systemd crowd always dropping in some negative comments about systemd, regardless what the topic is.

[shevegen]

Sarge-in charge introduced it into this thread, and I responded because I'm tired of the anti-systemd crowd always dropping in some negative comments about systemd, regardless what the topic is.

How would it not fit to PPAs?

It is a package just like many other packages, and as far as I am aware, there are PPA repositories so I am sure there are also ones with different systemd variants.

add-apt-repository ppa:some/ppa

if Systemd is a dealbreaker for anyone, then the obvious and logical solution is to move to something without Systemd. It's pure math. Because the battle is lost in Debian. So it's not that people can not disagree with me, but it serves no purpose to continue to fight a lost battle. At some time people need to accept that Systemd is the default in Debian, and make their choices based on that fact. The fight is over.

This is correct and something I also don't understand - if you don't want systemd then you can switch to other distributions.

There are still some variants without systemd.

There is however had one thing that the debian crowd should keep in mind - you don't offer an alternative to systemd. The alternatives I have seen are huge workarounds.

Linux is about choice. Debian is not. And this was different ~10 years ago - I learned the Linux way on a debian system without the xorg server.

I wouldn't want to have to learn the intricacies of an ever growing system of complexity.

[spacex]

@shevegen

I do agree with you that the Debian alternative to systemd is a workaround, and one that isn't going to be viable in the long run. Anyone that feels systemd as a dealbreaker should move elsewhere. I wasn't happy for systemd myself, but to me it wasn't a dealbreaker. I accepted it as something that was going to come, whether I liked it or not, and that I had two choices, adapt to systemd as soon as possible, or leave Debian. This time I chose to stay with Debian, because Systemd isn't a dealbreaker for me. At least not at this point. The worst case scenarios might still make me leave Debian, but I'm going to wait and see how it plays out and what new steps Debian will make in the next crossroads. If it moves further in a direction I don't like, then I'll leave.

But I'll worry about that if and when we get there, and I'm in no way going to complaint. Because my freedom isn't worth more than the devs freedom. They develop whatever they want to, and I use it if I like it. That's what real freedom is about. Forcing devs to provide us with options they are not interested in developing, isn't freedom. We as users have to understand that the devs has to be free too. They aren't hired, and we can't demand or expect anything from them.

So the freedom is really this, you are free to choose what to use, or what not to use, and you are free to make your own if you don't like anything you are being offered. That's it. Linux offers a variety of choices, but you can't expect any specific distro to supply all the options. The freedom lies in the fact that you can choose between different distros and flavours.

Nobody ever said that all possible options should be available in Debian. If that was the case, then we wouldn't need any other distros. Different distros, different options.

[fireExit]

add-apt-repository ppa:some/ppa

Debian's proposal [already linked in this topic] is not to use Launchpad PPA's and probably not even the name PPA

On 05/09/2013 02:38 PM, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, 08 May 2013, Holger Levsen wrote:
>> I actually really like this idea! (Though I suggest "Debian Personal
>> Archive".)
>>
>> It's really different from what people know as PPAs.
> To be fair, "Personal" is probably not relevant either. I expect many of
> those repositories to be maintained by teams.
>
> DSPA = Debian Special Purpose Archive
> DSPR = Debian Special Purpose Repository
> DASP = Debian Archive of Special Packages
> SPA = Special Package Archive
>
> bikeshed \o/
Seriously, any of the above would be better than PPA.
Naming it like for Ubuntu fools our users into believing
it is the same thing, when the plan is not like that.

I like the first name above.

Thomas

[Deshapria]

add-apt-repository ppa:some/ppa

Debian's proposal [already linked in this topic] is not to use Launchpad PPA's and probably not even the name PPA

That's not exactly Debian's proposal, but another user's proposal. This user is proposing that the Debian users should have a user created archive.

The problem is Ubuntu has such an archive, and the website that hosts the archive is owned by Cannonical, and that these files has .deb ending.

We are told, we shouldn't use them, but if we look inside the .deb package, we'd see what that package is depending on. If we can find the dependencies in Debain repos, why not use them?

When we add-apt-repository ppa:some/ppa, it directs to a Debian repo, the one we are using, and not to an Ubuntu repo, so it would either pull dependencies from the Debian repo(s), or say it cannot be installed, or say find some dependencies. Most of those dependencies can be found in https://packages.debian.org, so what the problem in installing and trying out that user created app, even though it was created with Ubuntu in mind?

[Randicus]

The problem is Ubuntu has such an archive, and the website that hosts the archive is owned by Cannonical, and that these files has .deb ending.

Canonical having a repository of packages for their system is not a problem. In fact, it should be expected.

We are told, we shouldn't use them, but if we look inside the .deb package, we'd see what that package is depending on. If we can find the dependencies in Debain repos, why not use them?

Almost everyone who wants to use Ubuntu PPAs on a Debian system does not have even a basic level of knowledge about Debian or Ubuntu. They believe since Ubuntu is based on Debian and both use .deb packages, packages are interchangeable between the two systems. Your example assumes a higher level of knowledge and common sense than what many new users have. A repository like the one fireExit refers to is a much better idea.