Devuan Jessie beta released

Posted Apr 30, 2016 21:53 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Devuan Jessie beta released by ballombe
Parent article: Devuan Jessie beta released

> You can still use regular Debian so actually they are providing more choice.

Yeah, they're providing a choice that's already offered by stock Debian.

The amount of work they undertook by forking an entire distro to avoid polluting the filesystem with 'libsystemd.so' would have been far more productively spent working with various upstreams to help maintain (and/or fix) their non-systemd code paths to provide viable alternatives to the functionality that systemd enables.

But it's their time.... far be it for me to tell someone else what they should or shouldn't do with it.

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Devuan Jessie beta released

Posted Apr 30, 2016 22:17 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (11 responses)

The problem with staying inside Debian is that there is a vast conspiracy of people – led by Lennart Poettering and his minions the Debian systemd maintainers – who are using systemd to make Debian into Fedora, or Windows (it isn't entirely clear which but that doesn't matter). Right now the conspiracy tries to deceive people into believing that System-V init is still a supported option in Debian, but in reality they are secretly working behind the scenes to have it abolished completely.

Everybody knows that Debian is, by design, susceptible to all sorts of cabals and schemery, for example when the perfectly viable a.out binary format was replaced, in one fell swoop, by the newfangled ELF format. Therefore it is clear the Devuan crowd can't rely on Debian supporting System-V init; they need to replicate the entire distribution in order to be sure that the systemd cancer is excised by the root.

Devuan Jessie beta released

Posted Apr 30, 2016 23:00 UTC (Sat) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (9 responses)

> Everybody knows that Debian is, by design, susceptible to all sorts of cabals and schemery, for example when the perfectly viable a.out binary format was replaced, in one fell swoop, by the newfangled ELF format.

Unlike with SystemD, there were actually very good reasons to replace a.out. There were severe issues with shared libraries; most importantly, there needed to be a centralized registry maintained on the Internet listing the virtual memory locations of every shared library, to make sure they didn't conflict.

I can't tell if you're joking (Poe's Law), and I wasn't using Linux when the transition happened in ... *Googles* ... 1995 ... so I can't comment on whether Debian handled the transition well, but a.out definitely had to go.

Also, lol Yggdrasil: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/80

Devuan Jessie beta released

Posted May 1, 2016 9:44 UTC (Sun) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link] (4 responses)

> I can't tell if you're joking (Poe's Law),

the "Debian is, by design, susceptible to all sorts of cabals and schemery" part makes me think it's a joke (even if the author is not joking) :D

Devuan Jessie beta released

Posted May 1, 2016 15:53 UTC (Sun) by edmonds42 (guest, #42670) [Link] (3 responses)

I guess it makes slightly more sense if you read "cabal" as "group of people" and "conspiracy" as "group of people doing things together".

Devuan Jessie beta released

Posted May 2, 2016 7:08 UTC (Mon) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (2 responses)

Strictly speaking, it's only a conspiracy if a law is or would be broken. No law, no conspiracy. The worst we could have here is colluding. ("Conspire": breathe together; "collude": play together; "cooperate": work together.)

Devuan Jessie beta released

Posted May 2, 2016 16:36 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

> Strictly speaking, it's only a conspiracy if a law is or would be broken.

I don't think that anybody is claiming that Debian should seek to criminally prosecute the 'systemd cabal' for conspiracy. Using the term can imply attempts to break the law, but it can just as easily be used to describe any group of people acting in secret for evil or immoral reasons. So strictly speaking usage of the term in this context is fine.

To argue against the 'secret conspiracy of Lennart's cohorts' you can choose to claim that there is no secret agreements to undermine non-systemd Debian OR that working together in secret to promote systemd is not malicious, evil, or immoral.

Personally I feel there is no secret conspiracy. Lennart and 'friends of systemd' do work to promote their software, but it's no secret. Anybody who puts this much effort into some undertaking with the hopes of wide-spread adoption is going to work to promote their software if they have any brains at all.

And I don't think it's malicious or evil. Systemd is simply a massive improvement over sysvinit and upstart. There are certainly other ways to accomplish things, but so far nothing has gained traction. A person may disagree with systemd and dislike it, but to argue that a 'systemd cabal' is evilly working to destroy Linux puts you square in the loony-toons camp of 'people who cannot think clearly'.

My opinion is that if people are really concerned about systemd they will find that a much more constructive approach is to work with systemd to establish a standardized API to create a strong division between 'Linux Plumbing' from the rest of the OS. I have a feeling that the biggest problem in the future will be that Systemd project implemented the DBUS apis in a way that that is specific to a particular systemd _implementation_. I don't think that Systemd project is really capable of policing themselves to avoid leaking implementation details into the upper layers. It is not that they are a stupid, but it's a issue of being too close to the project and 'not seeing the forest for all the trees'. So people interested in having the possibility of having systemd alternatives or being able to migrate away from systemd in the future should work to help ensure that APIs are clean and can be implemented by other projects.

Devuan Jessie beta released

Posted May 2, 2016 16:50 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> It is not that they are stupid, but it's a issue of being too close to the project and 'not seeing the forest for all the trees'.

It's not that either... Basically, you can't ever be sure about how well your API is designed until you have multiple independent implementations of that functionality. That's when you find out if your assumptions are different and what sort "unintentional features" your spec allows for.

> So people interested in having the possibility of having systemd alternatives or being able to migrate away from systemd in the future should work to help ensure that APIs are clean and can be implemented by other projects.

I completely agree, and systemd (the project) has shown it's quite willing to work towards those goals -- But in order to work towards those goals, one has to at least accept the validity of the problems systemd is attempting to tackle. That seems to be where things are (loudly) breaking down.

Devuan Jessie beta released

Posted May 3, 2016 12:15 UTC (Tue) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link] (3 responses)

I can't tell if you're joking (Poe's Law)

Debian being managed by a secret cabal or a whole conspiracy of cabals is sort of a running joke within the project. As we all know, there is no cabal.

Devuan Jessie beta released

Posted May 5, 2016 15:33 UTC (Thu) by stevem (subscriber, #1512) [Link] (2 responses)

There isn't a cabal. There are many cabals. :-)

Devuan Jessie beta released

Posted May 6, 2016 15:47 UTC (Fri) by ghane (guest, #1805) [Link] (1 responses)

> There isn't a cabal. There are many cabals. :-)

Yes, but they are all fronts for the One True Cabal.

Devuan Jessie beta released

Posted May 10, 2016 21:54 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

And that, of course, is here: <https://www.haskell.org/cabal/>.

Devuan Jessie beta released

Posted May 4, 2016 9:11 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

An excellently done work of sarcasm, sir, with the problems with this position superbly stated by the wonderful second paragraph: I salute you.

(And before anyone says that ELF is perfect, unlike the devil systemd, well, um, it really isn't.)