Happy Birthday, Debian!

“Debian GNU/Linux”:http://debian.org/ turns 19 today.

I estimate that I did my first install some time in late 1995, perhaps early 1996. I haven’t really used anything else as my day-in-day-out OS since. I’ve never had a Mac of any stripe, and haven’t used Windows with any frequency other than for World of Warcraft since ’99.

I can pin my first contribution to Debian with far more accuracy: September 3, 1996. That’s the date on the first Debian changelog entry in the @libwww-perl@ package, which was, I believe, the first package I ever made. It still exists in Debian and Ubuntu (and other derivatives) and if you have it installed, you can look at @/usr/share/doc/libwww-perl/changelog.Debian.gz@, and right down there at the very end, you’ll find my grubby little fingerprints.

Sadly, things quickly went downhill—I am, to some extent, to blame for the fucked-up naming convention (with its poorly-sorting use of a @-perl@ suffix) of every Perl library package in Debian, and probably by extension, the similar poor choices in the @-java@ and @-cil@ groups. Even the PHP guys were smarter.

As I remember it, having packaged @libwww-perl@ (which is the actual name of the package as it exists on CPAN, so I just used that as the package name), I discovered that for some things—FTP support, I believe—it required the @libnet@ package, which provides a lot of @Net::*@ modules. But when I announced that I was going to package it someone (I want to finger Rob Browning, but cannot in be certain, and I don’t know if the Debian archives go back that far, and can’t be bothered to check, really) said they were about to package the @libnet@ C library, which would conflict, so maybe I could call it @libnet-perl@, like @libwww-perl@, which I did. And then the next thing I packaged I ended up calling lib<whatever>-perl for no good reason, and it all went to hell.

Bleargh.

Almost 16 years later, we have ~ 3000 Perl packages in the repository, all with that damned @-perl@ suffix. So, um, sorry.

My other big accomplishment of any note, I think, was to finally get the 64-bit Alpha port to a self-sustaining state. This started with a bootstrap that someone had done from a set of RedHat binaries before, and gradually pulling along various bits of the system until we had a self-hosting system.

Along the way, I was responsible for another unfortunate bit of “engineering”—@libc6.1@. Again, I don’t think I was totally alone in putting this forth (David, David…um, I forget his last name, and the libc6 @changelog.Debian@ doesn’t go back that far), but it probably would have been better to bite the bullet and avoid all the gymnastics it required.

As I remember it (this was, err, ’97? So I may have some details wrong), RedHat had pushed their first Alpha release using a libc with a @SONAME@ of 6, based on a pre-release @glibc-2@…and then the 64-bit ABI was changed when @glibc-2@ was released. Our versioning tools for shared libraries were much more primitive at the time, and we wanted to keep compatibility with RedHat, since that’s where a lot of the heavy duty engineering was going, so we had to follow them in changing the library @SONAME@ to 6.1. This entailed a lot of churn at the time, most of which I’ve blocked out. I did a lot of mechanical patches on a lot of packages.

I did spent a lot of time doing fixes for 64-bit-isms in various packages, and I can remember the flush of pride I had when Alan Cox mentioned that he’d gotten a bunch of 64-bit fixes as well as the conversion of the @mh@ mail client to use an ELF shared library from the Debian package, because that was *my* work.

My time as an active Debian contributor was not always a smooth one—I wasn’t always as attentive about keeping things up to date or doing triage on bugs as I could have been. I think I finally formally recognized that I wasn’t able to keep up around 2002, which was probably a couple of years later than everyone else had realized it.

Ironically, I probably maintain more packages now, for our internal company purposes at Ironic Design, than I ever did as a developer; the tools have made the maintenance at least of the sorts of packages I do (libraries and simple applications) incredibly easy.

I maintain ~ 20 production Debian servers, with a handful of dev servers and a couple of home systems, including the laptop I’m writing this on, with basically no problems on a day to day basis. It has its warts, but I have boxes that have been continuously upgraded over a span of half a dozen years with no appreciable problems. I am able to be productive and use the environment happily. I remember the rough spots at the beginning (the move from @a.out@ to @ELF@, for instance), but what Debian provides now always surprises and delights me.

So kudos to those Debian maintainers, former and current, who have contributed to such a great software system.