Debian Packaging Policies

The cluster centers on debates about Debian's conservative packaging practices, maintainer decisions, volunteer-driven development, bug handling, and comparisons to Ubuntu, with defenses against criticisms of slowness or deliberate choices.

➡️ Stable 0.6x Open Source
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#2110
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Keywords

OK ICE HN ubuntu.com VB RH IP ANYTHING debconf.org OS debian ubuntu packages package upstream software bug bug report technical developers

Sample Comments

jhanschoo Aug 11, 2021 View on HN

What problems have you faced from Debian's approach?

pekk May 27, 2013 View on HN

What is Debian missing and why is it Ubuntu's fault that it isn't in Debian?

Hackbraten May 22, 2025 View on HN

Why do you assume Debian packagers don’t do the same?

zahlman Jan 20, 2026 View on HN

Disappointing that Debian seems completely uninterested in this :(

rb666 Oct 29, 2018 View on HN

That's why we have Debian!

txutxu Feb 17, 2016 View on HN

People,This is great news for few of us.But it has been hard to read trough this comments and realize how much ignorance about what Debian is, how it works, what the Debian bug tracker is, what a voluntary-based project is, and to read some assertions and prepotency around in HNIf you see ANYTHING wrong with Debian, go fix it, or shut up and go to sell your stuff to another one.Debian is not a startup. Debian is not an elastic architecture in the cloud to support/pay-for traffi

dfc Sep 11, 2012 View on HN

Do you know why debian did that? Any links to debian-devel threads?

geofft Aug 24, 2017 View on HN

Well, this is Debian - they generally don't maintain the software, they just package it. Small changes can be pushed upstream, but "Here's a brand new build system that we promise is super cool" is generally not a patch that people like taking :)

nolist_policy Mar 30, 2024 View on HN

... and Debian is very serious about it: https://fulda.social/@Ganneff/112184975950858403

initself Dec 23, 2019 View on HN

Does Debian benefit from this work?