The most prolific packager for Alpine Linux is stepping away

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Alpine-Linux-Prolific-Packager

by pantalaimon • 3 years ago

211 62 3 years ago

mmastrac2• 3 years ago

The blessing and curse of having a prolific contributor (mostly the former). The trick is to manage burnout and figuring out continuity for these individuals to avoid massive upset in the open-source project if they decide to move on or take an extended break.

phkahler2• 3 years ago

> The trick is to manage burnout and figuring out continuity for these individuals to avoid massive upset in the open-source project if they decide to move on or take an extended break.

Another good trick would be to get more maintainers. If a bunch of people would just handle one package each...

mmastrac2• 3 years ago

If it was easy to get more volunteer maintainers, a lot of open-source projects would be very happy. :)

derealized2• 3 years ago

I've been in this situation at a couple of companies. Very prolific in the first year, only to burn out.

At my new job, I'm taking it easy.

agumonkey5• 3 years ago

what was your motivation ? and what changed ? I like high output in jobs, it's tiresome at times but makes me tired is lack of freedom and lack of surroundings. You'd like to organize things to promote speed and quality but some companies don't care. Good colleague will allow you to find better ideas, bad colleague will make you regress.

derealized2• 3 years ago

I have intrisic motivation, I just like what I work with and like to do a good job. I often have high standards for my work.

What changed? It's very tiresome to swim against the current. You can only care about so many things that your team doesn't until you get tired of barking at the tree.

At my new job it's the same, as usual, but I'm not forcing things and just getting with the flow. If I can, I'll suggest some ocasional improvements but if it falls on deaf ears, I'll let it go.

nvahalik• 3 years ago

This isn't a sprint. It's a marathon.

syndicatedjelly• 3 years ago

Except when everything is a sprint, back to back, forever and ever

agumonkey5• 3 years ago

I think burnout happens when people slow you below your marathon speed.

oneshtein• 3 years ago

- It's time for AI to replace the maintainer!

- But AI costs money to run, while maintainers are working for free...

phkahler2• 3 years ago

Then we'd need someone to maintain the AI.

1letterunixname2• 3 years ago

Who then would maintain the AI maintainer?

And who maintains the AI maintainer maintainer?

mrweasel• 3 years ago

This always fascinating to see a person that maintains a ton of package, knowing full well that there is no way that they actively use all that software themselves. At the same time there are millions of us that just expects a package to be available, but never think to offer to at least help maintain a something. Frequently it's not even that hard, sure there are a few specialized packages which require more skills, but packaging up a Python library is something most of us could easily do.

Generally all of us needs to be better at pitching in where we can and not be depended on a few people overworking themselves.

5e92cb50239222b• 3 years ago

I don't know about Alpine specifically, but many distributions put a lot of red tape around becoming a maintainer (for good reasons). I just don't want to get into it. AUR from Arch Linux has an interesting take on this — anyone can become a maintainer in a matter of minutes — and while that results in some low-quality packages and the expectation that you're supposed to review everything you install (which is easy though thanks to the excellent package format, which Alpine also uses with minor modifications), most of them are fine, and AUR gets a lot more maintainers than any other distribution.

You also don't put any obligations on yourself by becoming a maintainer on AUR — you can always orphan a package in less than a minute, no questions asked. Some users actually place new packages on AUR and orphan them right away. If it's of any use, it usually get a volunteer maintainer within a few days.

fluix2• 3 years ago

I've found packaging for Alpine has been similarly easy. There is a review process in the sense that you file an MR instead of committing directly, but my experience has been really quick and easy. Also, not everyone with commit access does this, but psykose would also fix minor issues like indentation without requesting changes and doing the whole back and forth. I really appreciated it and noticed the changes for next time.

The community and main repositories have some stability guarantees but that doesn't stop you from orphaning the package.

freedomben2• 3 years ago

Fedora is particularly bad at what you describe. It's basically just impossible for somebody who isn't already in the system (or doesn't know somebody who is already in the system) to get into the system. Between hard to find documentation and requirements like, "just join the mailing list and ask for people to sponsor you" (which nobody wants to do when they don't already know you) you have to really want to do it. I could have easily maintained several packages that I built, but after sinking 4 hours into it (building the packages only took an hour or so), in the end I just threw them on my COPR and called it a day. I'm not going to spin my wheels trying to jump ridiculous non-technical hurdles and try to navigate needlessly opaque processes.

raverbashing• 3 years ago

but you know what? I think Alpine is right

If you see the distros with more red tape ( cough debian cough ) , you have people "reigning in their little Package Kingdom" which also can end up with orphaned (or at least severely neglected) packages

bombcar• 3 years ago

Gentoo makes it pretty easy to add an "overlay" to get packages that someone makes, and if they get steam it becomes simple to import them into "mainstream".

~x86 helps too, masking a package is a good way to say "maybe tested, maybe not so much".

bfrog2• 3 years ago

It's really hard to beat the PKGBUILD + makepkg ease of packaging. I really hope nix flakes kind of become simple and easy as time goes on. They kind of are, but nix having so many features and flexibility also means that super simple makepkg type program is sort of intertwined in a few other things.

Ideally? nix build someflake would just work. Reality is there's a few hoops at the moment which is kind of a disappointing aspect.

If nix build someflake Just Worked I could see a lot more ad-hoc type contributions happening. Better still unlike makepkg its very easy to customize a package so presumably fewer same-but-slight-variant type things tha aur has a lot of would be consolidated.

wvh• 3 years ago

Whenever I tried to get into packaging something during the years, I've bumped into politics and policy issues associated with each project to a lesser or greater degree. Technical knowledge is not enough, you must also really get into each project's rules and mindset, find a sponsor/mentor, adhere to its standards, gain trust, attend meetings, learn a specific tool set, all of which is a whole different ballpark compared to throwing a working technical solution over the wall.

cinntaile• 3 years ago

I think that's the purpose, you want to filter out anyone that is not highly motivated because otherwise you'll have to invest a ton of time into many different people and you don't have that kind of bandwidth.

appplication• 3 years ago

This is really the barrier for me. I’ve written plenty of (company) internal packages that end up getting moderate adoption, but trying to open source is an exercise in personal marketing. It’s insufficient that your project solve a problem. You have to convince people to use it and make PRs to other repos that would use it, monitor SO for questions, etc.

wpietri• 3 years ago

My dad knew a mail carrier. Tall, lanky, energetic, and a bit of an odd duck. When he started a new route, he'd go through it quickly, finishing early. An early finish meant they'd add more to the route. He'd take that as a challenge, working even harder to get through it early. They'd extend the route again, creating another challenge.

This would repeat until he was nearly running to get the route done in time. At this point things got boring, so he'd use his seniority to switch to a new route. That mean some poor low-seniority sucker would get assigned his very demanding route and struggle desperately with it, finishing very late.

My point being that some people like being heroes, at least for a while. It seems to me kinda like the way I like running races: fun as an occasional challenge partly because doing something unsustainable causes me to push myself.

pengaru• 3 years ago

I'm pretty sure Jeff Vogel of Spider Web Software would describe this as someone being a Viking, based on his great GDC talk.

eternityforest2• 3 years ago

Sounds like a really terrible programmer! Too bad it at least seems to be sometimes pretty much the only way to go certain things when nobody else wants to.

TheRealDunkirk• 3 years ago

After long stints with Slackware, RedHat, SuSE, and Debian, I got very much into Gentoo Linux. Kept a local copy of the portage tree. Ran a dozen servers out of my house. That sort of thing. Then, I found a new job with a very-small, highly-technical company, which had built a successful business on the back of a custom physical testing software written by the young guy who was my boss. They used Gentoo for everything. It was probably a year into the job before I went to look up something about a package, and found my boss' name listed as the maintainer. That made sense, because it was a vital package that our custom software stack depended on. Then I noticed his name on something else. Then I grepped the portage tree, and discovered that he was the maintainer of MANY HUNDREDS of packages in the distro. I believe it takes a special skill set to want to do that, but this guy was on another level. He is the most talented, yet most modest, person I've ever seen.

Zetobal• 3 years ago

Gentoo has a special place in my heart... watching 2 days on a AMD Athlon 1Ghz to compile the system. I learned a lot from it not the watching part but everything else.

pjmlp• 3 years ago

It is the same kind of entitlement that makes many refuse to pay for the work of others, while fully expected to be paid for their own work.

eternityforest2• 3 years ago

If NixOS were the standard distro everyone used, then I'd agree, packaging would be easy. But constant breaking changes that devs like to make complicate matters.

The stuff that's not already packaged tends to have 50 dependencies that aren't packaged, and need a version of Node that isn't packaged yet, etc.

For existing stuff, people are probably afraid the current maintainer is gonna do a better job than them, they don't want to mess something up, since breaking changes filter in from every package.

Android solves this by putting stuff in the os itself maintained by paid people, and not doing package management like Linux.

Nix solves it by making it easy to package stuff and allowing multiple versions. You can go from never used Nix to writing packages in hours to days.

Other distros put much more work on humans.

pcdoodle2• 3 years ago

does that mean it's getting apt-get? A big win in my opinion, i can only remember so many cooky terminal commands.

yjftsjthsd-h• 3 years ago

Why would a person stopping making packages lead you to conclude that they would replace the package manager?

pcdoodle2• 3 years ago

I was stopping by to poke fun at the linux crowd. Hello terminal, I'd like to buy a vowel please.

pmontra• 3 years ago

Congratulations for all those packages and best wishes for catching up that year of sleep.

throwawaaarrgh• 3 years ago

Alpine's community has always seemed kind of "slap this together" combined with "figure it out yourself". I remember trying to contribute and it being a pain. Advice to the maintainers: spend a month or two finding ways to make it easier for us to contribute, and we will.

fluix2• 3 years ago

Could you describe what you found difficult? I'm pretty new to packaging on Alpine, but found it to be easy to get into, only requiring a bit more effort than the AUR.

copperbrick25• 3 years ago

What issues exactly did you have with contributing? I found it very easy to contribute to alpine, I wrote an APKBUILD, created a pull request, someone reviewed my PR and pointed out an issue, I fixed it and my PR was merged. I can't think of a way that could be made any easier.

1letterunixname2• 3 years ago

Sounds like all the release engineering rigor of a 1 man, DIY hobby out for the path of least resistance.

One person trying to do too much is no bueno. It needs to be a team effort and consumers need to step-up to be occasional producers as well.

salawat• 3 years ago

Counterpoint:

No system built by committee will ever be trivially reckonable/navigable by a single person. Therefore the only people who will derive benefit from it will mostly be committees/orgs.

When one builds for oneself, or a single person, one builds under a set of constraints that truly allow for peak accessibility.

You've only got 1 person to do the whole shebang. And if one person can do it, you're on a much better footing from which to then allow anyone to do it.

As someone in the midst of building out a lab, it's been humbling, and in a way invigorating to return to grappling with building cohesive, single operator systems.

LAC-Tech• 3 years ago

I use alpine and on my desktop and I've seen that handle so much! Thanks for all your hard work, if you ever read this.

As an aside, I really should learn how to package stuff for alpine.

daniel-thompson• 3 years ago

13K commits over the past year works out to almost 40 commits per day. Curious what the workflow is to accomplish that and the nature of the commits. Irrespective of that, that is super intense, sounds like she's getting a well-deserved rest.

The most prolific packager for Alpine Linux is stepping away

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