Linux

5340 readers

205 users here now

A community for everything relating to the linux operating system

Also check out [email protected]

Original icon base courtesy of [email protected] and The GIMP

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

Ategon

anzo

dwraf_of_ignorance

Linux Mint Takes To Forking Some APT Components (www.phoronix.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/linux

2 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The Linux Mint project has at times forked various open-source projects to evolve them on their own such as the Cinnamon desktop starting out as forks of several GNOME 3 components. While their software forks and focus has mostly been at the desktop-level, they are going a bit further down the stack now to develop forks of several APT components that power package management on Debian/Ubuntu systems.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I just hope they don't bite off more than they can chew.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

The text says "several", but it mentions only four components (gdebi, apturl, aptdaemon and mintcommon-aptdaemon) merged into two (captain, aptkit). It doesn't look like much, and typically the Mint project is responsible to not claim to maintain more than it can maintain¹.

In special, I remember gdebi being broken for quite a while², so this hints that Mint's goal is to get properly maintained replacements.

As shown by Cinnamon. I personally don't like it, but it is well maintained, even being a huge project.
If I recall correctly, the issue was with the associated gdebi-gtk frontend; you'd open a package with it, then click "install", then the program exits because it's looking for sudo instead of pkexec. I'm almost certain that it was fixed by now, but it does show general lack of maintainance.