[reidrac]

> As an end user, it doesn't concern me too much ...

It doesn't concern me neither, but there's some attitude here that makes me uneasy.

This could have been managed better. I see a similar change in the future that could affect me, and there will be precedent. Canonical paying Devs and all, it isn't a great way of influencing a community.

[tremon]

I agree. It's sad to see maintainers take a "my way or the highway" approach to package maintenance, but this attitude has gradually become more accepted in Debian over the years. I've seen this play before, with different actors: gcc maintainers (regarding cross-bootstrapping ports), udev (regarding device naming, I think?), systemd (regarding systemd), and now with apt. Not all of them involved Canonical employees, and sometimes the Canonical employees were the voice of reason (e.g. that's how I remember Steve Langasek).

I'm sure some will point out that each example above was just an isolated incident, but I perceive a growing pattern of incidents. There was a time when Debian proudly called itself "The Universal Operating System", but I think that hasn't been true for a while now.

[mschuster91]

> It's sad to see maintainers take a "my way or the highway" approach to package maintenance, but this attitude has gradually become more accepted in Debian over the years.

It's frankly the only way to maintain a distribution relying almost completely on volunteer work! The more different options there are, the more expensive (both in terms of human cost, engineering time and hardware cost) testing gets.

It's one thing if you're, say, Red Hat with a serious amount of commercial customers, they can and do pay for conformance testing and all the options. But for a fully FOSS project like Debian, eventually it becomes unmaintainable.

Additionally, the more "liberty" distributions take in how the system is set up, the more work software developers have to put in. Just look at autotools, an abomination that is sadly necessary.

[Onavo]

> Canonical paying Devs and all, it isn't a great way of influencing a community.

That's kind of the point of modern open source organizations. Let corporations fund the projects, and in exchange they get a say in terms of direction, and hopefully everything works out. The bigger issue with Ubuntu is that they lack vision, and when they ram things through, they give up at the slightest hint of opposition (and waste a tremendous amount of resources and time along the way). For example Mir and Unity were perfectly fine technologies but they retired it because they didn't want to see things through. For such a successful company, it's surprising that there technical direction setting is so unserious.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/15brwi0/why_canonica...