2. I hate docker's repository systems (and other upstream packaging)
But this article writer sure is putting the maintainers on a pedestal.
More fundamentally, the maintainer is the primary line of defence and interaction between users and developers. Maintainers shield developers from uninformed users, allowing the devs to write software with less support overhead. Non-bugs are caught and filtered out. Low-quality bugs reported to the distribution's tracker often becomes a good bug when the maintainer reports it upstream.
...
Maintainers also shield users from developers, offering a layer of quality control...choosing a subset of the (subjectively) best software FOSS has to offer. Maintainers will disable features that they feel act in bad faith. Maintainers' greatest power is the ability to outright say "This is not good enough for our users"
Really? Then what about this poor sap who had the misfortune of releasing one buggy minor version, and is now forced to support that for the next 5 years even though the bug was fixed in the next version?
The maintainers actively tried to sabotage his attempts to tell people to upgrade to a new version in the name of 'consistency.'
Sure, consistency is great, but only if we (the maintainers) don't have to do any work (such as backporting). We offload all the supports to the developer and have him do support work for us. Then when he complains we will call him a whiner and laugh him off...
While I'm more on jwz's side in the xscreensaver issue, it's a fair bit more complex that the way you're presenting it.
You're also missing the forest for the trees - if no-one maintained xscreensaver packages for distros, then there would be considerably fewer installs of it. Centralised package management is a very powerful feature, and without it, you're reduced to the Windows style of installing software: hunt around on the web for it, try and figure out if you're getting it from the official repo, try and figure out if the download is trustworthly, install it separately, hope it doesn't sideload malware, then maintain it personally as time goes on, and maybe even suffer every second tool having it's own self-updating service phoning home and nagging you (plus you may not even be able to easily uninstall the software if the author didn't offer that option). It's easy to do that for just one bit of software, but it's a real chore to do it for all your software.
Why not get the benefit of both worlds but having centralised repositories for Snaps/Flatpaks? This way developers simply have to push their builds to it. Of course, also retain the traditional packaging model for much of the underlying system, and we seem to have hit a sweet spot between established practise and the anarchy of Windows land.
Sure. I'm a pragmatist - if that would work, I'd be happy. One major problem is fragmentation/network effects though - you'd need to get enough developers onboard to make something effectively the 'default' userspace packaging system. Major distros already have a big NIH problem with system packaging, every one having it's own system.
Packaging is a difficult problem - the 80% use case is easy to solve, but the edge cases really require elegant forethought. It also seems that every distro has a different idea of what that 20% is...
Yes, those pesky stable distributions that prioritise bug fixes are clearly to blame. While it might be annoying for you (and me to some extent), some people actually need to have a stable system. If I was installing a GNU/Linux distro for a family member I would pick Debian or openSUSE Leap over a more rapidly updating distribution -- I just got burned by such a distro yesterday and I'm still reinstalling my machine.
1. I use Arch Linux for my desktop and I like it.
2. I hate docker's repository systems (and other upstream packaging)
But this article writer sure is putting the maintainers on a pedestal.
More fundamentally, the maintainer is the primary line of defence and interaction between users and developers. Maintainers shield developers from uninformed users, allowing the devs to write software with less support overhead. Non-bugs are caught and filtered out. Low-quality bugs reported to the distribution's tracker often becomes a good bug when the maintainer reports it upstream.
...
Maintainers also shield users from developers, offering a layer of quality control...choosing a subset of the (subjectively) best software FOSS has to offer. Maintainers will disable features that they feel act in bad faith. Maintainers' greatest power is the ability to outright say "This is not good enough for our users"
Really? Then what about this poor sap who had the misfortune of releasing one buggy minor version, and is now forced to support that for the next 5 years even though the bug was fixed in the next version?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11452432
The maintainers actively tried to sabotage his attempts to tell people to upgrade to a new version in the name of 'consistency.'
Sure, consistency is great, but only if we (the maintainers) don't have to do any work (such as backporting). We offload all the supports to the developer and have him do support work for us. Then when he complains we will call him a whiner and laugh him off...