On Wed, Mar 06, 2019 at 06:33:00AM +0000, Niels Thykier wrote: > I am sorry to hear that you are sad by this. To be honest, I had > expected you were informed about this already. > > This was requested in #922826 with the argument that our live image > builds no longer worked and that it was too risky to rewrite it at this > time in the release cycle (I remember some of this discussion from IRC, > so it might not be visible in the bug). > > I have CC'ed the people requesting/supporting this change as they are > better suited for answering any questions you have in details but also > figuring out where we go from here (even if that ends up being something > as trivial as replacing you the maintainer field, so you are not listed > at the direct contact point vmdebootstrap longer than you had anticipated).
Since I retired, I don't follow any Debian mailing lists, and I'm only on one obscure Debian related IRC channel, which mostly doesn't even talk about Debian. I feel better this way, as so much of Debian is bad for my serenity and mental health. There's a lot of great people in Debian, and a lot of great work happens in Debian, and I like the distro, but there's also a number of people doing things that make me really unhappy about being associated with the in any way. Which is why I retired. I made some very really incompetent, rookie mistakes when first writing vmdebootstrap, and as a result it is one of the worst pieces of software I've released in decades. It's so fundamentally bad that it can't be fixed without rethinking and redesigning it from scratch. That it sometimes mostly works is no excuse. I've been trying to kill it off for a couple of years now. Unfortunately, I've not been able to help those using it from transitioning to something better. Specifically, Debian's live image building. When I retired from Debian last year I intentionally didn't upload a version setting the maintainer to QA, since that carried the risk that someone would adopt it. I don't want it adopted, I want it killed. If it was my decision, I'd rather Debian release without a live image than release one built with vmdebootstrap. However, I realise that this would not be acceptable to most people and that live images are used by enough people that Debian needs to provide them. In a cruel twist of fate, I originally wrote vmdebootstrap because the Debian live image building tools were buiding images that weren't suitable for my needs, and also I found the tools to be written in way thatI didn't want to even try to change them to suit my needs. Writing my own tool from scratch seemed like it would be easy and an interesting challenge. I'm paying for that hubris now. I accept that buster will release with vmdebootstrap. If you could make it so I don't get any emails about, taking me off as the package maintainer, that would be nice and I would appreciate that. Thank you. I'm afraid I won't be answering any bug reports, accept any patches, or provide any help in keeping vmdebootstrap alive or working through the life of the buster release. -- I want to build worthwhile things that might last. --joeyh
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