2012-01-10 I like the Debian community and love its fundamental concepts. I think Debian is a fine, high qualtiy distro. I think their pack- age system is basically well done. But ... I more and more be- lieve, that Debian becomes overly complex, and that's a fault. It's fine, that it ``just works'', but who want's to maintain all that stuff? Hadn't it all been for FUN, once? I had showed interest in the orphaned package `grap', which is of the kind of software I like. Now, a new version had been released and I wanted to create a new package. The current package is in quilt format, which I haven't used before. With masqmail, I had stayed with the old style format and took as few of the new stuff as possible. Well, I tried to get it working with this new stuff. It took hours. And when I finally had created the new package, it included some unneccessary files, which I wanted to be removed. But how? Everything is automated. There is abstrac- tion everywhere. I can't use any of my Unix knowledge because all of the Unix is hidden under layers of Debian automation. All I wanted was a `rm -rf package-base/some/path'. I know how to do it, actually, but I can't tell it to the thing, because it shouldn't be talked to in the Unix language. What a fail! Sorry, but I lost the FUN! That's when things go wrong. True, Crux needs a bit fiddling here and there, but this fiddling *is* FUN. I still can speak Unix, and that's what I want. This sounds like a goodbye to Debian maintenance ... I'm a bit sorry, because I really like Debian's community- basedness and its strong values. That's something I don't want to miss. But technically, I'm afraid, we're drifted to far from each other. http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke