Hello, On Sun, Dec 10, 2023 at 12:57:59AM +0100, Anders Andersson wrote: > On Sat, Dec 9, 2023 at 3:01 AM Andrew M.A. Cater <amaca...@einval.com> wrote: > > Today is the 8th of December - strictly, that's barely a business week. > > > > Debian expressly comes with no guarantees. You are running sid a.k.a > > unstable - that comes with still fewer guarantees other than breakage > > from time to time. > > I find this quite rude. Nothing in OPs post suggests that he demands > or expects any help, yet you're quick to point out there are no > guarantees. So? Who asked about guarantees?
It is difficult to tactfully suggest that someone may not be expert enough to do something, and I would class trying to do your daily work on Debian sid as an expert endeavour. I took Andrew's mention of the date not as an admonishment that OP was expecting too much of Debian developers, but rather as a reality check that sid does sometimes enter a time of severe brokenness that can last weeks, as a normal state of affairs that no one feels any particular urgency to rectify, because that is the nature of the thing. It is explicitly for developers. > > You are expected to be able to fix breakage in sid yourself or > > you get to keep both pieces :) > > > > You may find that the issue has been fixed if you update today: you may not. > > There's not much there in logs to help any of the rest of us who don't > > habitually run sid. > > Aren't you even allowed to ask for help if you run sid? "Allowed" is too strong a word, but sid is for developers and the level of questions being asked here together with the level of information supplied strongly suggest that OP is not a developer. Questions about sid's status and issues within sid as discussed between Debian developers tend to look very different. OP's post looks like a typical end user support query, and that's not really going to work for users of sid. > Where else to ask other debian users for pointers than the debian > user list? Is there a specific list for sid users only? Probably debian-devel, or the team list for the specific package that is thought to be having issues, or the bugs database for same. That is, it really needs to be a discussion between developers, not a user support conversation, so it's not really a "Debian user" matter, except in the sense that any developer of Debian is also a user of Debian. If it's something that is broken in sid but not in a released version of Debian then it can be difficult for debian-user to assist. > > This is explicitly *not* a sarcastic suggestion: if you can't run sid, > > then I would suggest you reformat your disks and install Debian stable. > > Most of the people either active on this list or lurking and reading on > > the sidelines run Debian stable for a reason. > > It does not come of as sarcastic, just condescending, as if OP does > not already know what sid is. I suspect from the toner of OP's message that they really don't know what sid is. Again, it's tricky to politely suggest that someone might be using the wrong tool for the job. > > unless you are actively interested in testing and fixing > > breakage as it occurs, there is little justification for running > > sid as a daily operating system. > > > > Sid is explicitly *not* a chance to run the latest, greatest bleeding edge > > software reliably on a sustained basis without the occasional crash or > > significant problems. > > Again, OP never claimed anything different. Something broke, as > expected. OP asks for help trying to fix it. I think it's a useful reminder of the purpose of sid and what to expect. > Can't you simply let people who want to help answer? If no one > knows, then fine, OP is on his own. I did not see Andrew telling people not to help OP, so if anyone can, they are still able to. But user support for sid is more difficult. There are definitely people out there who mistakenly see sid as "Debian, but with newer packages" and it seems possible that OP is one of those people. If Andrew's response educates any such person then I think it was worth it. Much like with X/Y problems, where we must suggest that the user needs to step back and explain what they are actually trying to achieve, communicating that you think someone is using the wrong tool—and why—is fraught with social pitfalls. Thanks, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
