Motivation

I was a happy Debian user from 1999. I had some experience with a few other distros, toyed around with a few different BSD installations and occassionally used different proprietary UNIX systems. Being aware of how different systems address the packaging problem with pros and cons, I really liked most aspects of Debian's choices.

However, there were a few things I always disliked about Debian's choices and a few that went wrong over time:

• both building packages and installing packages (debconf) depend on perl so it is effectively impossible to install a minimal system without perl
• plus lately it started to depend on python3 (Devuan beowulf: init scripts depend on lsb-base which depends on python3-all)
• non-minimalistic defaults (such as tasksel or vi for editor); after a base system installation I always have to go through the package list and remove dozens of packages I will never need
• bootstraping doesn't work as good as it could, making installation painful: my preferred way of installation is booting up a grml from a cd or pendrive (could be any such distro) and running debootstrap; unfortunately debootstrap is very sensitive to the host systems age, which means I can not install recent Debian from a 10 years old grml - not because there's any real good reason (e.g. kernel ABI incompatibility), but because of debootstrap's unreasonable implicit dependencies
• the package build mechanism doesn't make life easy (TODO: link details)
• because of unreasonable administrative overhead, the gatekeeping effect is high so it's not easy to get a new package in Debian even if you are willing to maintain it
• from time to time I run into a major problem with dpkg status database messed up (due to running out of disk space or blackout during upgrade); it's very hard or impossible to completly restore such systems
• some of the bloat renders systems practically unusable; for example the other day I tried to run gdb on one of my Devuan systems and it failed to start up because of some cryptic python3 problem. I never even wanted python in gdb! Such things conditioned me to avoid upgrading my systems not wanting to fight breaks introduced by bloat I didn't want to install anyway
• default settings of some software I use daily are just wrong; for example mc installs with internal editor disabled. I hardly can imagine someone starting mc and then wanting to use emacs as editor when emacs surely has its internal file navigation tool...

I could fix a few of these problems by rolling my own alternative packages but then I'd have to keep those packages up-to-date and the more packages I have to fix the closer I get to actually having a Debian based distro of my own.

On the other hand, if all these were fixed, Devuan (Debian) would still not be perfect because it's a generic distribution for a wide audience while I am a console junkie with unusual preferences. One may reason I should go for one of those "minimalistic" distros, like a smallish bsd, openwrt, alpine. I have some minimal experience with some of them, but they are sligtly further from optimum than Debian. The most common problems with them are:

• binary vs. source distro: I prefer binary packages because I have a large number of systems using one of 3 architectures and it just doesn't make sense to recompile the same shell or awk or gcc 15 times just because I happen to have 15 installations
• they are not brave enough in minimalism: I want to have my gdb without python support/dependency, whether it takes a ./configure option or a patch. I want my system to speak English and I don't want to install language files with random software. I want to be able to install a base system that boots up, gives me a shell but doesn't even have a text editor. Most of the minimalistic distros are not brave enough to actively turn off or even patch out bloat from most software...
• ... but they try to save on the wrong side, for example saving on packge descriptions, license information or trying to make the package manager's feature set so small that it's nearly unusable

My conclusion is: I have to roll my own distro. For a long time I thought it was impossible to do because it takes too much effort but lately I figured there's a shortcut.