Comment by Valodim

2 days ago

Oh, yes. This seems like nothing short of necessary for the long term viability of the project. I really hope this effort succeeds, thank you to everyone pushing this!

You might think, but here we are at the end of 2025 and this is still a WIP.

I don’t think it’s a bad move, but it also seems like they were getting by with patches and tarballs.

  • I can't find it now but I recently saw a graph of new Debian Developers joining the project over time and it has sharply declined in recent years. I was on track to becoming a Debian Developer (attended a couple DebConfs, got some packages into the archive, became a Debian Maintainer) but I ultimately burned out in large part because of how painful Debian's tooling makes everything. Michael Stapelberg's post about leaving Debian really rings true: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-windin...

    Debian may still be "getting by" but if they don't make changes like this Git transition they will eventually stop getting by.