Debian Package Maintainer Steps Down, Complaining About 'Old Infrastructure'

Michael Stapelberg, maintains 'a bunch' of Debian packages and services, and says the free software Linux distro 'has been in my life for well over 10 years at this point.'

Today he released a 2,255-word essay explaining why he's 'winding down' his involvement in Debian to a minimum, citing numerous complaints including Debian's complicated build stack, waits of up to seven hours before package uploads can be installed, leading to 'asynchronous' feedback -- and Debian's lack of tooling for large changes.

The closest to 'sending out a change for review' is to open a bug report with an attached patch... Culturally, reviews and reactions are slow. There are no deadlines. I literally sometimes get emails notifying me that a patch I sent out a few years ago (!!) is now merged. This turns projects from a small number of weeks into many years, which is a huge demotivator for me.

Interestingly enough, you can see artifacts of the slow online activity manifest itself in the offline culture as well: I don't want to be discussing systemd's merits 10 years after I first heard about it.

Lastly, changes can easily be slowed down significantly by holdouts who refuse to collaborate. My canonical example for this is rsync, whose maintainer refused my patches to make the package use debhelper purely out of personal preference. Granting so much personal freedom to individual maintainers prevents us as a project from raising the abstraction level for building Debian packages, which in turn makes tooling harder.

There's also several complaints about old infrastructure -- for example, 'I dread interacting with the Debian bug tracker. debbugs is a piece of software (from 1994) which is only used by Debian and the GNU project these days.' Stapelberg also complains that the 'painful' experience of developing using Debian 'leaves a lot to be desired,' and adds that 'It baffles me that in 2019, we still don't have a conveniently browsable threaded archive of mailing list discussions.'

'My frustration level ultimately exceeded the threshold,' Stapelberg writes in the essay, adding 'I hope this post inspires someone, ideally a group of people, to improve the developer experience within Debian.' He'll soon transition packages to be team-maintained 'where it makes sense,' but also 'orphan packages where I am the sole maintainer... For all intents and purposes, please treat me as permanently on vacation...'

'I will try to keep up best-effort maintenance of the manpages.debian.org service and the codesearch.debian.net service, but any help would be much appreciated.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.