[Hamara-devel] New DPL talks about open-source PPA's

[shirish]

Hi all,
Look at 
https://www.linux.com/news/software/applications/829303-new-debian-project-leader-talks-open-source-careers-ppas-and-more

and specifically :-

"You proposed the implementation of Personal Package Archives (PPA) for 
Debian. Do you think PPAs will improve the experience for Debian users 
looking for rock-solid, stable systems?

McGovern: I believe so, yes. The main aim of PPAs is to improve the 
workflow of Debian members, so they can easily create alternate versions 
of software which work with the main Debian system, and integrate them 
into the archive.

There are hundreds of PPAs for Ubuntu, will they work with Debian?

McGovern: I think that's unlikely. Although Debian has a good 
relationship with Ubuntu, and other downstream distributions, we have a 
different focus. Keeping all the main libraries in sync would create a 
lot of effort to allow this to happen, and it's not something we really 
have the time to do while developing our own distribution.

How easy or difficult will it be for developers who have Ubuntu PPAs to 
port them for Debian?
McGovern: I don't think it would be particularly hard, but they're 
really two different things. Essentially, the work is in creating Debian 
compliant packages, and a lot of the preliminary work will have been 
done in creating Ubuntu packages anyway. " - Linux.com

What is worrying was the snappy thing but because we are no longer tied 
to Canonical way of doing things we can rest assuredly.

http://www.itworld.com/article/2914850/linux/is-ubuntu-moving-away-from-deb-packages-here-is-the-complete-story.html

Going further down in the same model :-

"Canonical is planning to move away from .deb packages and implementing 
their own Snappy/Click. What do you think about it? How does it affect 
Debian? Will it be more work for developers to create .deb packages and 
Snappy packages? Will either of the two distros suffer in the long term?

McGovern: The Snappy concept from Canonical seems to be geared towards 
cloud and IoT developments, rather than the traditional desktop or 
server offering. I think it offers some advantage for Canonical, but I'm 
a little concerned about the splitting off of development time and 
effort. It seems that they'll eventually move a lot of the application 
side over to Snappy, and I don't think that will help compatibility with 
the rest of the free software ecosystem.

What role do you see Debian playing in modern times when Docker and 
cloud are becoming popular in the enterprise segment?

McGovern: The key issue is trust - when Debian distributes a package, 
you know that it's met various quality and stability standards. There's 
a risk in moving to an entire container based model that people will 
simply download random applications from the internet. If a security 
problem is found in a shared library in Debian, we can fix it once. If 
that library is embedded in hundreds of different 'apps', then they'll 
all need fixing independently. This would certainly be a challenge to 
overcome. Mind you, in our latest release we had over 45,000 binary 
packages, so I don't think that there's a lack of choice of software in 
Debian! " - Linux.com

I read the two articles and apparently Snappy is nothing but a 
containerized model of packages and hence Neil's concerns are same as 
mine but again as that model is not being followed we can rest in peace.

-- 
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal,
Community Lead,
Hamaralinux.org