Comment by dima55

2 days ago

Lots. Because many upstream projects don't have their build system set up to work within a distribution (to get dependencies form the system and to install to standard places). All distros must patch things to get them to work.

7 comments

dima55

latchup 2 days ago

Well, there are big differences in how aggressively things are patched. Arch Linux makes a point to strictly minimize patches and avoid them entirely whenever possible. That's a good thing, because otherwise, nonsense like the Xscreensaver situation ensues, where the original developers aggressively reject distro packages for mutilating their work and/or forcing old and buggy versions on unsuspecting users.

lelanthran 2 days ago
> nonsense like the Xscreensaver situation ensues, where the original developers aggressively reject distro packages
I didn't know about this. Link?
- latchup 2 days ago
  
  https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/04/i-would-like-debian-to-stop...
  and
  https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=819703#158
  Needless to say, Zawinski was more than a little frustrated with how the Debian maintainers do things.
  But honestly, this took 30 seconds to Google and was highly publicized at the time. This whole "I never heard of this, link??" approach to defend a lost argument when the point made is easily verifiable serves to do nothing but detract from discussion. Which, you know, is what this place is for.
  
  1 reply →
dima55 2 days ago
Huh? I contribute to Debian; I don't aggressively patch anything. You can too.
- lionkor 2 days ago
  
  It's "let's patch as little as possible" vs "let's enforce our rules with the smallest patch possible"
- latchup 2 days ago
  
  Well good for you. Then I suppose you don't speak for the Debian maintainers responsible for trainwrecks like this:
  https://research.swtch.com/openssl
  There seems to be a serious issue with Debian (and by extension, the tens of distros based on it) having no respect whatsoever for the developers of the software their OS is based on, which ends up hurting users the most. Not sure why they cannot just be respectful, but I am afraid they are shoveling Debian's grave, as people are abandoning stale and broken Debian-based distros in droves.