> ...upstream package maintainers who are expected to deal with bug reports from ancient versions...

They are not expected to deal with this. This is the responsibility of the Debian package maintainer.

If you (as an upstream) licensed your software in a manner that allows Debian to do what it does, and they do this to serve their users who actually want that, you are wrong to then complain about it.

If you don't want this, don't license your software like that, and Debian and their users will use some other software instead.

▲

koverstreet 2 hours ago | parent [-]

If package maintainers were always fine upstanding package maintainers as you imagine them to be I wouldn't be complaining, but I have in fact had Debian ship my software and screw it up and gotten a flood of bug reports, so... :)

I think you need to chill out. Relicensing the way you suggest would be _quite_ the hostile act, and I'm not going to that either. But I am an engineer, so of course I'm going to talk about engineering best practices when it comes up.

You don't have to take it as an attack on your favorite distro - that really does pee in the pool of the upstream/downstream relationship between distros and their upstream.

▲

fc417fc802 an hour ago | parent [-]

> I am an engineer, so of course I'm going to talk about engineering best practices when it comes up.

The trouble is you seem to be assuming that best practices for you, in your opinion, also apply to everyone else. They don't. Not everyone sees things the way you do or is facing the same issues or is making the same set of tradeoffs. There are downsides to what debian does but there are also upsides.

At this point, given the plethora of high quality options available as well as how easy it is to mix and match them on the same system thanks to container-related utilities and common practices I really don't think there's any room for someone who doesn't like the debian model (ie in general, as opposed to targeted objections) to complain about how they do things. If you want cutting edge userspace on debian stable at this point you have at least 3 options between nix, guix, and gentoo. There's also flatpak and snap which come built in.

▲

koverstreet 35 minutes ago | parent [-]

We're in the middle of a huge spike in LLM discovered security vulnerabilities, which means not everything will get assigned a CVE, a lot of people are watching repositories to look for exploitable bugs, and in the frenzy of backporting that people are now having to do things will get missed.

I wager it's only a matter of time before we see a mass rooting event that hits Debian hard while everyone running something more modern has already been patched.

I think that might be what cuts down on the grandstanding about "freedoms" and "that's how we've always done things". You certainly are, up until it becomes a public nuisance.

	▲	fc417fc802 27 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		No one is grandstanding about freedom here though? I claimed that the approach debian takes has both upsides and downsides. I stand by that. Personally I pull my networked services from testing while running stable on the host. I absolutely do not want constant churn of the filesystem code or drivers on my devices but I would also prefer not to run some franken build of ssh or apache or what have you. However I can also sympathize with others who need a more structured process and substantial lead time in staging prior to making major changes to production. Why would you expect LLMs not to be simultaneously leveraged to catch backports that were missed or inadvertently broken? Given recent headlines I think it's far more likely that we see a mass rooting event hit one or more of the bleeding edge rolling release distros or language ecosystems due to supply chain compromise. Running slightly out of date software has never been more attractive.