Hello all,
I'd like to get a few comments in to the devuan developers before a
"fix" is decided upon. I'll also share the anecdote of how a separate
problem in the devuan infrastructure indirectly saved me from falling
victim to this incident:
1] IMO, the issue isn't really that devuan wasn't prepared for
debian's naming change; it's that devuan decided to redirect users
to repositories of another project.
2] That decision is guaranteed to be a source of future problems, even
as it saves the devuan project bandwidth and hosting costs.
3] Now might be a good time to review the cost-savings of that
decision against:
3.1] The overhead costs of maintaining the complexities of redirecting
to outside repositories and maintaining the merged devuan
repository.
3.2] The replacement of one point of failure (a theoretical complete
devuan repository) with three points (the redirect mechanism, the
devuan merged repository, the debian infrastructure).
3.3] The consequences to devuan's reputation from being reliant on
the whims, fortunes, and circumstances of an outside project.
3.3.1] There might be a chicken-and-egg issue here in that potential
enterprise sponsors of the project might be hesitant to support
devuan because of how it has decided to manage its
infrastructure, while the devuan project might be hesitant to
invest in 100% in-huose infrastructure without enterprise
sponsorship.
Personally, I have only a single devuan install, for non-commercial
use, based upon a combination of `stable' and `testing', and it was
saved because I had earlier noticed that the devuan infrastructure
wasn't supporting "translation" repositories. I noticed this when
`apt-cache show' wasn't displaying extended package descriptions for
non-installed packages. The best `fix' I came up with for this was a
`kludge' of reading debian's translation files directly from their
repositories. However, because this was my own 'kludge', I felt
uncomfortable enough with it that I began staging software upgrades
with `apt-get -s upgrade' and double-checking which repository and
which version were being used. Because I'm a persistently careful guy,
I continued doing this for weeks, so when the ascii/buster issue
arose, I noticed a problem immediately, but thought it was somehow due
to my personal 'kludge', and manually postponed upgrading those
particular files until I had time to investigate.
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