Sorry for this off topic post, but I think this list reaches many of the people in Debian community who combined have some influence over the direction of Debian. If there is a better forum for this discussion, please let me know.
Hackers love to share. GNU/Linux should embrace this. If they do, GNU/Linux FOSS development could increase tenfold. That's the entire point of my argument. However, it requires a major change in how we enable developers to contribute to GNU/Linux (including Debian). GNU/Linux developers and the Debian devs need to wake up to the fact that we've built a cathedral when we need a bazaar. As you've likely read in the <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/">paper by that title</a>, Emacs was developed in a manner where every bit was laid by expert craftsman under the watchful eye of RMS. Contributors were not allowed to add to the cathedral willy-nilly. GNU was going to be built right, even if RMS had to do it himself. Meanwhile, Linux Torvalds threw out his kernel to the world and encouraged everyone to use it and people started building all sorts of stuff. Anyone could write a program today, and have it shared on the list tomorrow. That was the bazaar, and it's where the heart and sole of GNU/Linux was created, including the amazing Debian package manager. It is wonderful to have pre-compiled repositories of verified code compiled from source, and that's the foundation that made Debian great. The problem is that this binary repository is managed lovingly by devoted monks. Every brick is carefully examined by experts and nothing gets included unless it passes the high standards of the Debian monastery. The good news is that it's no longer just one man in charge. The bad news is there's now a group of devoted monks in charge. The process of carefully examining every brick and excluding most has not changed since Emacs. The magic happening in Android, and I hate to admit but iOS too, is they've gone back to the bazaar model where anyone can share any app they like. Sure, most of it is crap. In fact they probably have an app for crap. Part of it is driven by developer greed, which is counter to what Debian stands for, but most of it is just hackers enjoying their new found freedom to share. Sure, the base is solid, and carefully crafted and built at Google. You can't just write any old crud and expect it to ship installed on every phone by default. You need the default code base to "just work". However, anyone is enabled to share whatever crap they like as an app in the market. That freedom to share is missing in Debian. To get there in GNU/Linux, I'm recommending that a basic "app" run in a chroot and permissions jail, with hard links to the exact shared libraries with which the app was originally built and tested. Multiple copies of any given shared library only need to be on the disk once. Apps could have their own /usr/lib directories for their shared libraries, but on the actual disk it should be /Apps/MyStupidFartApp/usr/lib/libsndfile.so.whatever. This would keep MyStupidFartApp from colliding with my friend's competing BiggerAndBetterFarts app, as we're likely to want to install a /etc/fart.conf. Later, when my friend submits a patch to libsndfile which gets included in Debian, it totally breaks my poorly tested fart app. Why should my popular fart app suffer because it has bugs that were sensitized by a new libsndfile shared library? If we just run them in their own jails, and never upgrade their shared libraries (except in sever security situations), that fart app should continue to run for decades. Why should I go through the Debian packaging and review process to share a stupid buggy fart app? Why does Debian stand in my way? We've broken sharing in a major way, but it's more than just the Debian packaging and review system at fault. We've also fragmented our app distribution channels. For Android, if you're in the Market, which any old fool can do with close to zero effort, everyone on the planet can find and install your app with a few touches. In GNU/Linux land, we've got Debian, Red Hat, Suse, Gentoo, and many other incompatible distros where a binary from one will not run on the other. If I want the whole world of deviant GNU/Linux hackers to enjoy the deep tones of my stupid buggy fart app, I have to package it many different ways, and pass the high standards of the monks of the various Linux base distros. It's never going to happen. Therefore, to get back to the bazaar, we have to allow apps to ship with the various binary libraries that are not included and compatible in every distro. When my fart app loads sound files, it should use the exact compiled binary of libsndfile and all it's dependent binaries all the way down to libc6 that it was tested with by the author. This way, the app will run on every recent Linux distro. We need a place were a stupid hacker can write a stupid fart app, and have every Linux user farting away the next week. That's what we need to save GNU/Linux. We need a cross-distro App Center, where software can be published with zero or minimal review, and then run on any GNU/Linux platform. There has been efforts in this direction recently. The Zero Install guys are making good progress, for example. There was a meeting recently where various distros discussed a cross-platform package installer, but it ended in everyone agreeing to continue with business as usual with a band-aid on top that wont make any difference. In any case, I'm not promoting a specific solution. I just hope to convince some of the Debian devs that there is a problem, and to start thinking about a solution. If Debian wants simply to be the software run on servers in dark closets, fine. Ignore the problem in that case. If Debian wants to be directly meaningful to as many people as possible, it needs more apps, and to do that, we need to offer developers a better way to reach users. Bill -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-mentors-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/CAOLP8p73u0ezwzBakSwQ0QZ42tHqE4SHz0M=+1kgyyrfmgm...@mail.gmail.com