I know there are ways to install software outside of aptitude on debian/ubuntu, (add repo, or build, or download binary, or possibly flatpak/snap/etc).

But being able to download *.deb files was one of the nicest aspect of using a debian based distros and now I’m seeing more and more projects include all distros except deb files.

Someone correct me but I vaguely recall that distributing debs is no longer recommended by debian itself?

  1. Am I wrong, and have I only co-incidentally stumbled on projects that don’t distribute debs?
  2. I am right and this seems like a mis-step, removing one of the most beginner friendly features that helped propagate debian based distros?

Flamesuit on.

  • @NoXPhasmaEnglish
    20•2 years ago

    Why should they even package it at all? Just distribute the source code and let the distributors handle it themselves.

    • CarrotsHaveEarsEnglish
      10•2 years ago

      Man, this became so bad in the last five years or so.

      Just bought a digital drawing tablet from a manufacturer who claim their products have Linux support. Plugged it in and went to their download lage. Of course, there would not be a link to their GitHub project and instead I got a .deb and a .rpm, which is totally useless to me because my system is neither Debian/Ubuntu nor even glibc.

      • @[email protected]English
        3•2 years ago

        rpm2targz should solve the first half of that problem (debs can be unpacked without their package manager too, but I forget the method). As for the glibc part, crossing your fingers and hoping it will work with musl or whatever anyway seems like the most useful course of action, alas.

        • @[email protected]English
          1•2 years ago

          They’re (usually) packaged with the slightly unusual ar format - ar x yourpackage.deb should give you the underlying tar files that would be installed, and then tar xf yourpackage.tar. Most archive managers will let you open them up like any other archive though - Gnome’s certainly does - if that’s easier for you.

    • Max-PEnglish
      7•2 years ago

      That. Historically, upsteam provided sources, and downstream distros packaged it however they want to. If anything, the developer would package it for their own use on the distro(s) they use.

      Is it weird for the users? Kind of. But it still makes the most sense: you can’t expect the developers to know how to properly integrate a package in every distro. And what usually happens is that we end up with packages that ships static binaries and puts the app in /opt and call it a day.

      I’m an inactive maintainer for [The Lounge](https://thelounge chat), and the result of us trying to package for multiple distros is that we store chat logs in /etc/thelounge because the project is designed mostly for the Docker version, which uses just one “data” folder. The project prefers consistency for the users, so the deb and Arch packages are both fairly questionable. I get reports for this from time to time in the AUR comments, and I’d have to step over the other project maintainers to split it into /etc/thelounge and /var/lib/thelounge as it should. If packaging remained independent, I could adapt the package better for Arch’s FSH.

      The universal platform for developers that want to offer end users a prepackaged way that works on every distro is Flatpak. Personally I prefer to install natively where possible, but I think it’s a good middleground between users having to figure it out, without developers stepping over the distro’s package structure. Users that want a native package can get good quality ones or build it themselves, while less experienced users can just use the developer-supported installation method.