Re: X facts about Debian - some fact checking and looking for ideas.

[Raphael Hertzog]

Hi,

On Thu, 24 Aug 2017, shirish शिरीष wrote:
> As far as fact-checking goes, can anybody share about Debian and Kali
> Linux relationship in bit more detail. AFAIK Raphaël Hertzog is one of
> the main developers and there has been lot of symbiotic relationship
> between the two projects but how much both projects have benefited
> from this partnership has not been codified or told/shared anywhere
> AFAIK.
> 
> The only thing I could get is
> https://docs.kali.org/policy/kali-linux-relationship-with-debian which
> seems to be pretty dry and short as far as documentation goes.

You know, you could have sent me an email if you wanted to have some
information on my work. You can have a look at my blog, I post monthly
summaries where I report the work I did on Debian and Kali.

http://raphaelhertzog.com

There's also a section about the relationship with Kali in this book:
https://kali.training/chapter-1/relationship-with-debian/
https://kali.training/chapter-1/a-bit-of-history/

I also gave a talk last year in Debconf:
https://kali.training/chapter-1/a-bit-of-history/

I started the pkg-security team notably to help bring back Kali
packages into Debian and to make it easier to help maintain security
packages that we use in Kali and that come straight from Debian.

https://debconf16.debconf.org/talks/39/

HTH.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer

Support Debian LTS: https://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts.html
Learn to master Debian: https://debian-handbook.info/get/

Re: Question about dpkg Re: X facts about Debian - some fact checking and looking for ideas.

[shirish शिरीष]

at bottom :-

On 30/08/2017, Colin Watson  wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 11:26:55PM +0530, shirish शिरीष wrote:
>> I was under the impression that due to rpm brokeness Debian and
>> thereafter dpkg came into being.
>
> This is entirely wrong.  The first entry in dpkg's changelog was in
> 1994, and rpm's first release was in 1997.
>
> Please spend at least a little time doing research before asking
> questions of a widely-read mailing list; establishing those dates took
> less than a minute (tail of dpkg's debian/changelog, and looking at
> RPM's Wikipedia page).
>

Dear Colin,

Thank you for pointing out the error of my ways. You are right. It
probably had to do more with the fact/bias that I came/used Debian
much later than I used various rpm distributions. I did see rpm
upgrade, downgrade was broken for a long time in a string of various
rpm-based distributions which later lead me to Ubuntu and then finally
to Debian.

Sorry for the noise.



>
> --
> Colin Watson   [cjwat...@debian.org]
>


-- 
  Regards,
  Shirish Agarwal  शिरीष अग्रवाल
  My quotes in this email licensed under CC 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com
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Re: Question about dpkg Re: X facts about Debian - some fact checking and looking for ideas.

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 11:26:55PM +0530, shirish शिरीष wrote:
> I was under the impression that due to rpm brokeness Debian and
> thereafter dpkg came into being.

This is entirely wrong.  The first entry in dpkg's changelog was in
1994, and rpm's first release was in 1997.

Please spend at least a little time doing research before asking
questions of a widely-read mailing list; establishing those dates took
less than a minute (tail of dpkg's debian/changelog, and looking at
RPM's Wikipedia page).

> Could or does somebody remember what discussions took place when dpkg
> was being put up as an ideal package manager. It still is, in case of
> breakage or something goes wrong and the other tools can't fix.

dpkg was written as part of developing Debian and was an integral part
of that development.  It wasn't a matter of looking around for an
existing system to use.

If you want to look at the history of discussions, you're welcome to
look at Debian's mailing list archives; most of the early stuff will be
on debian-devel (https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/).

-- 
Colin Watson   [cjwat...@debian.org]

Re: DPL election terms 1 year was Re: X facts about Debian - some fact checking and looking for ideas.

[Jonathan McDowell]

On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 11:37:09PM +0530, shirish शिरीष wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> Please CC me if somebody puts a reply
> 
> Another query but of more recent vintage is the idea of having yearly
> elections for choosing DPL. Now while sadly Ian Murdock is not there
> but am sure there are more than enough people who know and remember
> why Ian Murdock felt the need to have yearly elections instead of a
> 2-5 year term.

Can I suggest that debian-devel is not an appropriate forum for your
research into Debian's past? I would suggest -curiosa, -research or
perhaps -project would all be better places to ask these questions.

J.

-- 
There are never any bugs you haven't found yet.

DPL election terms 1 year was Re: X facts about Debian - some fact checking and looking for ideas.

[shirish शिरीष]

Dear all,

Please CC me if somebody puts a reply

Another query but of more recent vintage is the idea of having yearly
elections for choosing DPL. Now while sadly Ian Murdock is not there
but am sure there are more than enough people who know and remember
why Ian Murdock felt the need to have yearly elections instead of a
2-5 year term.

Was it because of Bruce Perens as shared in
https://debian-handbook.info/browse/stable/sect.foundation-documents.html
or something else ?

Re: Question about dpkg Re: X facts about Debian - some fact checking and looking for ideas.

[Jeremy Stanley]

On 2017-08-29 23:26:55 +0530 (+0530), shirish शिरीष wrote:
[...]
> From the wikipedia page it seems the motivation came from SLS - a
> derivative of Slackware.
[...]

Minor correction for you: Slackware was borne out of SLS and not the
other way around:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softlanding_Linux_System

(feeling kinda old now that I realize that was 25 years ago, still
almost seems like yesterday sometimes)
-- 
Jeremy Stanley

Question about dpkg Re: X facts about Debian - some fact checking and looking for ideas.

[shirish शिरीष]

Dear all,

Please CC me when answering or putting something on the thread.

When I started using ubuntu and then later Debian one of the first
tools I fell in love with was dpkg. Although nowadays we have multiple
tools like apt, aptitude, one of the biggest features of dpkg (which
is replicated by almost all tools are and were) upgrade, downgrade and
hold.

I was reading the wikipedia page about Debian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian#cite_ref-FOOTNOTEKrafft200531.E2.80.9332_39-0
 and it just cites about dpkg being the essential package manager in
1996.

>From what I remember most rpm based distributions during that time had
rpm broken which means if you upgraded, you couldn't downgrade and
there were lots of times when the system broke due to one issue or the
other.

I was under the impression that due to rpm brokeness Debian and
thereafter dpkg came into being. From the wikipedia page it seems the
motivation came from SLS - a derivative of Slackware.

Could or does somebody remember what discussions took place when dpkg
was being put up as an ideal package manager. It still is, in case of
breakage or something goes wrong and the other tools can't fix.

I am more interested in what sort of scenario was then. I also read
that YUM the fedora package manager borrowed lot of ideas and
functionality from dpkg but do not know of any authoritative data to
backup, only rumors.

Could somebody share some info. on that.

Looking forward to know more.

-- 
  Regards,
  Shirish Agarwal  शिरीष अग्रवाल
  My quotes in this email licensed under CC 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com
EB80 462B 08E1 A0DE A73A  2C2F 9F3D C7A4 E1C4 D2D8

Re: X facts about Debian - some fact checking and looking for ideas.

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Aug 28, 2017 at 10:39:51PM +0530, shirish शिरीष wrote:
> The first thing I wanted to find out, the separation of changelogs
> happened in 1998 according to dpkg changelogs.
> 
> dpkg (1.4.0.22) frozen unstable; urgency=medium
> 
>   * Non-maintainer bug-fix release
>   * Install main changelog file as `changelog.gz' instead of
> `changelog.dpkg.gz' (Debian Policy, section 5.8) (Bug#6052,15157)

That doesn't demonstrate the point you claim above that it makes.  That
change was just a renaming.

The previous state was that doc/changelog (for the debian-manuals
package of the time, which later became debian-policy) was installed as
"changelog.manuals" in the binary, and debian/changelog was installed as
"changelog.dpkg"; after this change, there was still a
"changelog.manuals" but debian/changelog was now installed as
"changelog" installed.  But there were two files both before and after
that change.

In any case, that wasn't a typical matter of an upstream changelog vs.
Debian changelog, but more like two separate packages that were managed
as part of the same source tree but had independent changelogs.

-- 
Colin Watson   [cjwat...@debian.org]

Re: X facts about Debian - some fact checking and looking for ideas.

[shirish शिरीष]

at bottom :-

On 28/08/2017, Guillem Jover  wrote:
> Hi!
>
> On Mon, 2017-08-28 at 12:50:48 +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
>> It did take a little while for the current format to evolve.  For
>> example, very early source packages had changes recorded in a
>> "debian.README" file in somewhat ad-hoc formats.
>>
>> I think the current changelog format arrived with dpkg 1.3.x in August
>> 1996 (https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1996/08/msg00369.html etc.),
>> but true old-timers might remember more.
>
> I think it's older than that. But it might not have been "formalized"
> until that point because there was no tool to parse it automatically
> before then.
>
> Check the tail of the dpkg changelog, which is one of the oldest ones
> I know is still currently present in unstable, and you'll see that
> evolution taking place:
>
>
> 
>
> Thanks,
> Guillem
>


Dear Guillem,

Thank you for pointing in the right direction.

The first thing I wanted to find out, the separation of changelogs
happened in 1998 according to dpkg changelogs.

dpkg (1.4.0.22) frozen unstable; urgency=medium

  * Non-maintainer bug-fix release
  * Install main changelog file as `changelog.gz' instead of
`changelog.dpkg.gz' (Debian Policy, section 5.8) (Bug#6052,15157)
...

...

 Juan Cespedes   Sun,  5 Apr 1998 17:37:01 +0200


And the earliest mention as correctly pointed out by you started In
August 1994 itself.


Thu Aug 25 11:46:27 1994  Ian Murdock  (imurd...@debra.debian.org)

..

..

ChangeLog begins Thu Aug 25 11:46:27 1994 for dpkg 0.93.5.

which means it was there from starting itself.

Thank you again for sharing that.

-- 
  Regards,
  Shirish Agarwal  शिरीष अग्रवाल
  My quotes in this email licensed under CC 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com
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Re: X facts about Debian - some fact checking and looking for ideas.

[Guillem Jover]

Hi!

On Mon, 2017-08-28 at 12:50:48 +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> It did take a little while for the current format to evolve.  For
> example, very early source packages had changes recorded in a
> "debian.README" file in somewhat ad-hoc formats.
> 
> I think the current changelog format arrived with dpkg 1.3.x in August
> 1996 (https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1996/08/msg00369.html etc.),
> but true old-timers might remember more.

I think it's older than that. But it might not have been "formalized"
until that point because there was no tool to parse it automatically
before then.

Check the tail of the dpkg changelog, which is one of the oldest ones
I know is still currently present in unstable, and you'll see that
evolution taking place:

  


Thanks,
Guillem

Re: X facts about Debian - some fact checking and looking for ideas.

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Mon, 28 Aug 2017, shirish शिरीष wrote:
> It would be helpful if somebody has one of the 1996 packages snapshots
> and can share how the changelogs were at that point of time. That
> might give a bit of reference as to how things were and if there were
> any changes between them and now.

http://archive.debian.org/debian/pool/main/libc/libc/

Will give you glibc 5, from 1998, but the packaging is from 1999.  It
already had separate changelogs.

> Also the crucial question if whether this idea came in Debian first
> and then flowed to other distributions or was it was first used in
> Redhat and then came to Debian would be interesting in itself.

Sorry, I have no idea about that.  But it is such an obvious thing to do
once you have "distro versions" (which RedHat *already had*), that I'd
bet the dual changelogs came from whomever started with distro-specific
versioning first.

Take a look at early slackware, it is the oldest you can still find.

http://futurist.se/gldt/

-- 
  Henrique Holschuh

Re: X facts about Debian - some fact checking and looking for ideas.

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Aug 28, 2017 at 04:10:05PM +0530, shirish शिरीष wrote:
> @Andrey Rahmatullin  I read your answer at
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2017/08/msg00598.html but it
> doesn't tell me whether this obvious idea was born in Debian or some
> other GNU/Linux distribution. I do not the early history of Debian so
> it is possible that at one point it was a single changelog.gz file and
> then separation of the two changelogs happened along the road or
> something like that.

To the best of my knowledge, Debian changes were never recorded by
editing the upstream changelog file; that would have been silly, and not
at all the path of least resistance (bear in mind that the plethora of
patch management tools we have nowadays mostly didn't exist then, so
maintaining patches against a frequently-changing file such as a
changelog would have been pretty cumbersome).

It did take a little while for the current format to evolve.  For
example, very early source packages had changes recorded in a
"debian.README" file in somewhat ad-hoc formats.

I think the current changelog format arrived with dpkg 1.3.x in August
1996 (https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1996/08/msg00369.html etc.),
but true old-timers might remember more.

> If somebody knows something it would be nice to know. I had tried to
> look if early packages could be found but sadly snapshot.debian.org
> has records from 2k5 only, a simple
> http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/?year=2000 reveals from when
> the packages are available. The first Debian stable release was in
> 1996. https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ch-releases.en.html

You can find old releases on http://archive.debian.org/debian/, as far
back as 0.93R6.  The recognisable modern(-ish) source package format
wasn't around until Debian 1.2.

> Also the crucial question if whether this idea came in Debian first
> and then flowed to other distributions or was it was first used in
> Redhat and then came to Debian would be interesting in itself.

I don't think you should claim this as a Debian innovation.  For
example, early Slackware releases had a changelog separate from upstream
changelogs, even if it was (and I think still is) distribution-wide
rather than per-package:

  
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distributions/slackware-1.1.2/change.log

Debian *may* have been the first distribution to include
machine-parseable changelogs in a consistent source package format, but
I'm not particularly certain of that.

-- 
Colin Watson   [cjwat...@debian.org]

Re: X facts about Debian - some fact checking and looking for ideas.

[shirish शिरीष]

at bottom :-

On 27/08/2017, Dominique Dumont  wrote:
> On Thursday, 24 August 2017 08:01:54 CEST shirish शिरीष wrote:
>> Are there any such unsung technical/non-technical or social
>> innovations that Debian has done that is now known/or lesser known
>> which Debianities should know about and be proud about. Having more
>> Debian fanboys should also increase both participation and
>> contribution to Debian.
>
> lcdproc package now feature automatic configuration merge when upgrading a
> package: system admin modifications and package manager modifications are
> merged
> automatically in a way that preserve both changes.
>
> See [1] for more details.
>
> All the best.
>
> [1] https://wiki.debian.org/PackageConfigUpgrade
>

Dominique, thank you, that was a nice find. I'm looking both new and
old innovations which might be credited to Debian, both in technical
terms or in social terms. I would discuss about lcdproc in another
e-mail altogether which I just did. I do have loads of questions about
Debian history which perhaps might or might not be interesting to
people, I just fired the first one just a short while ago -

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2017/08/msg00597.html

While some of the queries might seem to be trivial there is lack of
authoritative answers to them.

@Andrey Rahmatullin  I read your answer at
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2017/08/msg00598.html but it
doesn't tell me whether this obvious idea was born in Debian or some
other GNU/Linux distribution. I do not the early history of Debian so
it is possible that at one point it was a single changelog.gz file and
then separation of the two changelogs happened along the road or
something like that.

If somebody knows something it would be nice to know. I had tried to
look if early packages could be found but sadly snapshot.debian.org
has records from 2k5 only, a simple
http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/?year=2000 reveals from when
the packages are available. The first Debian stable release was in
1996. https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ch-releases.en.html

It would be helpful if somebody has one of the 1996 packages snapshots
and can share how the changelogs were at that point of time. That
might give a bit of reference as to how things were and if there were
any changes between them and now.

Also the crucial question if whether this idea came in Debian first
and then flowed to other distributions or was it was first used in
Redhat and then came to Debian would be interesting in itself.

Hope I gave a bit more context from where I'm coming from.

> --
>  https://github.com/dod38fr/   -o- http://search.cpan.org/~ddumont/
> http://ddumont.wordpress.com/  -o-   irc: dod at irc.debian.org
>


-- 
  Regards,
  Shirish Agarwal  शिरीष अग्रवाल
  My quotes in this email licensed under CC 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com
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Re: lcdproc was Re: X facts about Debian - some fact checking and looking for ideas.

[Andrey Rahmatullin]

On Mon, Aug 28, 2017 at 03:51:22PM +0530, shirish शिरीष wrote:
> Dear Dominique,
> 
> Thank you for sharing about lcdproc as response to my mail. For my 2
> cents, I disliked the idea (of lcdproc) immediately as simply applying
> maintainer changes defeats the very purpose the tool declares or
> claims to help. For e.g. I know of quite a few people where the modem
> login page is at a different rather than the universal 192.168.0.1
> address.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_network
What do lcdproc and network settings have in common?

> In such a scenario a grandma's internet may simply stop working after
> an upgrade if she blindly accepts a maintainer's changes.
Huh?

> What is actually required is a tool which asks questions in a manner
> in which the grandma or anybody not knowing technology can answer.
> This I accept is really hard to fix :(
What's needed is screenshots of the NM configuration dialog posted on your
ISPs page, like they do with the Windows ones.

-- 
WBR, wRAR


signature.asc
Description: PGP signature

lcdproc was Re: X facts about Debian - some fact checking and looking for ideas.

[shirish शिरीष]

Dear Dominique,

Thank you for sharing about lcdproc as response to my mail. For my 2
cents, I disliked the idea (of lcdproc) immediately as simply applying
maintainer changes defeats the very purpose the tool declares or
claims to help. For e.g. I know of quite a few people where the modem
login page is at a different rather than the universal 192.168.0.1
address.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_network and at times
have to write manual /etc/network/interfaces rules in order for
internet to work. In India, in practise this happens quite a bit
within ethernet based modem/routers, leave alone cable modems.

Couple of URL's to tell what I mean (only for the modem router page mind you) .

http://www.in.techspot.com/features/tips-tricks/a-list-of-common-default-router-ip-addresses/articleshow/47795297.cms

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-to-find-your-routers-ip-and-admin/

Add to that an ISP's settings that an elderly person might have to set up.

https://bpedia.co.in/bsnl-modem-configuration/ - just one ISP's settings.

And there are 244 ISP's in India alone according to December 2016 latest list

http://www.dot.gov.in/sites/default/files/2016_08_24%20ISP-DS_0.pdf?download=1

In such a scenario a grandma's internet may simply stop working after
an upgrade if she blindly accepts a maintainer's changes. It has
happened with me in the past even though I know a bit about how things
work, let alone a non-technical grandma.

What is actually required is a tool which asks questions in a manner
in which the grandma or anybody not knowing technology can answer.
This I accept is really hard to fix :(

Apart from cryptic info. what is also needed to fix is also cryptic
errors which is not easy for non-technical people to diagnose what is
wrong but that's a different question altogether.

-- 
  Regards,
  Shirish Agarwal  शिरीष अग्रवाल
  My quotes in this email licensed under CC 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com
EB80 462B 08E1 A0DE A73A  2C2F 9F3D C7A4 E1C4 D2D8

Re: X facts about Debian - some fact checking and looking for ideas.

[Samuel Henrique]

CC'ing to pkg-sec

As far as fact-checking goes, can anybody share about Debian and Kali
> Linux relationship in bit more detail. AFAIK Raphaël Hertzog is one of
> the main developers and there has been lot of symbiotic relationship
> between the two projects but how much both projects have benefited
> from this partnership has not been codified or told/shared anywhere
> AFAIK.


Samuel Henrique 

2017-08-23 23:31 GMT-03:00 shirish शिरीष :

> Dear all,
>
> I have been writing some beginner articles in my spare-time to
> talk/share about Debian and make it more popular.
>
> In that direction I have and had been penning few articles at
> https://itsfoss.com/author/shirish/
>
> As shared before, these are beginner articles and are meant only to
> bring awareness about Debian to the masses.
>
> Just a few days back, Debian turned 24
> https://bits.debian.org/2017/08/debian-turns-24.html
>
> While I have been thinking about sharing the number of packages, the
> number of developers, the diversity, the debconf's and where debconfs
> have been held over the years for starters but all of these I have
> already shared before.
>
> I saw hartmann's article on p.d.o. the other day
> http://hartmans.livejournal.com/96841.html and I started pondering
> about some of the lesser unknown innovative ideas of debian which
> people don't know about.
>
> For e.g. the reproducible builds project
> https://reproducible-builds.org/ seems to have a lot of weight and
> faith of DD's but is not known at all (or maybe some slightly bit)
> outside the technical circles.
>
> Are there any such unsung technical/non-technical or social
> innovations that Debian has done that is now known/or lesser known
> which Debianities should know about and be proud about. Having more
> Debian fanboys should also increase both participation and
> contribution to Debian.
>
> As far as fact-checking goes, can anybody share about Debian and Kali
> Linux relationship in bit more detail. AFAIK Raphaël Hertzog is one of
> the main developers and there has been lot of symbiotic relationship
> between the two projects but how much both projects have benefited
> from this partnership has not been codified or told/shared anywhere
> AFAIK.
>
> The only thing I could get is
> https://docs.kali.org/policy/kali-linux-relationship-with-debian which
> seems to be pretty dry and short as far as documentation goes.
>
> Looking forward to knowing more.
>
> --
>   Regards,
>   Shirish Agarwal  शिरीष अग्रवाल
>   My quotes in this email licensed under CC 3.0
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
> http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com
> EB80 462B 08E1 A0DE A73A  2C2F 9F3D C7A4 E1C4 D2D8
>
>

Re: X facts about Debian - some fact checking and looking for ideas.

[Dominique Dumont]

On Thursday, 24 August 2017 08:01:54 CEST shirish शिरीष wrote:
> Are there any such unsung technical/non-technical or social
> innovations that Debian has done that is now known/or lesser known
> which Debianities should know about and be proud about. Having more
> Debian fanboys should also increase both participation and
> contribution to Debian.

lcdproc package now feature automatic configuration merge when upgrading a 
package: system admin modifications and package manager modifications are 
merged 
automatically in a way that preserve both changes.

See [1] for more details.

All the best.

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/PackageConfigUpgrade

-- 
 https://github.com/dod38fr/   -o- http://search.cpan.org/~ddumont/
http://ddumont.wordpress.com/  -o-   irc: dod at irc.debian.org