Thoughts about Debian

Welcome to my little rant page about Debian. :) No, seriously, I like Debian. And I am devoting much time to it and - much like others - do not get half the appreciation I probably deserve. A lot of people are quickly scared away from Debian just because they are dealing with people whose parents obviously never took their time to educate their children. Perhaps when reading this article you will unvoluntarily nod because you have made similar experiences. Then I may show you a way to like Debian again. To cut it short: there are very few very loud flipping idiots in Debian. The most important thing you need to understand is that these do not represent the project. They are often ruining the good image that Debian deserves due to its technological superiority.

debian-devel@lists.debian.org

The worst mailing list I have ever been subscribed to is debian-devel. It is supposed to be the central mailing list for Debian Developers to ask questions, make suggestions for improvements and question things like they are. Unfortunately there are mainly two directions that a thread is heading:

  1. If a question is technically challenging there is a lot of techy talk going on.
  2. If a question is remotely non-technical or even obviously discussing social matters they almost always result in a rousing flamewar.

To stay alive on that mailing list as a soft-hearted participant means understanding this:

Debian versus Ubuntu

I attended the Ubuntu conference in Mataro/Spain in December 2004. At that time I was stuck in the New Maintainers approval queue for 1 1/2 year and things didn't seem to move at all. In addition I got flamed and insulted very badly by two Debian Developers on the debian-devel mailing list which made me question my wish to join Debian and dedicate parts of my spare time to Debian. My first attempt was to clear up things with them via personal email but I never received a reply. Later I learned that one is a known smartass and the other was the project secretary (which scared me even more that our secretary has such a lack of social skills). My second reaction was unsubscribing from debian-devel to keep whatever mental health I had left. What additionally scared me was that other subscribers wrote to me personally showing their sympathy. You may be interested what evil thing I wrote. The topic was that a user from outside of Debian said: "I would like to remind the flamers that, from an external point of view, their mails carry 99% irrelevant informations, such as who dislikes who." I was trying to support his opinion and make people think about the current discussion style. No surprise the formerly mentioned troll was the first one to answer - and unintentionally he showed the very behavior that was first critisized and asked for examples. My second rather helpless attempt to find a solution was starting to killfile certain people. Pretty bad idea since blocking the secretary is not a good idea if you intend to use your rights to vote since the emails get sent by him. :) (My current idea is to tag certain people with certain scores or karmas so they show up in my mutt with different colors. That would allow me to quickly skip an email from a known troll without being tempted to read it, irk over it or even reply to his bullshit thus worsening the situation for everybody.)

Ubuntu had promising ideas that I liked. First of all they introduced the Code of Conduct - a number of rules that define how people should behave when working with each other. When talking to Ubuntu activists I found that they shared my point of view regarding the evil things in Debian. Also they wanted to avoid the bad issues of the New Maintainers process. The initiators of Debian found that my project mentors.debian.net was a good idea and asked me to think of ways the mistakes in Debian could be avoided in Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is trying to fix things that have always been an obstacle in Debian. Elitism, flamewars and ignorance. The community is admittely far better in Ubuntu. But contrary to what I saw at the last Debconf (although I just watched the videos because I did not attend personally) I could not understand a word at the Ubuntu speeches - and that's not only because english is not my native language. It appeared to me like there is a clique of core developers in Ubuntu. So I found it very hard to get into what really mattered in the project. Writing documentation was an easy start and I worked for the documentation team just to get involved into Ubuntu and see how it works out. To be fair I must say that I brought my wife and son to the conference and I did not spend as much time getting to know everyone as I liked. And finally I couldn't provide as much help in setting up a new maintainers process in Ubuntu as would have been needed. I was mainly invited to present my ideas but it felt like I was a short ad in a BOF instead of really driving the whole thing. There were too many things since Ubuntu was pretty new and my ideas didn't seem to have priority. So I kept on doing what I started in Ubuntu: work for the documentation team.

When I came back from the conference I found that I didn't enjoy the conference trip much. Travelling with the family large distance to a conference that could only have been interesting for me unfortunately made the visit unpleasant. The next thing that happened one month later was that I was applied as Debian Developer. Yahoo! And although I now believed I know how both distributions tick and that Debian has serious problems I decided to stay to get things moving in Debian. Even though I was sure that I can't do miracles and would mainly stay out of the way of politics. I first uploaded a package for a sponsoree before I took the time to tidy up my own packages that had long awaited sponsorship. And while getting to maintain more packages and keep connections to former sponsors and future sponsorees I got to know many people who though similar like me and tried to get things done instead of whining and flaming. I had to stop working on Ubuntu documentation just for the lack of time. And although I saw many more trolls and idiots on Debian I found that there are many people who make it fun to work with. I just avoid politic stuff on Debian and spend my time in subprojects like helping people new to Debian packaging and my all-time-favorite project mentors.debian.net.

By the way: you will find a lot of people who show their public dislike of Ubuntu. Be assured that most of those have never been to an Ubuntu conference and do not actually know why they hate Ubuntu. Mainly it probably is because Ubuntu managed to fix things that will be hard to solve in Debian - the good community is one part. One word: jealousy. Just keep in mind that Ubuntu is a derived distribution. Without the work of the thousands of Debian Developers everywhere Ubuntu could never exist. It's weird to agree to the DFSG but at the same time disagree with having a derived distribution that helps spread the word by bringing Debian packages to the desktop of your mother-in-law.

Debian is a great distribution - but the community sucks

I would have liked to finish my little philosophical article about Debian with an appeal to other Debian activists to behave more friendly. But being honest to myself I need to admit that it would not change anything. So my personal suggestion to anyone who is scared of the Debian community is: look out for people who share your thoughts and who are friendly and helpful. And if you should ever feel the need to post on debian-devel and browse through the replies: ignore the insulting ones and just talk to the people who take you seriously. You are devoting your spare time to Debian and you deserve to be taken seriously. There will always be people who like what you do. And if you maintain packages there are thousands of users everywhere who use your package and just don't thank you because they do not know that you exist. So on their behalf of them let me say: thanks for your effort.

WorkaroundOrg: DebianThoughts (last edited 2005-07-20 21:44:21 by ChristophHaas)