Good morning everyone. As a live user, and one who was extremely vocal a few years ago, I do understand how people felt about live build but I must say I'm glad Debian is not a country that needs running. The effort that went into killing live build was immense and the saviour of Debian's live presence never really got off the ground.
Diplomacy is not one of Debian's fine points is it? Really lets be honest about this. Debian wants people to take on a project that was unceremoniously killed off and its author publicly crucified. Yes I am well aware than Daniel was difficult but what happened or more correctly how it happened was wrong. If the leadership team at Debian still don't recognise that then there is a problem. Debian has had a few problems over the last few years and of the ones I know about the live build problem was the least public. Debian lost some really brilliant people, had an extremely public (so much so the media reported it) blow up, and a complete forking of Debian over systemd and Devuan is going reasonably well. Now having said all that let me just ask you why would someone or "people" plural want to take on a task like this in Debian when Debian isn't fixing the problems it created. Maybe if Debian acknowledged the handling of the issue and made provisions to working on ways that would not create such a hostile situation again Debian may find some people who are willing to work with it but I'll just say I think it's unlikely that Debian has the ability or the desire to do that. n.b when I say Debian I am referring to the organisation and its structure. Regards. Michael. On 20/04/2021, Jonathan Carter <j...@debian.org> wrote: > Hi Roland (and Steve (and others)) > > On 2021/04/19 19:10, Steve McIntyre wrote: >> Thanks for asking, and for your efforts so far. I'm going to be frank >> in my response - please don't take this personally! > > Ditto, your work is much appreciated. > >> My experiences with live-build over the years have been so bad that I >> personally never want to touch it again [1]. However, if you and >> others think it is now a reasonable piece of software, then of course >> I'm not going to stand in your way and try to stop you from using it. >> >> My main worry, however, is that we need some *people* (plural) to own >> Debian's live builds going forwards: maintaining the software we use >> (whatever that might be), running it, debugging it, making and testing >> releases with it. In particular, the latter is not a small >> undertaking. This is an ongoing commitment. > > I test the live images regularly and have gotten a bunch of papercuts > fixed in the resulting live images over the last two releases, and also > integrated calamares and worked with upstream to fix some bugs for us. > I'm happy to continue doing that, but also don't have a particular > interest in live-build for the exact reasons that you list, which also > makes me particularly grateful that Roland is looking into it, until > today I was worried that most of Roland's work has been on a shelf > collecting dust, but I learned that it has been merged into live-build, > so that's really great. > > I think the live images are as important as our other installation media > and I'm also glad that buxy has taken care of so many things, I'd do > more but like Steve, my fingers are in so many pies already so at some > point you have to draw a line on how much you can take on. > > So yes, in summary, thanks for all your work, and I'm happy to continue > testing, working on calamares integration (I had some plans for bullseye > that didn't work out that I still intend to pursue for bookworm[1]) and > fix/file Desktop bugs and meta-package issues for -live. So for what > it's worth, you're also not alone when it comes to the live images. > > -Jonathan > > [1] https://jonathancarter.org/2019/10/17/calamares-plans-for-debian-11/ > >
