On Sun, 30 Jul 2023, Russell Senior wrote:
A slightly related story: Debian's wiki is moinmoin. Moinmoin v1.x is
based on python 2. Python2 is (of course) deprecated and pretty much
abandoned as of Debian Bullseye. It seems somewhat ironic that the
wiki that proudly announces Debian 12 (bookworm) as of July 22, has to
run Debian 10 (buster, i.e. oldoldstable) because that's the last
version that supports python2 enough to run the wiki.
https://u35970666.ct.sendgrid.net/ls/click?upn=TqJK0v-2BTL1dmkjS-2FZRBwGRDG4t3PuCk88LFqqcTvyYGDJGeFNIjwU8pGkcA3tIrkXxPogHNGRue04tX0s41yELyVT2kQTzNKeJ1a3JRIU5c-3DkyL0_VIYZ4N8dmyIPGy7Y8nsPO1q5dom4O0HMDO1WKXG4iy6cRPYqUFHozao-2Fpbo-2BoZqOchXuKORABSzW180gWYBHeRPNrdK7edxBEXDVaeFmkWm4xnUhizY9EOtln7Mj8LEiArb78-2BbHAD0AsaSTK9AWj1JB0cOk7hkn-2BvgslB0tXdYqMV8BZkiZeBlgfBwozTDycTSoXvNA4kNrtVykLP6PwQ-3D-3D
I have a particularly acute awareness of this because Personal Telco's
wiki also uses moinmoin, and it stopped working when I tried to update
to Debian 11 (bullseye) about a year ago. We had a brief outage while
I figured out what had gone wrong.
This is a sadly familiar story. A high-level software package depends
on dozens, perhaps hundreds, of lower-level language runtimes,
libraries, and even utilities. One or more of those lower-level
packages gets deprecated, drops features, becomes orphaned, or simply
doesn't keep up with the rest of the dependency ecosystem.
Voila -- a dead-end solution with a future of pain, fragility, and
(probably) unpatched security vulnerabilities while people scramble to
find and implement a solution (that may no longer exist within even a
reasonable set of parameters).
I feel vaguely guilty every time I say it, but if computers were easy
I wouldn't have a job.
--
Paul Heinlein
heinl...@madboa.com
45°22'48" N, 122°35'36" W
