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Debian is a large, complex operating system, and a huge open source project. It's thirty years old now. To many people, some of its aspects are weird. Most such things have a good reason, but it can be hard to find out what it is. This is an attempt to answer some such questions, without being a detailed history of…
When I wrote Why is Debian the way it is? , a year and a half ago, I was asked to also cover why Debian changes the software it packages. Here's a brief list of examples of why that happens:
Lars Wirzenius Consulting Ltd has created a Git repository with the source code of Debian 12 (bookworm), the main component. It's one repository for all the source code, as one commit. It's a monorepo .
This weekend, those interested in Debian development have been having a discussion on the debian-devel mailing list about "What can Debian do to provide complex applications to its users?". I'm commenting on that in my blog rather than the mailing list, since this got a bit too long to be usefully done in an email.