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[Discussion] A world in which Debian uses RPM

Off-Topic discussions about science, technology, and non Debian specific topics.
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donald
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Re: [Discussion] A world in which Debian uses RPM

#61 Post by donald »

brainchild wrote: 2022-12-06 03:39 Yes, I understand. I think some find irksome not being able to resolve a correct answer, more so than the subject matter not being narrowly targeted. At least, it would explain why so much frustration was noisily vented over my not giving any premise (e.g. any "argument") that might be negated. In fact, the frustration ran so steep that easily-refuted premises simply were attributed to me inaccurately, along with, of course, the actual refutations.
No disagreement from me.
brainchild wrote: 2022-12-06 03:39 There are how questions and why questions. In developing technology, we often become so embedded in the how that we imagine some kind of relevance sealed away from the real world, which demands us to ask why.
Rapid or evolving technology/software deserves a voice and a platform as most of the software developed comes from: 'How does this work', 'How can I/We make this better'?
brainchild wrote: 2022-12-06 03:39 Why does Debian maintain its own separate package system? Is a technical reason satisfying, or is the reason primarily historic? Are upgrades isolated and reversible, or incremental and unidirectional? Are snapshots best handled through the file system, or through an abstracted file tree? Does Debian handle the full gamut of demands asked of modern operating systems, or prefer to stay confined to a more narrow niche? I think all such questions are broadly constructive.
I like where you are going with this, but perhaps wait a bit. It is a lot to absorb. Good points though. Maybe one point/thread per week. I really enjoy the technical crowd coming in and adding information and defending stances, I am honest in saying that I learned a lot in this thread.

The naysayers and hot heads can be ignored as long as there is some kind of education in the topic. The latter will eventually get frustrated with being ignored and stop 'contributing' in threads like this, or find somewhere else to post vitriol. Either way, that boorish behaviour is not welcome here by any means.
brainchild wrote: 2022-12-06 03:39 For my part, I had assumed Debian users largely would want the system to evolve along a tract common with certain competitors, but now I understand the strength of devotion to certain classic characteristics. Yet, Debian is not just the Debian distribution, but also a larger family, including derivations. Of course, I understand when someone grows fond of a system, discussing major changes may be unpleasant.
Don't let the insulting posters distract or confuse you. Debian does listen to outside voices and takes contributions, in the same model as here it is up to the users to support or contribute to the idea. Debian Developers are not point and click workers, we are people, we see things that we would like to change and make those changes. This is not unavailable to those who would like to see changes with contributions or discussions. As a secondary point, while this discussion is welcome here, the official Debian mailing lists may have been a better venue for this discussion ... though the feedback here would lend to a better thread on the mailing lists for defensible positions. Win/Win.
brainchild wrote: 2022-12-06 03:39 However, to your point of encouraging discussion, I doubt any encouragement truly follows by relegating such threads to a section called "Offtopic". Perhaps another section might be added for the purpose, one with a more uplifting description, for example, "General Discussion". (In fact, although the thread was moved to "Offtopic", the description is given as "If it doesn't relate to Debian, but you still want to share it, please do it here". Based on descriptions alone, I tend to consider a better match to be the original location, "Development Discussion", or otherwise, "General Debian".)
One of the other Administrators moved the thread here to this area, and to be fair, it was a good decision. We have specific areas and that administrator chose this area for whichever reasons they may have chosen.

Lastly, I'm not pushing forward your particular viewpoints or ideology, but I welcome it and will not have anyone here speak over you or shout you down as 'unpopular' as it may be.

Freedom of expression and software demands equal voices, and that will always be accepted here.
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Re: [Discussion] A world in which Debian uses RPM

#62 Post by brainchild »

donald wrote: 2022-12-06 09:39
brainchild wrote: 2022-12-06 03:39 There are how questions and why questions. In developing technology, we often become so embedded in the how that we imagine some kind of relevance sealed away from the real world, which demands us to ask why.
Rapid or evolving technology/software deserves a voice and a platform as most of the software developed comes from: 'How does this work', 'How can I/We make this better'?
The distinction I was making was between questions that may progress directly toward a definitive endpoint, versus those that would remain open, mediated by conflicting external pressures. For example, How do I install Inkscape on a Debian system, versus Why does Debian use APT, while RedHat uses RPM. Generally why questions lead to how questions, but when emphasizing the latter too much, a tendency may emerge to become closed to the why.
donald wrote: 2022-12-06 09:39
brainchild wrote: 2022-12-06 03:39 Why does Debian maintain its own separate package system? Is a technical reason satisfying, or is the reason primarily historic? Are upgrades isolated and reversible, or incremental and unidirectional? Are snapshots best handled through the file system, or through an abstracted file tree? Does Debian handle the full gamut of demands asked of modern operating systems, or prefer to stay confined to a more narrow niche? I think all such questions are broadly constructive.
I like where you are going with this, but perhaps wait a bit. It is a lot to absorb. Good points though. Maybe one point/thread per week. I really enjoy the technical crowd coming in and adding information and defending stances, I am honest in saying that I learned a lot in this thread.
I was intending only to give examples of the latter kind of question, of how questions, to illustrate the point.
Last edited by brainchild on 2022-12-06 10:18, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: [Discussion] A world in which Debian uses RPM

#63 Post by donald »

brainchild wrote: 2022-12-06 09:59 I was intending only to give examples of the latter kind of question, of how questions, to illustrate the point.
You and everyone have freedom of expression here, carry on, post on, post more. Fellow members who cannot offer common courtesy or follow the The Forum Guidelines. simply risk their ability to continue discussions here.
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Re: [Discussion] A world in which Debian uses RPM

#64 Post by brainchild »

donald wrote: 2022-12-06 10:11 You and everyone have freedom of expression here, carry on, post on, post more. Fellow members who cannot offer common courtesy or follow the The Forum Guidelines. simply risk their ability to continue discussions here.
Great. Mailing lists are often associated with accessibility barriers, even if some are largely symbolic, so receptivity on the forum is helpful. Ironically, one of those barriers is the reputation of mailing lists for being less friendly than forums, a generalization not supported by the present experience.

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Re: [Discussion] A world in which Debian uses RPM

#65 Post by donald »

brainchild wrote: 2022-12-06 10:16
donald wrote: 2022-12-06 10:11 You and everyone have freedom of expression here, carry on, post on, post more. Fellow members who cannot offer common courtesy or follow the The Forum Guidelines. simply risk their ability to continue discussions here.
Great. Mailing lists are often associated with accessibility barriers, even if some are largely symbolic, so receptivity on the forum is helpful. Ironically, one of those barriers is the reputation of mailing lists for being less friendly than forums, a generalization not supported by the present experience.
The mailing lists can be ... brutal to be honest, but at least here you won't be shouted down. Later if or when you decide to approach a topic such as this on the main lists you will have the negative points shared from other members here to add to your positive points there for your proposal/idea to the lists.

Again, I would state that the Debian User Forums are shared and contained under the overall Debian infrastructure umbrella, which means this is an official resource of the project.

For you and anyone else reading this thread, that means that The Debian Project, while mostly active on mailing lists and channels, is actually active here. While you may not bump into or interact with another Debian Developer here, some of them do in fact read the forums. So posting here is not a lost cause, but linking from here and posting on the lists may get more individuals involved, as such and as you desire if you wish to post these ideas to the mailing lists you can link back to your posted thread here.
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Re: [Discussion] A world in which Debian uses RPM

#66 Post by brainchild »

donald wrote: 2022-12-06 10:42 For you and anyone else reading this thread, that means that The Debian Project, while mostly active on mailing lists and channels, is actually active here. While you may not bump into or interact with another Debian Developer here, some of them do in fact read the forums. So posting here is not a lost cause, but linking from here and posting on the lists may get more individuals involved, as such and as you desire if you wish to post these ideas to the mailing lists you can link back to your posted thread here.
Thank you for the explanation. The particular topic is immense, however, in terms of the scale of its implications, almost singularly so. Any possibility of leading to an actual plan of action would follow from a vastly larger discussion, and consensus, accumulated over a very long duration, through a great number of voices. My sense is, for the present case, that planting seeds of thought in one place or another matters more than which place, but I tend to prefer one with a broader reach, rather than a deeper one.

I hope my thoughts reveal some measure of sensibility.
Last edited by brainchild on 2022-12-06 11:07, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: [Discussion] A world in which Debian uses RPM

#67 Post by brainchild »

donald wrote: 2022-12-06 10:42 The mailing lists can be ... brutal to be honest, but at least here you won't be shouted down.
Here meaning where, here here (the forum), or there here (the mailing lists)...?

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Re: [Discussion] A world in which Debian uses RPM

#68 Post by donald »

brainchild wrote: 2022-12-06 11:04
donald wrote: 2022-12-06 10:42 The mailing lists can be ... brutal to be honest, but at least here you won't be shouted down.
Here meaning where, here here (the forum), or there here (the mailing lists)...?
The Debian mail lists. They can be friendly or not so much so, certainly more polite than the unfortunate embarrassing behaviour on display here in some regards, but not always.
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Re: [Discussion] A world in which Debian uses RPM

#69 Post by dilberts_left_nut »

That's a regular side effect of religious discussions.... ;)
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Re: [Discussion] A world in which Debian uses RPM

#70 Post by brainchild »

dilberts_left_nut wrote: 2022-12-06 12:41 That's a regular side effect of religious discussions.... ;)
Heated and opinionated, however, is not one in the same as unfriendly and unkind.

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Re: [Discussion] A world in which Debian uses RPM

#71 Post by donald »

dilberts_left_nut wrote: 2022-12-06 12:41 That's a regular side effect of religious discussions.... ;)
User Warning. :lol:
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Re: [Discussion] A world in which Debian uses RPM

#72 Post by el_koraco »

brainchild wrote: 2022-12-05 21:58 No one thing makes Debian what it is, other than the incremental continuity of its community, just as no one thing makes China what it is, or Walmart, or the Greek language.
I would disagree: https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/

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Re: [Discussion] A world in which Debian uses RPM

#73 Post by LE_746F6D617A7A69 »

brainchild wrote: 2022-12-05 23:29
CwF wrote: 2022-12-05 23:26
LE_746F6D617A7A69 wrote: 2022-12-05 22:32 Personally, I think that APT could be seriously speed-up by moving it to multi-threaded world - yes I think it's possible
I thought it was in a limited way? It is beneficial for tracing for it to be sequential, and it does complexities through iteration, that's why I think Aptitude is faster for complex upgrades when done in a tty with so many of typical desktop and services not running.
I think the downloading and unpacking phases may be made parallel in principle, but application of the upgrades to the system would remain sequential. Only one worker may be allocated for the purpose of modifying the system, otherwise race conditions would emerge. Such changes would require some redesign and rewriting, especially with respect to separating unpacking from installation, currently handled by a single invocation of the base utility.
Yeah - especially unpacking can be made fully parallel - that's the easy part.

The actual changes in the system can also be parallelized to a some degree, i.e. there are 2 "kinds" of changes: system-wide files and services and "top-level" applications (like office apps, browsers, games) - those apps are usually independent on each other and could be upgraded in parallel.
"Top-level" package could have a flag like "enable-parallel-upgrade", and for each such package another installation process can be spawned. Packages without such flag are processed one by one in the main process.
Since "top-level" packages may depend on low-level components and services, all the forked processes should wait on a barrier until the main process finishes to upgrade the low-level stuff.

This is obviously just an overview of how it could be implemented ;)
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Re: [Discussion] A world in which Debian uses RPM

#74 Post by sunrat »

There's a new front-end for package management called nala, which features parallel downloads, history, and more, and is allegedly prettier - https://gitlab.com/volian/nala
It's in the repos for Sid and Testing already.
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Re: [Discussion] A world in which Debian uses RPM

#75 Post by LE_746F6D617A7A69 »

sunrat wrote: 2022-12-06 21:19 (..) which features parallel downloads (...)
Actually, "parallel downloads" are physically impossible, because the internet connections are a "serial" connections ;)
Anyway, the benefits can be seen if the sources.list are referencing different servers -> then, when one of the servers is slow to respond (f.e. overloaded), the other (faster) server can saturate Your internet link ;)

EDIT: (clarification)
The above does not mean that You can speed-up downloading by putting all the available Debian mirrors in the sources.list - that would probably break Your system, or at least generate problems. The mirror servers can't be synchronized in zero time - there are delays (can be up to few days).
You should have only a single Debian mirror configured in sources.list (usually it's best to use the mirror that is closest to Your location)

"Parallel downloads" applies only to a situation where You have a single Debian mirror configured in the sources.list + some other *external* repositories.
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