Debian feels like a distribution maintained by a bunch of sysadmins: People who have shit to do, and who understand that the purpose of a machine is to get stuff done, not to run some software.
A lot of sysadmins believe since they are responsible for the software, they need to be able to build stuff and fix some stuff themselves (i.e. it can't wait for upstream). In my experience, it's usually something stupid (like commenting out some logspam), but it's critical enough that I can imagine a lot of shops making it mandatory to ensure they can do this.
Really proactive sysadmins do try to run fuzzers and valgrind and do try to look for bugs rather than waiting for them to strike. And sometimes they get it completely wrong, as in the OpenSSL/Valgrind disaster, but they usually ask first[1].
Now I don't agree with everything Debian do, and I don't want to defend everything they do, either, but I think programmers in general need to get out a certain amount of humility when dealing with sysadmins: Because when these sysadmins say that they're not going to package hadoop because the hadoop build process is bullshit, it isn't appropriate to reply "well you guys fucked up openssl, so what do you know?"
One thing that would help is if we didn't look at it as Programmers on one side of the fence and Sysadmins on another side. Programmers have problems to solve, and sysadmins have problems to solve, and maybe you can help each other help solve each other's problems.
Debian feels like a distribution maintained by a bunch of sysadmins: People who have shit to do, and who understand that the purpose of a machine is to get stuff done, not to run some software.
A lot of sysadmins believe since they are responsible for the software, they need to be able to build stuff and fix some stuff themselves (i.e. it can't wait for upstream). In my experience, it's usually something stupid (like commenting out some logspam), but it's critical enough that I can imagine a lot of shops making it mandatory to ensure they can do this.
Really proactive sysadmins do try to run fuzzers and valgrind and do try to look for bugs rather than waiting for them to strike. And sometimes they get it completely wrong, as in the OpenSSL/Valgrind disaster, but they usually ask first[1].
Now I don't agree with everything Debian do, and I don't want to defend everything they do, either, but I think programmers in general need to get out a certain amount of humility when dealing with sysadmins: Because when these sysadmins say that they're not going to package hadoop because the hadoop build process is bullshit, it isn't appropriate to reply "well you guys fucked up openssl, so what do you know?"
One thing that would help is if we didn't look at it as Programmers on one side of the fence and Sysadmins on another side. Programmers have problems to solve, and sysadmins have problems to solve, and maybe you can help each other help solve each other's problems.
[1]: http://marc.info/?l=openssl-dev&m=114651085826293&w=2