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posted by janrinok on Wednesday November 19 2014, @11:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the I-hope-we-don't-regret-this dept.

Ian Jackson's general resolution to prevent init system coupling has failed to pass, the majority vote deciding that the resolution is unnecessary. This means that not only will Debian's default init be systemd, but packages will not be required to support other init systems. Presumably, this means that using other init systems on Debian (without using systemd as a base) will not be possible without major workarounds, or possibly at all. It also leaves the future of Debian projects such as kFreeBSD unclear, as systemd is linux specific.

The vote results can be found here

The winners are:

Option 4 "General Resolution is not required"

Related Stories

Debian Package Request for GPC-Slots 2 Rejected - Unfairly? 136 comments

The Debian project has suffered from a long string of negative events recently, ranging from severe discontent over the inclusion of systemd, to talk of forking the project, to a grave bug affecting the important 'wine' package, to the resignation and reduced involvement of long time contributors.

The latest strife affecting Debian revolves around a request for a Debian package of the GPC-Slots 2 software. This request has been rejected with little more than an ad hominem attack against the software's author.

In response to the request, Stephen Gran wrote,

This is code by someone who routinely trolls Debian. I doubt we want any more poisonous upstreams in Debian, so I at least would prefer this never get packaged.

Jonathan Wiltshire proceeded to mark the request as 'wontfix', and closed it.

While Debian does strive to maintain high standards regarding the software it packages, the negative and personal nature of this rejection, without any apparent technical or licensing concerns, appears to conflict with Debian's own Code of Conduct. Such a personal attack could be seen as contradictory to the Code of Conduct's mandate that Debian participants "Be respectful", "Be collaborative", and most importantly, "Assume good faith".

Given its recent troubles as of late, many of them concerning the poor treatment of Debian developers and users alike, can Debian really afford to get embroiled in yet another negative incident?

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by LookIntoTheFuture on Wednesday November 19 2014, @11:35AM

    by LookIntoTheFuture (462) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @11:35AM (#117592)
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:01PM

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:01PM (#117600) Journal

      Call me socially-inept, but for the life of my I don't get how come a technical issue got to the point of asking for "compassion" or "empathy"?

      Look, it's a technical problem with possible multiple solutions, supposedly not a clear "best solution" exists.
      Of course I'd favour one, based on my experience but until I convinced the others, it's a matter of opinion.
      Now, suppose it is not my favourite solution solution didn't win and it was another one that was picked. Then, I'd have two fair/professional choices, either:

      1. the chosen solution is acceptable to me and I can professionally contribute; or
      2. I really think the chosen solution is crappy (from the technical point of view).
        In this case, I must admit to myself I failed to convince others but they do have the right to go forward with what they think is right and I do have the right to step out of their way (my justification: my life is too short to crap on it. If I don't believe in the picked solution, it is very likely I'm not the best contributor: it's only fair to let others try their best and wish them "Good luck, I think you'll need it")

      Within the professional approach above, where the hell "compassion" or "empathy" would find their place?

      --
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:00PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:00PM (#117618)

        It's a hipster/Millennial thing.

        Many of them are a bunch of soft pansies who feel the need to bring "social justice" into absolutely everything.

        They're very sensitive people, who can't take any sort of criticism, even when it's perfectly valid. Somehow they think that critiquing their work is a personal attack upon them.

        Everything is supposedly about "emotion" and "empathy" and "compassion" and "tolerance" to them.

        This is, obviously, an absolutely terrible state of mind to have when working with technology. It clouds the ability to make sane, sensible technical decisions. It interferes with objective analysis of the pros and cons of technology. It leads to a disaster like systemd in Debian, the decline of Firefox, and everything about the total mishap that is GNOME 3.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:25PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:25PM (#117633)

          Everything is supposedly about "emotion" and "empathy" and "compassion" and "tolerance" to them.

          This is, obviously, an absolutely terrible state of mind to have when working with technology.

          well, the systemd devs have been telling users to fuck off, so in light of your revelations you should build a bridge and get the fuck over it

          moron

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:29PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:29PM (#117639)

            well, the systemd devs have been telling users to fuck off, so in light of your revelations you should build a bridge and get the fuck over it

            I would, if that bridge allows me to stay far far away from them.

        • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:25PM

          by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:25PM (#117634) Journal

          It's a hipster/Millennial thing.[...]

          The thought you may be right made my shudder.

          --
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
          • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:20PM

            by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:20PM (#117665)

            Don't worry, he's not. Some people falsely equate embracing "Don't be a dick" as a moral standard with weakness and over-sensitivity. Also, GP seems to be equating not discriminating against people based on inborn traits like gender identity, race, and sexual orientation with being unwilling to criticize stupid ideas or shoddy work for being stupid and shoddy.

            --
            The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
            • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday November 20 2014, @06:52AM

              by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 20 2014, @06:52AM (#118024) Journal

              Some people falsely equate embracing "Don't be a dick" as a moral standard with weakness and over-sensitivity.

              This is why I like better "live and let live" as a moral compass - it is less prone to misinterpretation and has the "Don't be a dick" as a consequence.

              --
              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
              • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday November 20 2014, @01:26PM

                by Thexalon (636) on Thursday November 20 2014, @01:26PM (#118096)

                There's an important difference between "Don't be a dick" and "Live and let live": Let's say you observe somebody getting beaten on the sidewalk. "Don't be a dick" implies you should do something to improve the situation (because it's a dick move to ignore others' suffering). "Live and let live" implies that you shouldn't (because that would be interfering with someone else's dispute).

                --
                The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday November 19 2014, @09:55PM

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 19 2014, @09:55PM (#117865) Journal

        When people are emotionally committed to something, anything, they may be disappointed. Being disappointed makes people unhappy. If you need to work with someone who is unhappy, it assists you to realize that they are unhappy. This is called being empathetic. The reason that they are unhappy is nearly irrelevant. Compassion is reasonable is you like, or want to like, that person even if you find their reason for being unhappy unreasonable.

        If you don't understand that, then I will be willing to call you socially inept.

        --
        Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
        • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday November 19 2014, @10:43PM

          by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 19 2014, @10:43PM (#117880) Journal

          Being disappointed makes people unhappy.

          Doesn't happen to me, the two feelings are very loosely coupled.

          If you need to work with someone who is unhappy, it assists you to realize that they are unhappy.

          If the work is what makes people unhappy, then what aren't they stop doing it? Especially in open-source, when it's not about earning your living.

          The reason that they are unhappy is nearly irrelevant. Compassion is reasonable is you like, or want to like, that person even if you find their reason for being unhappy unreasonable.

          I'm lost: for me the reason is highly relevant - otherwise, how can I help them if I can?
          Surely, I can empathize with them. But if the work that was agreed makes them unhappy, then the agreement takes precedence over their feeling - the only release they will ever get is the release from the responsibility of the agreed work.

          --
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
      • (Score: 1) by jmorris on Wednesday November 19 2014, @11:52PM

        by jmorris (4844) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @11:52PM (#117910)

        how come a technical issue got to the point of

        There is your problem. It isn't a technical issue, it is a culture problem.

        The 'Linux' community has a problem; it was too open and by allowing people who disagree with the UNIX philosophy equal standing to commit code and otherwise set policy we have simply been outvoted by the Windows refugees.

        Something the *BSD communities should be thinking deeply on about now as a lot of refugees are about to be fleeing Linux. Many are UNIX folk who won't be a problem but many are far too open to things the more hardcore *BSD types abhor and if unchecked will begin to overwhelm the much smaller *BSD community. Start discussing the problem NOW while there is time.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @12:51AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @12:51AM (#117926)

          This is very true. If there's even the slightest indication that somebody might be a hipster, they need to be excluded from any open source project. It's worth losing out on some good code if it means avoiding the risk that somebody might infect an open source project with the systemd mentality, or worse, bring along their social justice warrior style of political bullshit. As we've seen with Debian, that kind of shit will kill even the most vibrant of open source projects. FreeBSD is just as vulnerable as Debian was, as far as I'm concerned.

          • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday November 20 2014, @02:43AM

            by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 20 2014, @02:43AM (#117959) Journal

            FreeBSD is just as vulnerable as Debian was

            [Citation needed].
            No, seriously this time, not just the use of a meme for funny/trolling purposes.
            I'm just trying to make my mind which of the *BSD distros I should try first. Any information on the risk if a "systemd-like issue repeat" factors heavily in my decision.
            Thanks in advance.

            --
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
            • (Score: 1) by jmorris on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:00AM

              by jmorris (4844) on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:00AM (#117968)

              Look at all of the BSDs and decide which one you like. Odds are a lot of the refugees will make the same choice and considering the size difference between the Windows refugees and the Linux community is probably on the order of the size of the Linux refugees vs that BSD...

              Of course the BSD people do have some defenses, they are Cathedral Builders and thus do not allow untrusted outsiders to just walk in and start pushing patches into their trees. Now we learn the value of the other side of that argument. ESR was right that the bazaar can build faster but it proved very vulnerable to a few corporate backed folks who could dedicate full time effort to taking over a project and making it unrecognizable to the original builders. Will be curious to see whether when this all shakes out if he revises his CatB document or issues a new screed.

        • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:21AM

          by cafebabe (894) on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:21AM (#117976) Journal

          The 'Linux' community has a problem; it was too open and by allowing people who disagree with the UNIX philosophy equal standing to commit code and otherwise set policy we have simply been outvoted by the Windows refugees.

          Windows is dying and Linux is the refuge for Windows users. Through ignorance and expectation, Linux has gained some of the Windows cruft.

          --
          1702845791×2
          • (Score: 1) by jmorris on Thursday November 20 2014, @04:20AM

            by jmorris (4844) on Thursday November 20 2014, @04:20AM (#117991)

            Windows may (or may not) now actually be dying but for over a decade Linux has been taking in refugees who could no longer stand the suckage of Windows. However they brought most of their Windows mindset with them, which is why svchost^Wsystemd is seen as a welcome advance. They just want a Windows that doesn't suck, a good many couldn't even care less about whether it is Free or not.

            At the risk of going severely offtopic, it is much the same as the political situation in States like CO. People flee the general stupidity in CA and the first thing they do is register to vote and start voting for the exact same policies they ran away from the consequences of. The problem was in them so there is no running away; they just spread the mental disease.

            In both cases they reflexively agree with the underlying premise while seeing that the result stinks. So they want to change the result without reexamining the premise, preferring to believe it was just a bad implementation because that is easier; self reflection and change being far harder than blaming somebody else. The mental model of Windows can't be fixed by having 'better' people do it. And Pottering ain't better people anyway.

            But this is why most reviews is from the p.o.v. of a Windows user and the grading is on the extent a Linux distro is indistinguishable from Windows. It was why the GNOMEs tried to beat Microsoft to upending the desktop into a tablet for example. So long as being 'as good as Windows (or Mac)' is the only quality metric there is no opportunity to be better. Or to realize we already ARE better, and that is why they migrated in the first place; but we are also different. UNIX will still be here long after both PotteringOS and Windows are gone.

            • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Thursday November 20 2014, @05:30AM

              by cafebabe (894) on Thursday November 20 2014, @05:30AM (#118001) Journal

              They just want a Windows that doesn't suck, a good many couldn't even care less about whether it is Free or not.

              If you expose users to multiple operating systems, few prefer Windows. However, the ones who do want a version of Windows which costs $0, never crashes and works with all of their bargain bin hardware. They haven't found this solution but they are locusts who will depart when they find a closer fit. Support this market at your peril.

              At the risk of going severely offtopic, it is much the same as the political situation in States like CO. People flee the general stupidity in CA and the first thing they do is register to vote and start voting for the exact same policies they ran away from the consequences of. The problem was in them so there is no running away; they just spread the mental disease.

              I understand. Worryingly, people may exacerbate a problem by either repeating familiar behavior or by becoming the other side of the problem. For example, a friend in London witnessed a man say "There's too many foreigners in London. I'm moving to Spain." And you just know this person is going to be *exactly* the type of immigrant of which he complains. (Never learns local customs. Never learns the local language. Never eats native food. Never integrates.) Sometimes, just sometimes, there are binary positions in a debate and "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem."

              But this is why most reviews is from the p.o.v. of a Windows user and the grading is on the extent a Linux distro is indistinguishable from Windows.

              We could have implemented anything. Instead we got Windows Explorer clones, Microsoft Office clones, Photoshop clones and mediocre Windows binary support. The people writing these clones are lauded but Windows users look upon them as cheap imitations. Personally, I am overwhelmed with the features of OpenOffice but casual users don't appreciate that the implementation is more akin to ClarisWorks with more shared code and more consistent behavior. They just see an antiquated version of Word with different icons and a slow spreadsheet. (Unfortunately, the latter is not an easy fix because Microsoft Excel is a separate binary written in a bespoke version of C++ for the specific purpose of achieving performance targets.)

              --
              1702845791×2
    • (Score: 2) by jbernardo on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:54PM

      by jbernardo (300) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:54PM (#117615)

      Too late, the cultists are already screaming for Ian Jackson's head.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:07PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:07PM (#118120)

        Dumbass morons. One thing that distinguishes Debian from all other distros, technically, was dpkg/apt. Who brought that to Debian? Ian Jackson.

        Debian deserves either overhaul or slow painful death.

    • (Score: 2) by jackb_guppy on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:16PM

      by jackb_guppy (3560) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:16PM (#117626)

      The post is too late.

      Before voting the call of compassion and understanding is required. Too fully understand the other views, so you can speak for them they are not present. That is requirement for a team to have. Only understanding the FULL view can compromise exist and good results come of it.

      Main stream "Linux" is now no longer inclusive. For me, I am off to BSD or maybe LFS to see, if they are still inclusive. An example, old hardware is not longer "supported". The gcc compiler require over 100MB non-swappable memory to run, so builds fail on old hardware / small systems.

      It was good run.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:22PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:22PM (#117631)

        I would like to see the *BSD leadership teams make official statements about systemd now.

        They could make their platforms far more appealing if they come out now and take a very resolute stand against systemd.

        The *BSDs, and especially FreeBSD, are going to gain a lot of users once Debian 8 is out, and systemd is ruining workstations and servers left and right.

        Knowing that the *BSDs will not tolerate systemd or systemd-like approaches will bring certainty to some victims who have just faced very uncertain times, and may just help keep away the deviants who have destroyed Debian so swiftly.

        • (Score: 3, Informative) by ticho on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:37PM

          by ticho (89) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:37PM (#117647) Homepage Journal

          Why would they have to make such statement? Systemd is linux-only software, the authors have repeatedly said so. *BSD saying they do not plan to support it would be like saying they do not plan to support svchost.exe from Windows.

          • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:20PM

            by cafebabe (894) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:20PM (#117749) Journal

            That is an apt comparison.

            --
            1702845791×2
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:43PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:43PM (#117792)

            I, too, think it would be good to announce. I don't think that anyone would have predicted the current Debian debacle a year ago. But here we are. If it could happen to Debian, it could happen to FreeBSD, even if it is less likely and would take more work. With FreeBSD becoming the replacement for Debian for many users and businesses, it would be good to know that systemd will be defended against at all costs.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday November 19 2014, @11:35AM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday November 19 2014, @11:35AM (#117593) Homepage Journal

    As an Arch user on all my personal machines, this doesn't mean a whole lot to me; I've been on systemd for a while, though I reserve the right to bitch about it. As a sysadmin who usually puts debian and derivatives on servers I now have to revisit Slackware as my server distro of choice.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:53PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:53PM (#117613)

      This issue extends far beyond individual distros, and far beyond Debian.

      Over the past few years, we've systematically seen several large and significant open source projects utterly trashed by the same sort of hipsters who are pushing systemd into Debian. These people are destroying decades of work and effort in a very short amount of time.

      GNOME: Once the premiere open source desktop environment, it became a complete laughing stock thanks to GNOME 3. Despite a majority of the user community expressing complete and utter disapproval of the direction it took, the developers ignored them and released an unusable product. GNOME 2 users fled to KDE, Xfce, LXDE, and other environments rather than use GNOME 3.

      Firefox: Once the premiere open source web browser, it became a complete laughing stock thanks to Firefox 4 and later. Despite a majority of the user community expressing complete and utter disapproval of the direction it took, the developers ignored them and released an unusable product. Firefox users fled to Chrome, Opera, Safari and even IE rather than use Firefox.

      Ubuntu Linux: Once the premiere user-friendly Linux distro, it became a complete laughing stock thanks to Unity, Upstart and Amazon tracking. Despite a majority of the user community expressing complete and utter disapproval of the direction it took, the developers ignored them and released an unusable product. Ubuntu Linux users fled to Linux Mint, Debian and other distros rather than use Ubuntu Linux.

      And now we can add:

      Debian: Once the premiere Linux distro, it became a complete laughing stock thanks to systemd. Despite a majority of the user community expressing complete and utter disapproval of the direction it took, the developers ignored them and released an unusable product. Debian users fled to Slackware, Gentoo and even FreeBSD rather than use Debian.

      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:54PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:54PM (#117653)

        it became a complete laughing stock thanks to GNOME 3

        I cry foul in that GNOME was always a laughing stock, from day one. However, I may disagree in detail, but I agree in principle.

        There is a meta comedy that the reason the only linux desktops out there are running xmonad, awesome, xfce, is because devs don't dogfood and design by corporate committee, so obviously all "desktop environments" suck badly.

        What I like about firefox is there's addons and support to roll back most (all?) of the stupidity. You can actually get something useful if you disable everything done in the last couple years. Its not even hard to do.

        There is a hole in the FOSS development model where once you get jobs and corporate support moving in, when the job is done, the only way to keep collecting filthy lucre is basically to F stuff up. Imagine if some poor bastard's paycheck depended on never "finishing" the ls command. I guarantee we would be utterly unable to list the contents of directories at this time, although we'd have alpha blending, animations, cloud support, and social media (Click here to tweet this filename!)

        • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Wednesday November 19 2014, @04:41PM

          by Nerdfest (80) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @04:41PM (#117741)

          FireFox is a good example of why systemd is a bad idea. It used to be that things designed with the Unix philosophy did their job well, and you added more functionality. Maybe you'd have problems with the additions, but the underlying layers were simple, and very solid. Simplicity is a big contributor to the stability. With FireFox you need to extend it to *remove* functionality. This doesn't seem to me to inherently be a good idea for stability.

          • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:44PM

            by cafebabe (894) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:44PM (#117759) Journal

            Modularity works really well on a CLI when commands can be chained into a long pipe. It doesn't work so well in a GUI in which monoliths are the default. However, if it was easy to write software at the granularity of the Edit menu or smaller then modular GUI software would be feasible.

            --
            1702845791×2
            • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:57PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:57PM (#117803)

              Dont take this the wrong way... It is just something I have wanted to rant about for awhile

              Modularity works really well on a CLI when commands can be chained into a long pipe.

              I hate junk like that. It is modular but fairly unreadable gibberish usually. Just today I spent 30-40 mins decoding some crazy command line someone sent me. It is not always clear what particular parameters do. There is little continuity between programs so you end up digging out docs for every little thing. For example in one program 's' may mean recurse sub-directories and 'r' means turn the text red. Then in the next program 'r' means recurse and s means something totally different unless you use capital S.

              I can hang with the best CLI wizard out there but it really seems like command line pipe is a really badly abused interface. I look at the way it is used and think there *HAS* to be a better way. But I am drawing a blank (that may be a good thing :) ). GUIs usually make things a bad click fest. Input files/memory is 'hidden'. Scripts sorta of do it but then you have to think in context like a programmer (which I can do as well). So I grumble and use it thinking there must be something better.

              I am just not sure. It seems 'wrong' in some fundamental way that I can not put my finger on. Stuff like systemd I can see *why* they did it. Scripts are brittle in subtle ways. But in essence they are super simple. Yet the chaining of events creates a giant storm of bad in/bad out sometimes. The idea is a good one. But the method they went about to foist it on everyone is bad (simply ignoring what everyone was saying). Instead of taking what was there and extending it (like the system was designed) they threw it all out and basically said '20 years of scripting is garbage'. It is the same reason everyone abandoned xfree86 when it was convenient. There was an opportunity here to really make linux way better. Instead it is a bunch of infighting and a 50/50 split if you care or dont. It will be 10 years before whatever systemd ends up being, that it finally calms down and people undo the damage and creates a decent consistent startup/service interface out of it. Better consistency is one thing linux could do much better with.

              Thanks for the time letting me rant.. I am off to debug a startup issue on an embedded linux system.... Hopefully it is not a hardware issue (which means deracking 20 hds and weeks of RMA hassle from 8 states away).

              • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Wednesday November 19 2014, @07:13PM

                by Nerdfest (80) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @07:13PM (#117806)

                What you're complaining about is more an API problem than an architecture problem though. You can have a good architecture and a bad API (as you describe with some command line parms). I'd prefer to have that than the opposite. It's hard to fix a bad architecture.

                • (Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday November 20 2014, @12:51AM

                  by Arik (4543) on Thursday November 20 2014, @12:51AM (#117925) Journal
                  Too bad I dont have mod points, but that was a very good post. Concise, to the point, and very insightful.

                  This is what the systemd proponents just cant seem to wrap their heads around. A bad design is a bad design, no matter how beautifully executed.
                  --
                  If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:29PM

                  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:29PM (#118131)

                  You can have a good architecture and a bad API

                  I see what you are saying. But that still just does not seem right. Jamming things thru the CLI or thru stdin just seem wrong to me. They are very useful tools but it seems fraught and easy to create poor API.

                  I am a big believer of datastructs first. If you design your data properly the API usually comes out of it quite cleanly. To your architecture point. Yet the way data is moved around seems clunky to me for some reason. I am not saying it is bad. It just seems weird and not natural.

                  I cant put my finger on it. To use a quote from the matrix 'it is like a splinter in my mind'. It is like we are using the wrong interface for data movement. We are overloading meaning which creates confusion. Until something better comes along I will continue to use the crap out of it :)

                  It's hard to fix a bad architecture.
                  I agree... Which is why I am calling systemd a missed opportunity. It was an opportunity to remove one thing I see as very clunky in the 'distro wars'. The startup process. Each distro basically had their own versions of these scripts. Lots of redundant work just for the sake of being 'different'. Not necessarily better/worse, just different. It is one of the reasons many blew up on the idea. As it is part of the identity of the distro they picked. The systemd guys however cant seem to go back and fix what they have and are playing with polishing the brass on the rails of the titanic. They have not created a consistent interface, they 'grew one' then added in some weeds. If they get their interface right the other parts would fall naturally out of it and they would not have tons of work ahead of them. They could then go on and fix/create other things instead of farting around with how the system boots up. Which frankly is a minor part of my computer usage (at least it better be).

              • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Wednesday November 19 2014, @07:53PM

                by cafebabe (894) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @07:53PM (#117824) Journal

                For example in one program 's' may mean recurse sub-directories and 'r' means turn the text red. Then in the next program 'r' means recurse and s means something totally different unless you use capital S.

                That irritates me too. I wish that -R and only -R was recurse. I think the most annoying examples are within the suite of aircrack-ng utilities. Even the second generation of a bunch of commands released together don't use consistent parameter conventions. However, if I make the comparison with GUI software, menu shortcuts (such as Alt-H for Help) are equally inconsistent.

                Stuff like systemd I can see *why* they did it.

                I assume your background is weighted towards Windows or MacOS. All I see is technical debt [soylentnews.org], Not Invented Here [soylentnews.org], "WTF is RFC5452? [soylentnews.org]" and "Do you hate [google.com] disabled people? [youtube.com]"

                Yet the chaining of events creates a giant storm of bad in/bad out sometimes.

                Computer pioneers usually had a mathematical background, so stuff like y=f(g(h(x))) was bandied around without having to consider implementation details such as exception processing. However, when foo | bar | baz is stateful or starts spewing garbage, it falls outside of this mathematical paradise.

                It will be 10 years before whatever systemd ends up being, that it finally calms down and people undo the damage and creates a decent consistent startup/service interface out of it.

                We just cannot determine what it will be yet and that alone makes it unsuitable for deployment on stable systems. Regardless, deployments will be cracked. Repeatedly. This isn't an academic issue or an opportunity for schadenfreude. Some of those systems may contain my private information and your private information.

                --
                1702845791×2
        • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday November 19 2014, @09:26PM

          by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @09:26PM (#117854) Journal

          I cry foul in that GNOME was always a laughing stock, from day one.

          I disagree. Gnome 1 was great. I've used it by choice, on a distribution that defaulted to KDE. Gnome 2 was a big step back, but I kept using it due to inertia. But then there came Gnome 3. My inertia is not without limits.

          --
          The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
        • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday November 19 2014, @10:07PM

          by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 19 2014, @10:07PM (#117872) Homepage Journal

          Well, the ls command is huge:

          hendrik@notlookedfor:~$ ls -l /bin/ls
          -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 121032 Oct 29 23:47 /bin/ls
          hendrik@notlookedfor:~$

          There must be something useful in all those K. Anybody know what?

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @11:16PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @11:16PM (#117893)

            It's probably statically linked, so it includes libc and other library code which adds to the size.

            It's done that way so that you can still use it, even when systemd has fucked up your system so badly that dynamic linking isn't working properly, or the shared libraries aren't available because systemd has refused to mount the partition or device containing them.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @07:04PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @07:04PM (#117804)

        That's awesome...but we need to add a little "Red Hat" in the mix, if you get my drift.

      • (Score: 1) by curunir_wolf on Wednesday November 19 2014, @09:35PM

        by curunir_wolf (4772) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @09:35PM (#117861)

        GNOME: Once the premiere open source desktop environment, it became a complete laughing stock thanks to GNOME 3. Despite a majority of the user community expressing complete and utter disapproval of the direction it took, the developers ignored them and released an unusable product. GNOME 2 users fled to KDE, Xfce, LXDE, and other environments rather than use GNOME 3.

        It's telling that the GNOME devs have actually shown themselves to be less responsive to their user community than Microsoft, which did a major reversal on their Windows 8 release by pushing out Windows 8.1 and Update 1 as quick as they could.

        Worse than Microsoft. What an indictment!

        --
        I am a crackpot
      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday November 19 2014, @10:02PM

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 19 2014, @10:02PM (#117866) Journal

        Once is coincidence,
        Twice is happenstance,
        ...

        Something systematic is happening.
        My guess is that maintaining a system that isn't supported by Red Hat is too expensive if you want a complete desktop. Now as for why Red Hat is acting that way....well, Bob Young retired quite awhile ago now.

        --
        Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
      • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday November 21 2014, @08:32PM

        by urza9814 (3954) on Friday November 21 2014, @08:32PM (#118589) Journal

        People have been referring to GNOME as a "Fischer-Price UI" since at least 2002. It's always sucked.

        Firefox *was* crap, it's actually a lot better now. Remember when Chrome was first released? Remember how it blew Firefox totally out of the water? These days Firefox is a bit slower, but Chrome is a lot more unstable. I prefer Firefox, but they're just about even in my book.

        Ubuntu? Really? That crapfest? It wasn't until ~4 years ago that I was *ever* able to get Ubuntu to install successfully. To this day I still point new users seeking a simple, GUI-based system towards Mageia instead of Ubuntu because I've had nothing but bad experiences with Ubuntu, and nothing but good ones with Mandrake/Mandriva/Mageia.

        You might be right about Debian though.

    • (Score: 2) by CRCulver on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:31PM

      by CRCulver (4390) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:31PM (#117640) Homepage

      As an Arch user on all my personal machines, this doesn't mean a whole lot to me; I've been on systemd for a while, though I reserve the right to bitch about it.

      I don't really understand Arch's move to systemd. Didn't Arch start out as a Gentoo-like distro for people who like to really get into the nuts and bolts of their system? You'd think that they would be keen on maintaining old-style init scripts, because one can easily track how it all relates together through plain text. Systemd replaces all that with a series of poorly-documented binaries, with command-line options and config files significantly different from the hacking tradition Arch started out with. Is there some history online of why Arch choose systemd so enthusiastically?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:13PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:13PM (#117664)

        Is there some history online of why Arch choose systemd so enthusiastically?

        Unlikely, the maintainers repeatedly refused to even discuss the issue. From what I recall though, the decision was almost entirely "justified" with a "where will you get udev from" when the systemd cabal took udev hostage.

      • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:21PM

        by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:21PM (#117666) Homepage Journal

        Not that I ever saw.

        --
        My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 2) by arashi no garou on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:26PM

        by arashi no garou (2796) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:26PM (#117670)

        I stopped using Arch right before they switched to systemd, but not for that reason (in fact, back then I was looking forward to trying out systemd to see what it was all about). I stopped using it because, when they switched from a great bare-bones installer to an obtuse, script based sado-masochistic method, they outright said they switched to keep anyone new from being able to use Arch. Their attitude was "it's our private club and we don't want anyone else in it". The new installation method wasn't difficult for anyone who was used to the Arch Way; I mastered it pretty quickly. But when I went to the forums to search for some specific issue that I had ran into, I came across a discussion that told me everything I needed to know about the Arch maintainers; basically, they are so anti-user and against anyone new discovering Arch that they will bully and mock people who ask questions until they give up in frustration and drop the distro.

        I promptly removed Arch from my machines and went back to Slackware (and Raspbian on my just-acquired Raspberry Pi), as to my mind this was wholly against the spirit of GNU/Linux and open source. Later I found that they had completed the switch to systemd, and by that time I had had a chance to research it enough to be doubtful of its merits. But, I still wanted to try it out, so I grabbed the Arch Linux image for the Raspberry Pi, complete with systemd, and gave it a spin. On the whole, everything seemed more or less the same as pre-systemd, but for one thing, I noticed performance was even worse than before[1], and I also noticed that systemd commands using systemctl didn't always do what you told them to. For example, I'd tell it to stop and then start a process, and about half the time the process wouldn't actually stop, even giving it several seconds to do so. It was issues like this that led me to research systemd further outside of the Raspi environment, and after weighing the pros and cons, I found that I didn't want it.

        So, to answer your question, I wholly believe the Arch maintainers switched to systemd in an effort to further alienate the casual Arch user. Take a once great distro, hobble it with an obtuse installer, hobble it further with a broken and unfinished init system, and top it off with hateful dismissal of anyone not in the inner circle, and you have the true Arch Way.

        _____

        [1] The Raspberry Pi's performance as a desktop OS, even on the command line, is already so abysmal that anything slowing it down further is immediately felt. Pre-systemd Arch Linux was the fastest modern OS on the Pi (classic OSes like RiscOS and Plan9 run acceptably well on it, modern GNU/Linux not so much), but post-systemd Arch Linux is dog slow, even slower than Raspbian. The performance difference was striking, and was the reason I looked deeper into systemd instead of blindly accepting it.

        • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Friday November 21 2014, @08:55PM

          by urza9814 (3954) on Friday November 21 2014, @08:55PM (#118599) Journal

          Did you try Antergos at all? Basically it's just Arch with the old installer restored. I did the whole manual Arch install a couple times and it wasn't too bad, but they screwed the wiki regarding how to set up disk encryption at one point and I decided to just start using Antergos instead of wasting any more time screwing around with it. Quite happy with Antergos though.

          Of course, it *is* still Systemd if that's a problem for you. I don't like it, I've got four line shell scripts with features Systemd is lacking, but it's not bad enough to push me to Slackware or Gentoo yet. Used Slackware for a while back around '06 or so...it was nice, but I just don't have time for that anymore.

          • (Score: 2) by arashi no garou on Friday November 21 2014, @10:39PM

            by arashi no garou (2796) on Friday November 21 2014, @10:39PM (#118620)

            Of course, it *is* still Systemd if that's a problem for you.

            Unfortunately, it is. I don't fall into the "hate systemd for...um...reasons" camp, but until a) the political furor surrounding it calms down and b) it has matured and proven itself as superior to what we have now, I'm going to avoid using a distro that contains it. Besides, I more or less grew up on Slackware; it wasn't the first GNU/Linux distro I tried but it was the first that I understood and was able to learn from, instead of curse at. I've had at least one machine running it in some version since 1999. I'm still going to get up to speed on FreeBSD in the mean time, as it's been years since I dove into it deeply.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by morgauxo on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:33PM

      by morgauxo (2082) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:33PM (#117680)

      I'm mainly a Gentoo user myself but I still see this as bad. Debian is everywhere! It's used in most servers. It's the base of most popular desktop distros. It's usually the base of hobbyist toys like Raspberry Pis. It's usually the first Linux ported to new platforms. Even if you never use Debian yourself if you are using Linux you are benefitting from development which happens by or in support of Debian users. Sure, Debian users who are unhappy with this decision can go to other distributions. Or, they can even go to a BSD which at least is still an X'nix. But.. All those people could have switched a long time ago. There was something they liked better in Debian. Switching because Debian has changed for the worse must mean that something is lost.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by novak on Wednesday November 19 2014, @11:41AM

    by novak (4683) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @11:41AM (#117594) Homepage

    This is a dark day for not just Debian, but linux. I've heard some people anticipating Debian's demise as a result of systemd, but I don't think so. It just has too much inertia, regardless of how much has been lost in this fight. I think linux is going to get worse, but Debian will probably stay about where it was before in relation to other distros, since systemd is almost a given at this point.

    Well, I won't be using it again.

    --
    novak
    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @11:44AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @11:44AM (#117595)

      There's never a better time to be alive.

      I remember how cool it felt to get ancient versions of Linux running in the 1990s. How edgy it was. How cool you felt.

      Well, those days are back!

      /Posted from 'links' running on OpenBSD

    • (Score: 2) by cockroach on Wednesday November 19 2014, @11:58AM

      by cockroach (2266) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @11:58AM (#117598)

      [quote]Well, I won't be using it again.[/quote]

      Indeed. I've been using Debian since the late 90s. My desktop is now in the middle of a migration to FreeBSD and my laptop is busy compiling Gentoo. Sad days...

      Plus I need to figure out what to migrate my server to before wheezy support ends.

      • (Score: 2) by cockroach on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:00PM

        by cockroach (2266) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:00PM (#117599)

        Gah, HTML fail. Sorry 'bout that.

        • (Score: 3, Funny) by Konomi on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:05PM

          by Konomi (189) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:05PM (#117601)

          We have forever immortalised your mistake on the Internet *evil laugh*.

        • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:06PM

          by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:06PM (#117602) Homepage Journal

          Heh, yeah. <blockquote> or <quote> are I think what you were going for. We pondered <q> as well but it's apparently part of the html spec and used for in-sentence quoting.

          --
          My rights don't end where your fear begins.
          • (Score: 2) by cockroach on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:08PM

            by cockroach (2266) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:08PM (#117603)

            Heh yep, I must be spending too much time on bad forums. I hereby promise to henceforth always use the preview button.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:22PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:22PM (#117667)

            Not to sound like a stupid n00b but is there an easy way to escape the angle brackets and HTML tags on SN? I can use the escape codes but they are turned into their respective characters after a preview and will not render come the next preview or posting.

            I would like to request that the Soylent dev team change the parser for the Comment box to eliminate the substitution of characters for their escape codes after a preview. We can then see the expected characters in the preview window and make the corrections in the text field. To me, the rendering of an escape code in the input field after a preview is an annoying bug. I have to edit the post off-line to preserve the escape codes and copy-paste to keep things sane.

            • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:30PM

              by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:30PM (#117674) Homepage Journal

              &lt;foo&gt; should be what you're looking for, for now. This behavior will be the default and not screw up (it does right now) when you hit preview with the 14.12 update most likely though. Been doing a lot of work on removing filtering of user input and only and properly filtering output.

              --
              My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by novak on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:18PM

        by novak (4683) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:18PM (#117605) Homepage

        I only use Debian on servers.

        To me, the most crushing blow after the fall of Debian is that all distros relying on it for upstream are now locked into systemd, and systemd has taken over almost all linux distros. I can't imagine that slackware and gentoo will hold out forever either, though I hope they'll keep going for a while.

        My desktop is crux linux, which was the original inspiration for arch linux. The main difference is that it uses a ports system for packages. It's probably the only thing closer to BSD than slackware.

        --
        novak
        • (Score: 2) by cockroach on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:31PM

          by cockroach (2266) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:31PM (#117606)

          Ah interesting, never heard of crux. They explicitly mention "BSD-style initscripts" - I may just have to give it a try. Thanks!

          • (Score: 2) by novak on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:40PM

            by novak (4683) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:40PM (#117611) Homepage

            You're welcome. I've been using it since 2010 and I haven't found one I like better yet.

            --
            novak
            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:05PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:05PM (#117619)

              How has it immunized itself from the threat of systemd?

              To be honest, a year ago I would never have guessed that Debian would, as a project, make an absolutely idiotic decision like switching to systemd. I would never have expected it to tear the community apart like it has. I surely did not see myself moving all of my systems over to FreeBSD, like I'm currently in the process of doing.

              What is it about crux that will prevent it from being infected by systemd?

              FreeBSD has the advantage of not using the Linux kernel, as well as having a team of developers who just don't put up with shitty technology like systemd. What does crux have?

              • (Score: 2) by tempest on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:32PM

                by tempest (3050) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:32PM (#117678)

                Systemd isn't an inevitability in Linux, it's a CHOICE. If Crux uses simple BSD style init scripts to adhere to the primary "keep it simple" philosophy, I doubt they'd adopt the antithesis willingly.

                • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:12PM

                  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:12PM (#118125)

                  Of course, due to its nature, it has the danger of soon being not merely a choice. If the application you need depends on Gnome, and Gnome depends on systemd, then you only have the choice to either not use the application, or to use systemd. And the more common systemd will be on popular distributions, the more likely new software will be dependent on it, and new versions of old software will become dependent of it, and other alternatives not dependent on it will be abandoned and bit-rot away.

                  Note that while it is possible to run a Gnome application on an otherwise non-Gnome desktop, using Gome only for those specific applications, it is not possible to use systemd just for those programs that need it. Need one program that requires systemd, and you'll have no choice but to let systemd manage your machine.

                  Given the strong opposition to systemd, there's hope that a strong alternative will emerge. However that will soon not just be a slight variation, with just a few different packages installed, but due to the nature of systemd, it will mean a hard split; after a decade, systemd-Linux and alternative Linux will likely not be much closer to each other than Linux and *BSD are today.

              • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:48PM

                by tangomargarine (667) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:48PM (#117721)

                "Hope is not a strategy" :/

                --
                "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
      • (Score: 5, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:00PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:00PM (#117617)

        My desktop is now in the middle of a migration to FreeBSD

        Same here. Hows it going? I've been keeping notes.

        What do you think of their bootloader? Its only been 20 years of LILO later GRUB for me so its interesting to see something new. rc.ng or whatever its called is subjectively about twice as fast as systemd on the same hardware doing the same tasks which makes me laugh and laugh.

        Everything is intense deja vu very similar to Debian but different. Wasn't it a trip seeing the installer basically being the same and asking the same questions, almost but not quite? I swear you could slap "Debian Jessie" on it and search/replace some strings and totally prank someone... So similar but some differences in the details.

        So the docs are in subversion, and the core OS has one updater, and there's a binary package system, and the ports system, or you can install stuff by hand, sounds crazy but apparently they "work together" well enough. So far I have done Nothing with ports at all. All packages. On my to do list.

        I haven't gone ZFS yet. On bare metal linux for a decade (or more?) I always LVM to make drive upgrade/migration easy and haven't adjusted my workflow to the BSD way of thinking. This will require some thought and screwing around and reinstalling.

        I found installing X to be really weird. You have to enable hal and dbus then install xorg, then you get "Elf Binary type 3" errors which means you need to load up the linux shim in order to load the linux nvidia driver which unfortunately my peculiar card requires. Isn't the BSD equiv of linux's /etc/modules baroque? So there's entries in /boot/defaults/loader.conf but you override them in /boot/loader.conf, which is similar but different from /etc/rc.conf (isn't everything conceptually supposed to be in /etc/rc.conf... except for what isnt?)

        xmonad doesn't automatically pull in hs-mobar and dmenu and trayer so manually install those packages. And what is up with this hs- prefix?

        The HAL found my mouse and moused worked perfectly on the VCs and I've enabled allscreens_flags="-m on" but the blasted X wouldn't detect the mouse until I rebooted. What is this F-ing windows? Craziest thing ever. Willing to ignore it as just bad luck or cosmic rays or something. But windows style "you've installed a mouse, you need to reboot" type BS... Grrr.

        I had the usual X startup entertainment from memory xmonad didn't put in a desktop stanza, my favorite *DM doesn't run on freebsd, I ended up starting xmonad in .xinitrc. On the Debian boxes it usually lives in .xsession. I think this very *DM dependent and itsn't really a BSD issue.

        Speaking of XDM you manually edit /etc/ttys to turn it "on". Really, freebsd? Really?

        I have a monitor that is insane and reports its 1024x768 even though its physically 1600x1200 and its a PITA under both linux and freebsd to "force" the video card to output the correct resolution. Fun fun fun but my problem not linux or BSDs problem.

        Sound autodetected and works perfectly, basically the typical linux experience since the early 90s with the exception of the hideous pulseaudio years. Boring! Networking hardware and config was the same way, nice and boring and predictable and simple. I don't do any GUI foolishness or "network mismanager" or any of that much harder more agonizing stuff. Just works.

        LDAP install was interesting (I used kerberos and ldap at home) and the client lives in BOTH /usr/local/etc/ldap.conf and /usr/local/openldap/ldap.conf. That was interesting. I also had to edit /usr/local/etc/nss_ldap.conf and /etc/nsswitch.conf. That done, its a perfectly behaved LDAP client. Hurray! I had some hilarity where my linux login shell isn't in the same place as BSD's login shells but BSD doesn't mind following a symlink, thankfully.

        Kerberos was excruciatingly boring and predictable. Shockingly /etc/krb5.conf is the same thing on linux and BSD. There's some funkiness where its "linux speak" to put a deny at the end of your PAM paragraphs and the "BSD speak" is to list pam_unix multiple times, before pam_krb5 and at the end. In the end things worked. There is still some minor funkiness, like pure WTF 10 hour ticket lifetimes, probably just a config option I missed somewhere. Also don't forget to edit /etc/pam.d/xdm to kerberos-isfy it.

        AFS was truly boring (yes I run AFS at home... its really easy once you've set up LDAP and kerberos you're about 98% there). What linux calls /etc/openafs is what freebsd calls /usr/local/etc/openafs. Add afsd_enable="YES" to /etc/rc.conf and you're good.

        As far as apps go, chromium was kinda dull, some WTF-ness about the sysctl kern-ipc.shm_allow_removed=1.

        I have some puppet automation to get going. I have just realized that setting up "dual boot" on the same ip addrs etc isn't going to work very well with puppet as puppet will have no idea if my hostname has booted as linux or bsd and randomly shoving files will be a problem. I want to figure out what I'm doing with puppet before I fool around with reinstalling and experimenting. I want that "bare metal to fully configured in ten minutes, no manual configuring" I've come to expect from linux and puppet.

        From memory emacs worked. My home dirs all come from AFS so as long as I run roughly the same version on the legacy linux boxes as on the new BSD installs, I'm all good.

        I haven't begun converting the servers at home and work. I think that'll be easier. After all I don't care about mouse support under X or linux nvidia driver support on the "data warehouse" box at work. I'll have some adventures in JVMs, I'm sure. Its a lot easier to "port" a compiled scala project distributed as a jar to another machine, than, say, a legacy-ish rails app that hasn't been updated since 2.0 in '08 or something. Eventually, everyone hates rails, it just brews up at different time for everyone.

        Its 2014, I don't run applications locally unless they're hardware related, everythings a webpage so as long as chromium works I'm all good. I'd like the mythtv frontend on freebsd to talk to my legacy linux mythtv backends, and getting mplayer or equivalent up would be nice. But really all I ever use in a desktop is a console, emacs, and a browser, and that works, so I'm pretty much done other than the fine tuning.

        And thats a paraphrase and some commentary of my much longer notes.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:11PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:11PM (#117623)

          Thank you for these great details! Keep up the excellent work!

          It's imperative that we all do whatever we can to help the Debian refugees find safety within FreeBSD, or even Slackware.

          Nobody should have to suffer like they've had to suffer at the torturing hands of systemd.

          • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:05PM

            by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:05PM (#117656)

            I've been saying for awhile that "I" will make a doc trying to help refugees transition from linux to freebsd. In my infinite spare time aka its never happening beyond talking about it.

            "someone" with more spare time than myself should create a wiki for ex linux users to translate into freebsd, or more likely a matrix of ex-debian people into freebsd and ex-redhat into openbsd or whatever as a 2-d matrix. I have the time to cut and paste my notes and add hyperlinks to the official docs. But not to run a wiki project.

            The freebsd docs are good, but "we" are not their audience. I kid you not, they have cut and paste instructions for making a freebsd install flash drive from a freebsd command line. Thats useful for some people, but not experienced linux admins.

            My biggest conversion problems have been "assumptions" about whats unified and what isn't, what has like 10 places to edit on one os vs one file here, what needs to be done in two places for WTF reasons, what is just plain weird and only documented in the deepest darkest pits (seriously, I shouldn't have to hit google multiple times all over the planet to set up X, even if for me as an experienced admin it was pretty easy, it was clumsy...) Oh and simple translation. I know where ldap.conf is on linux and I know where its been for a decade or so and I need a simple cheat sheet for freebsd.

            Taking a tour of new features in *BSD is a side issue, maybe integrate it. Bhyve? Maybe. The mystery and miracle of ZFS? Maybe. The really cool jails system? Maybe. They don't fit directly into a transition guide, however. On the other hand, if you're gonna transition, best take advantage of everything there is to offer.

            Yeah maybe in my infinite spare time this weekend. Maybe.

            • (Score: 2) by arashi no garou on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:54PM

              by arashi no garou (2796) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:54PM (#117800)

              That's been my problem with trying out FreeBSD as a main OS, period: Time. I barely have any free time in the first place (free time meaning time outside of work and quality family time) so what little I have, I devote to more productive/entertaining things like learning Python and catching up on what little gaming I do. The migration back to Slackware from Crunchbang was fairly painless and quick; I have tons of experience using Slackware off and on for the past 15 years so it was a no-brainer. But FreeBSD is a different animal, that requires a heavy investment of time to learn all those little quirks and oddities (compared to GNU/Linux) that you wrote about above.

              Speaking of, thank you for sharing! Just reading over it on my break at work has gotten my brain into the groove, so to speak. When I get home tonight (given enough time) I think I'll get started on really learning FreeBSD on bare metal, instead of the half-functioning VM rotting away on my main workstation.

        • (Score: 2) by Kilo110 on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:22PM

          by Kilo110 (2853) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:22PM (#117669)

          ZFS is great.

          There are very few times where I can honestly say it's a pleasure working with a FS.

        • (Score: 2) by tempest on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:44PM

          by tempest (3050) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:44PM (#117687)

          loader.conf is generally used to set kernel level modules and options (particularly sysctl variables). While rc.conf is intended for the rc system. For instance, how is the rc system supposed to load when it can't read the disk because the kernel module required hasn't been loaded? Many options seem redundant because it works both ways, for instance you can create a bridge in rc.conf, and it automatically loads the bridge kernel driver for you, but some chicken and egg problems can't be done that way (or require the option be directly compiled into the kernel).

          • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:57PM

            by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:57PM (#117727)

            Yes.... this is the kind of philosophical mental model I want to document to help other people convert.

            The very simple model of "linux has one file per package/daemon, mostly" and "freebsd has one monster file /etc/rc.conf that does it all" when examined in detail is somewhat more complicated.

            So level 1 of learning how stuff is configured is the one liner I gave and level 2 of learning, in more detail, is your post, more or less.

            Probably there's some kind of level 3 of learning in even more detail but its advanced enough I haven't figured out where it is yet much less what it is...

            • (Score: 2) by fnj on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:15PM

              by fnj (1654) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:15PM (#117748)

              It's not so much one file vs many. Both have the many, but BSD init is much cleaner in return for lacking run-levels.

              Linux with SysVInit: /etc/init.d has the basic scripts; each script reads settings from its own config file in /etc/default. /etc/rc0.d through /etc/rc6.d - one directory for each run level - contain a forest of symlinks to those scripts, with prefixes. The letter of the prefix is S for start or K for stop. The digits control the order they are run ("priority"). Enabling or disabling a daemon changes the corresponding symlinks. The run-level is controlled by /etc/inittab.

              FreeBSD: /etc/rc.d has the basic scripts; each script reads settings from /etc/rc.conf. Common boilerplate is separated out into /etc/rc.subr. Dependencies between scripts are handled by special comment lines in the scripts. There is no forest of symlinks. Enabling or disabling a daemon is done in /etc/rc.conf. There are no run-levels. Single-user is a kind of fall-back if boot-to-multi-user fails, but it is possible to boot to single-user, and you can exit to single-user from multi-user by "kill -TERM 1".

              Both systems have an /etc/rc.local to stuff any kind of one-time on-boot stuff you want that does not fit into a daemon model, or you do not want to bother with a daemon.

              I have simplified the FreeBSD description a little, but not much. For example, there is a /usr/local/etc with its own parallel files. / is for the base system, and /usr/local is for packages/ports.

            • (Score: 2) by tempest on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:29PM

              by tempest (3050) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:29PM (#117754)

              FYI, Entries for many services can be added to /etc/rc.conf.d/service-name . This cleans up rc.conf quite a bit.

            • (Score: 2) by DECbot on Wednesday November 19 2014, @10:02PM

              by DECbot (832) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @10:02PM (#117867) Journal

              Probably there's some kind of level 3 of learning...

              So I understand that you would like to become a dev. We shall prepare the rite. Baptize your hard disk with /dev/zero so we can begin pure.

              --
              cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by cockroach on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:00PM

          by cockroach (2266) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:00PM (#117694)

          Same here. Hows it going? I've been keeping notes.

          Nice! I'll try to add some comments of my own:

          What do you think of their bootloader? Its only been 20 years of LILO later GRUB for me so its interesting to see something new. rc.ng or whatever its called is subjectively about twice as fast as systemd on the same hardware doing the same tasks which makes me laugh and laugh.

          To me it seems that FreeBSD takes quite a bit longer to boot than Debian (without systemd), could be related to disk encryption and/or a wrong impression though.

          Everything is intense deja vu very similar to Debian but different. Wasn't it a trip seeing the installer basically being the same and asking the same questions, almost but not quite?

          Haha yep, the installer could be the Debian installer from a parallel universe. I like it.

          So the docs are in subversion, and the core OS has one updater, and there's a binary package system, and the ports system, or you can install stuff by hand, sounds crazy but apparently they "work together" well enough. So far I have done Nothing with ports at all. All packages. On my to do list.

          I've had to build some Xorg stuff from ports to get a dual screen setup working with the Radeon driver on 10.0. I think this has since been fixed but I had to admit that I still have a bit of a mess where I'm not entirely sure how to keep track of binary packages and ports that have been manually compiled.

          I haven't gone ZFS yet.

          Last time I used ZFS on FreeBSD I had some rather unfortunate stability issues which were AFAICT related to my machine not having enough RAM. I won't be doing any further such experiments until I have way more than 4 GB available.

          I found installing X to be really weird. You have to enable hal and dbus then install xorg, then you get "Elf Binary type 3" errors which means you need to load up the linux shim in order to load the linux nvidia driver which unfortunately my peculiar card requires. Isn't the BSD equiv of linux's /etc/modules baroque? So there's entries in /boot/defaults/loader.conf but you override them in /boot/loader.conf, which is similar but different from /etc/rc.conf (isn't everything conceptually supposed to be in /etc/rc.conf... except for what isnt?)

          I haven't had any "Elf Binary type 3" issues but then I'm not using the nvidia drivers. The stuff with loader.conf takes some getting used to and I still haven't mastered it (i.e. I have no idea how to debug it).

          But windows style "you've installed a mouse, you need to reboot" type BS... Grrr.

          Haven't had that but it certainly sounds annoying. I did have to restart X at some point when messing with a mouse (on a different machine) though, seems a bit less smooth than on Linux.

          Speaking of XDM you manually edit /etc/ttys to turn it "on". Really, freebsd? Really?

          Hmm, I think I just installed "slim" which did all that for me.

          As far as apps go, chromium was kinda dull, some WTF-ness about the sysctl kern-ipc.shm_allow_removed=1.

          Indeed, I still feel dirty whenever I have to set that. One of these days I'll have to lookup what it actually does :)

          • (Score: 2) by fnj on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:37PM

            by fnj (1654) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:37PM (#117755)

            I'm not entirely sure how to keep track of binary packages and ports that have been manually compiled

            Yes, this is a weakness. I had to compile postfix from ports because the binary package was compiled with stupid options. Then "pkg upgrade" will try to stomp on it if a newer binary package appears. What I did discover is that you can "pkg lock postfix" to prevent this. So now you can safely run "pkg upgrade" again. Until you "pkg unlock postfix", it will bypass any newer postfix packages.

            Hope this helps.

            • (Score: 2) by cockroach on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:43PM

              by cockroach (2266) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:43PM (#117758)

              Hope this helps.

              It does indeed, thank you!

          • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:26PM

            by cafebabe (894) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:26PM (#117776) Journal

            I still feel dirty whenever I have to set that. One of these days I'll have to lookup what it actually does :)

            I assumed that it relaxed security in relation to shared memory segments but I was wrong. It seems to hold shared memory segments open until the last process terminates. Effectively, it ignores shmctl(shmkey, IPC_RMID, 0);

            --
            1702845791×2
        • (Score: 2) by mechanicjay on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:36PM

          by mechanicjay (7) <reversethis-{gro ... a} {yajcinahcem}> on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:36PM (#117714) Homepage Journal

          I've just gotten a FreeBSD install running on my Thinkpad as well. Aside from a shit wireless card that's always been a little funny, even under Linux, it's all well. Takes a bit longer to boot than I might hope, but once it loads it's foolishly responsive, especially when I compare it to the Windows 7 install which still infests a partition on the machine.

          Looks like I can nab a standard Thinkpad 5100 wireless card off fleabay for under $10, so that should be a quick easy fix.

          My last serious go at FreeBSD was on a G4 PowerBook a couple of years ago. I ended up giving up and reinstalling OSX since video performance was abysmal. I think that was 9.x.

          At any rate, my current FreeBSD experiment is designed to get some good experience with it. I moved all my stuff to linode in preparation for moving last month, when I get into a permanent place, I'm pretty set rebuilding my basement server as a FreeBSD box.

          I think I feel my neckbeard getting longer

          --
          My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:14PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:14PM (#117624)

      Might as well sell your Linux trademark to Red Hat. Fool.

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:26PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:26PM (#117636)

        I do hold Linus partially responsible for this. He should have come out very strongly against systemd. His opinion carries a lot of weight. By not using it in this case, where the only thing any sane person can say is that systemd is awfully flawed technology unsuitable for use, I think he helped contribute to the destruction of Debian. The beneficial contributions he has made to the open source community have been degraded by him not speaking out against systemd, in my opinion.

        • (Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:53PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:53PM (#117652)

          torvalds isn't an ignorant fool like the multitudes of systemd hater-tards out there

          he will also not suffer fools lightly

          systemd isn't the end of the world for linux any more than xorg or dbus was

          on the flipside, systemd might end up being the best trick they could ever have come up with to flush the deadwood out of the community, so to all you blind systemd haters out there... fuck off and go bitch on the windows and osx forums... your lack of positive contribution will not be missed

          • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:34PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:34PM (#117681)

            So you are right and everyone not agreeing is wrong. Nice, i bet your contributions are awesome.

          • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:54PM

            by tangomargarine (667) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:54PM (#117725)

            Because what any technical community needs is to jettison the skeptics, sure.

            --
            "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
        • (Score: 3, Informative) by choose another one on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:20PM

          by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:20PM (#117750)

          I do hold Linus partially responsible for this. He should have come out very strongly against systemd. His opinion carries a lot of weight. By not using it in this case,

          Um, Linus _does_ use systemd, doesn't dislike it, and is on record as saying that. He obviously isn't going to come out strongly against it because he thinks it is good enough to use, but he has restricted his public opinions to that and not come out strongly in support of it either.

          http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/65402-torvalds-says-he-has-no-strong-opinions-on-systemd [itwire.com]

          • (Score: 2) by fnj on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:42PM

            by fnj (1654) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:42PM (#117757)

            That's why linux is doomed. BSD for me.

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by choose another one on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:46PM

      by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:46PM (#117650)

      I think the dark days were the multiple resignations resulting from the way the debate has been carried out, including personal and physical threats against people. I don't care which side such things are coming from but, to me, people being threatened away from working on FOSS is a lot darker than _any_ technical decision.

      The vote result may be good from that point of view - a massive majority against FD and clear support for the process working as it already is. It's not a split or close vote like the TC, and again that is good - it's not going to split Debian in two.

      None of this takes away your choice of init system - one of Joey Hess's pre-resignation posts made it clear that the init system package maintainers were working together in consensus to maintain choice of init system. Assuming they haven't all been driven away by threats now, that is very reassuring (less good is that Joey seemed to feel that the GR was stomping all over that consensus way of working).

      Dependencies don't take away your choice of init, though they might create consequences from it, and they aren't created by package maintainers either - the maintainers job (surely?) is to assess and document the dependencies that are already there from upstream. Blaming maintainers or Debian as a whole for dependencies introduced elsewhere is just shooting the messenger. Indeed, I think the GR could conceivably have lead Debian into demise - if Gnome devs make it irreversibly dependent on systemd, and KDE does the same, and maybe the other desktops too, where would that leave Debian if the GR had passed, without a desktop, as a headless server-only distribution ?

      The way it is, if Gnome requires systemd then Gnome users can still use Debian and non-systemd users can still use Debian, the only restriction is that you can't use Gnome and not-systemd, but that will be the same for every distribution so Debian continues to give you as much choice as possible. Under the GR as far as I can see if Gnome becomes irreversibly dependent on systemd then it would have to be dropped from Debian, thus reducing choice.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:29PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:29PM (#117780)

        There will be no choice. Every time systemd proponents assure us that they would NEVER do something, they then do it. If debian or other large distros don't maintain a system which works without systemd, it will soon be almost entirely unworkable.

        People weren't driven away by threats, they were driven away by bureaucracy, mostly. The dark days started when Debian thought GNOME3 should go in stable. Remember how long they had KDE3 in stable because KDE4 was buggy? Several years after slackware, even. The quality has been diving for some time and they just informed us that they will not be slowing down that trainwreck.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:49PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:49PM (#118138)

          Every time systemd proponents assure us that they would NEVER do something, they then do it.

          I didn't know the reborn Walter Ulbricht [the-berlin-wall.com] develops systemd. ;-)

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @11:55AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @11:55AM (#117597)

    NetBSD sysupgrade reminds me of the old Debian installers that just unpacked the base system from a tarball, before they started that bullshit of installing every individual base package separately.

    The only reason I stopped using NetBSD was binary upgrades really sucked. Well you know, with sysupgrade and pkgin they don't fucking suck anymore.

    Goodbye Linux. It wasn't nice knowing you, bitch.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:53PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:53PM (#117691)

      Yep.

      Linux has been sucking ass for years now, maybe System D was the tipping point for some folks, but let's not forget some of the classics:

      xinetd
      rpmfind.net
      *kits
      dbus
      apparmor
      selinux
      upstart
      GNOME
      whoopsie
      avahi
      pulseaudio

      ...and probably a dozen other abominations...

      It's high time to get out.

  • (Score: 2) by jbernardo on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:50PM

    by jbernardo (300) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:50PM (#117612)

    Interestingly, the winning vote was for stopping any further discussion of init systems.
    With the 4 resignations just before the vote blaming the discussion for their decision, it seems that the victimisation technique worked for the acolytes, even if it was mostly received with laughter when the prophet tried it and attacked all Linux community.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:09PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:09PM (#117621)

      Can you name names here? Who do you see as the "victims" and "acolytes" and the "prophet" in this case?

      The only victims I see are all of us Debian refugees who have been unexpectedly forced to move to FreeBSD or Slackware with almost no notice. We've been shit upon repeatedly during this whole debacle.

      At least the outcome of this farce of a vote makes me glad that all of my systems will be running FreeBSD 10.1 by the end of this upcoming weekend. I want nothing to do with Debian now. It's a joke project.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by cafebabe on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:54PM

    by cafebabe (894) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:54PM (#117614) Journal

    In a month when two decade old bugs were found in Windows and bash, you'd expect people to have enough foresight to see that they'll be finding systmemd security [seclists.org] flaws [seclists.org] for the next two decades. Not using symlinks, shell scripts and/or globbing to boot a system does not change the fact that symlinks, shell scripts and globbing still exists [soylentnews.org] but is certainly a method to introduce new problems. Specifically, reducing boot time by a faction of a second has caused considerable reduction in reliability and security and has greatly increased the coupling of components. However, anyone who notes this supposedly hates [google.com] disabled people [youtube.com].

    --
    1702845791×2
  • (Score: 1) by boltronics on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:17PM

    by boltronics (580) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:17PM (#117627) Homepage Journal

    Now I'm going to have to switch distros again. I guess I had a good run with Debian, but I'm not going to stay with a distro that doesn't care about what the users want. I usually expect that crap from proprietary software projects, so I'm just amazed this is happening.

    From having used GNOME since the pre 1.x days and having to switch to XFCE a few years back, to Mozilla supporting H.264 support (but only for operating systems that already licensed the codec) and other very questionable decisions, and now to this - the last few years haven't been great for what was once some of the most popular and well respected free software projects.

    --
    It's GNU/Linux dammit!
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:29PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:29PM (#117638)

      Don't even bother with Linux. Consider moving to FreeBSD. They're much further away from the insanity that has caused so many problems in the Linux world.

    • (Score: 2) by canopic jug on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:12PM

      by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:12PM (#117663) Journal

      On the server side of things, you still have Debian/kFreeBSD. You wouldn't have many changes to migrate to that. However, for the desktop/notebook or embedded systems you are SOL unless FreeBSD supports your hardware, either raw FreeBSD or processed as Debian/kFreeBSD or PC-BSD. OpenBSD is another option, for some hardware, but because of the tight support lifecycle, you would be looking at upgrades/reinstalls every year.

      --
      Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:18PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:18PM (#117703)

        There was a submission here a few weeks ago about how kFreeBSD will likely be ended soon, thanks to systemd.

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by Marand on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:08PM

      by Marand (1081) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:08PM (#117768) Journal

      Now I'm going to have to switch distros again. I guess I had a good run with Debian, but I'm not going to stay with a distro that doesn't care about what the users want. I usually expect that crap from proprietary software projects, so I'm just amazed this is happening.

      I'm not giving up on using Debian just yet. It still has systemd separated, so you only run it as init if you install systemd-sysv, and can instead install systemd-shim if something else on the system needs to use the other parts of systemd (like systemd-logind). That means it's possible to pin systemd-sysv to -1 priority and not have to worry about abrupt init and logging system changes, which is what I did.

      I created a file (name doesn't matter, but I used nosystemd) in /etc/apt/preferences.d/ with the following contents:

      Package: systemd-sysv
      Pin: release o=Debian
      Pin-Priority: -1

      With that in place, systemd-sysv can't be installed, so the worst that will happen is an update will try to install systemd-shim instead and you'll get the parts of systemd that the desktop bits (upower, policykit, etc) want without changing your init or logging. With that done it's just another annoying dbus/hal/etc layer of bullshit and is mostly harmless.

      (Another note for anyone upgrading from wheezy: you'll want to install sysvinit-core before doing the full update because of the old sysvinit package becoming a transitional one)

      I don't really like the situation, but it's still better than most distros and I'm not ready to jump ship to BSD yet. Ubuntu purged sysvinit a while back in favour of upstart and others are doing the same thing for systemd now. Debian still gives you some choice in the matter in a way that's reasonably flexible, so I'm taking a "wait and see" approach for now.

      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday November 19 2014, @10:11PM

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 19 2014, @10:11PM (#117873) Journal

        What I decided to do was revert from testing to stable...i.e. Wheezy. What I'll do when support for Wheezy ends I haven't yet decided...and don't plan to decide for awhile.

        --
        Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
        • (Score: 2) by Marand on Wednesday November 19 2014, @11:23PM

          by Marand (1081) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @11:23PM (#117898) Journal

          That could be a good choice for some, though it wouldn't be great for me because I follow testing and use it like a rolling-release distro so that it's easier to cherry pick software from experimental, unstable, and Ubuntu PPAs. Stable gets too far behind Ubuntu so it's harder to keep the PPAs working.

          Except for a bit of a shock when Debian first tried to dump systemd on me, and a brief burp when there was a bad dependency (it got fixed; that's what testing is like sometimes), it hasn't really been a problem. There are only a couple things that attempt to install systemd*, and they're desktop-specific bits, so for servers it's a non-issue right now. For desktops the parts that you lose don't prevent you from running a desktop, just some convenience bits. (Unless you use GNOME, at least, but if you use GNOME you've probably already accepted the systemd overlords)

          I kept systemd completely off my system for a while, but then decided to give the non-init parts a fair shot. Installed the shim, blocked systemd-sysv, and let the the desktop-friendly bits do their thing. Figured it'd be easy enough to remove if it becomes problematic, and since my gripes with systemd (from a technical perspecive) are mostly with the init and logging, I had no issue with giving the other parts a chance.

          So far, barring some really minor annoyances, the logind+shim haven't been a problem. It makes crap like upower and udisks happy, neuters most of systemd, and basically turns systemd into another dbus-esque abstraction that I ignore unless something goes wrong. Meanwhile, my old-fashioned init and syslog processes just keep doing what they've been doing for years.

          As long as the systemd-shim package is maintained we're probably okay, and it seems there are still people in Debian that care enough about it, so there's some hope.

          * By "systemd" I mean the actual systemd processes, not the libs that other apps have as dependencies so they can use systemd if it exists. That crap is harmless, and even my wheezy-using laptop has had them installed forever. Without systemd installed they're just a few megabytes of wasted disk space that do nothing.

          • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday November 20 2014, @08:01PM

            by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 20 2014, @08:01PM (#118225) Journal

            OK. But I have one system, so it's both a desktop and a server. Until I'm assured that systemd won't cause problems, I'm just going to avoid it, and everything linked to it. Since my system *is* a desktop as well as a server, well...

            The question, really, is "Is systemd actually a desirable way to go?". I haven't encountered anything that makes me say yes, so I don't want to commit to it. Particularly as it seems to be an increasingly intrusive and entangling system. I don't mind building things from source, though. (Well, most things.) If I must, I can cut my main system off from the internet and communicate intermittently through a laptop, but that would be much less desirable than finding some better way. But stable is good enough, so there's no hurry. And maybe I'll even be convinced that its a good idea.

            --
            Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
            • (Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday November 20 2014, @09:59PM

              by Marand (1081) on Thursday November 20 2014, @09:59PM (#118264) Journal

              Yeah, I totally get that. I use a VPS for stuff I need up reliably, and for home stuff it doesn't matter much if I mix desktop+server bits because if the desktop is down I've got bigger concerns than worrying about mpd or my LAN-only httpd not running. I can afford to experiment a bit. Though I still refuse to let systemd become init, and I'm going to continue to refuse to do that for as long as possible.

              I don't necessarily think systemd's a great way to go, but neither was HAL, which is why it ended up superseded eventually. Meanwhile I'm just going to hold out as long as possible using sysv init, and if I start having issues with the non-init side of systemd (right now the only part that seems to run is logind, so the annoyance is minimal) I'll just throw it out and deal with clunkier USB storage mounting.

              Either way -- sticking with stable or using shim -- the idea's same. The situation isn't exactly dire yet, so it's a bit premature to be freaking out and switching to BSD. By the time it gets to that point, the entire landscape could change again. That's what happened not long after I finally got forced into using HAL. "Damn I'm stuck with it now. Oh look it's deprecated, yay" :)

      • (Score: 2) by melikamp on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:30AM

        by melikamp (1886) on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:30AM (#117979) Journal
        You actually sound like a sane normal person caught amid a giant foodfight full of rotten tomatos. Looks like everyone decided to overreact at the same time. It's not like wheezy will ever switch, and wheezy is good to go for a couple of years at least, and more on servers, which is the use case everyone is crying about. Why all the panic and the message of doom? Anti-systemd crowd likes to point at the refuge of Slackware, but Slackware is the distro where the user is expected to pick up the slack. Don't like the systemd? Well roll your own distro, right? Fork something. While some posters whail and tear their clothes, others are forking udev. No serious userland application (and that includes all servers) will ever tie itself to init, because their respective developers are not insane. So SUPPOSE we loose Gnome, that's one environment among half a dozen by now, and not a very good one. The doom will simply fail to materialize. systemd will proceed to become more sane, reliable, and unixlike if that's what works. Alternative inits will continue to exist. I will continue to use (deblobbed) Slackware and chew gum, and at this point I really don't care which init I end up with, as long as it works. The more I read about the technical differences between systemd and more traditional shell-driven inits, the more I am convinced none of this is really a big deal. It only becomes that when people take their emotional response to the forums.
        • (Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday November 20 2014, @06:09AM

          by Marand (1081) on Thursday November 20 2014, @06:09AM (#118011) Journal

          I might sound sane and normal about it right now, but if systemd-shim vanishes for some reason, I can guarantee that I'll be frothing at the mouth along with rest over it. Nearly all of my systemd complaints are about the init, logging, and the shitty, politically-charged adoption. Using the shim lets me avoid two of the three, and the third doesn't affect me in day-to-day use. I've already said a fair bit about Poettering, Sievers, and the pushy, rushed adoption of systemd already in other threads, so there isn't much point revisiting the complaints, but it's still a sore point with me. Still, that's not reason enough by itself to flee to BSD when Ubuntu and Debian have worked around some of the brain damage with the shim package.

          One potential fear with systemd, and one I do agree with, is that Poettering, Sievers, and co. are using their influence in so many pieces of Linux software to unfairly tie everything together in a way that will make systemd unavoidable. It's a sleazy tactic and it's pretty obvious it's really happening. Pulseaudio depends on systemd now. udev is folded into systemd. NetworkManager requires systemd now. udisks and upower (which I believe Poettering has been involved in) need systemd. Probably some more but I can't think of what else.

          Another is that distros will stop providing non-systemd start/stop scripts after systemd becomes the default, effectively making non-systemd impossible. I think this is a legitimate concern, but not necessarily a serious one, because someone that's serious about using an alternate init will be willing (and hardcore enough) to make their own init scripts or whatever. Someone might even rig up a systemd-to-sysv script generator of some kind to serve as a starting point.

          All said, I do think the systemd problem is a fairly big deal, but I don't think it's going to destroy Debian or Linux. Like you said, there are enough sane users and devs around that eventually, even if systemd ends up ubiquitous, it'll get tempered into something less insane. The real problem is the sleazy and suspicious way the whole thing has happened, and I have a feeling that's where a lot of the vitriol and emotion comes from. There's a huge backlash here because people feel cornered, forced into something abruptly. Hell, Debian's normal decision-making could reasonably be compared to an Entmoot, but not with systemd. Just for a comparison, I think systemd may have made its way from newcomer to default faster than Debian switched from KDE 3.5 to KDE 4.x

      • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:36AM

        by cafebabe (894) on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:36AM (#117980) Journal

        This approach is not sufficient because behavior remains dangerous. For example, it does not prevent an ancillary service from being too trusting [soylentnews.org].

        --
        1702845791×2
        • (Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday November 20 2014, @05:21AM

          by Marand (1081) on Thursday November 20 2014, @05:21AM (#118000) Journal

          This approach is not sufficient because behavior remains dangerous. For example, it does not prevent an ancillary service from being too trusting.

          I'm not entirely sure about that. Systemd is split up into a bunch of different pieces, and right now because of the shim, the only piece that seems to be necessary for desktop components is systemd-logind. As best I can tell, my system isn't making much (if any) use of the other systemd "modules" or whatever you want to call them. systemd-login and systemd-shim are the only persistent processes, and everything else is either completely unused or only being exec'd briefly just like any other program, so they're subject to the same security concerns as any other process doing the same jobs.

          There are still good arguments that can be made about various pieces of systemd not being mature enough yet, but it's far less of an issue when they're just another set of processes that get run, rather than the init and logging being new and untested. As long as systemd-shim remains supported and doing what it's doing, systemd's a lot more tolerable, at least to me, because you get some of those purported systemd benefits (for desktops mostly), without being forced to deal with the contentious parts like binary logs and your desktop forcing you into a specific init.

          ...Doesn't mean I like it, though. It's just not particularly more offensive than hal or dbus in this neutered form, so I'm taking it cautiously for now and waiting to see where Debian (and Linux in general) goes with it.

          • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Thursday November 20 2014, @06:02AM

            by cafebabe (894) on Thursday November 20 2014, @06:02AM (#118009) Journal

            I do not want systemd, systemd-shim or a modular re-implementation of systemd. And that was before inexcusable issues such as the DNS cache ignoring recommendations in RFC5452.

            I think you are vastly underestimating the scale of problems in systemd and I ask you to consider how many times you are prepared to be burned.

            --
            1702845791×2
            • (Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday November 20 2014, @06:25AM

              by Marand (1081) on Thursday November 20 2014, @06:25AM (#118018) Journal

              Meh. I don't want systemd, but I also didn't want HAL or dbus, either. Especially HAL, which was extremely fragile and fraught with problems for a very long time. I got stuck with them too, and learned to deal with it. I especially hated udev, because the initial adoption was a mess and broke a lot of things I had carefully set up, but nowadays it's actually a pretty useful thing. As long as it's not the init and not forcing its own DNS and other bullshit, I can deal with it being another lame dbus/HAL piece of shit that will eventually become more mature. (Maybe one day it'll even become a useful piece of shit like udev eventually did, but I wouldn't take those odds.)

              Right now thanks to the shim package, it's doing almost nothing on my system, and I can tolerate that. If it annoys me enough despite that, I can safely remove it and only lose some convenience stuff. I can tolerate that option, too. No reason to jump ship to BSD just yet, and definitely no reason to switch away from Debian when the alternatives don't even have the shim, making them less flexible than Debian regarding systemd.

              If/when something happens to change the landscape further, I'll worry about switching to something else. Right now it would be premature.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 21 2014, @01:49PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 21 2014, @01:49PM (#118473)

      It's NOT GNU/Linux any more - now it's GNU/systemd/Linux
      Get it right!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:21PM (#117630)

    With the Debian packaging, Linux became "modern" (for those of us coming from Slackware). Back to the ancient tar balls, then. Might as well fiddle with FreeBSD, too.

    • (Score: 1) by SlackStone on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:31PM

      by SlackStone (815) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:31PM (#117641) Homepage

      All good things must come to an end. I always figured two things would hold up, the GPL and Debian. I've got so much love for Debian, it makes this painful and sad to watch play out. It'll be curious to see what distro gets the energy bump from players jumping ship.

      Yep - Damn Shame

      • (Score: 2) by CoolHand on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:18PM

        by CoolHand (438) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:18PM (#117702) Journal

        I agree... I've VERY disappointed in DEBIAN. I thought they would ALWAYS put FREE (not as in beer) software values and choice for their users as a priority. It saddens me that they have come to this. I'm out. Already have gone to PC-BSD on my main desktop from Siduction, and looking at options on my laptops and home pc to replace Mint. (unfortunately since I've invested in Steam for Linux heavily lately, that complicates things)

        --
        Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
        • (Score: 2) by cockroach on Wednesday November 19 2014, @04:14PM

          by cockroach (2266) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @04:14PM (#117734)

          Ironic how Debian might be the new Windows - you need to keep it around for the Games ;)

          • (Score: 2) by CoolHand on Wednesday November 19 2014, @04:52PM

            by CoolHand (438) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @04:52PM (#117747) Journal

            True 'dat, brother..
            I'm also having to run a debian based virtual machine on my PC-BSD desktop for web browsing so I can easily get true JAVA client support for several things that I'm required to use at work. (there may be a few more native solutions but they seemed to be quite complicated and I haven't had time yet to make the attempt)

            --
            Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
            • (Score: 1) by linuxrocks123 on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:02PM

              by linuxrocks123 (2557) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:02PM (#117765) Journal

              FreeBSD docs say icedtea-web should work. And FreeBSD has a Linux kernel emulation mode that should work for web browsing even if that doesn't. I'd look into it again if I were you unless you've already ruled all those options out.

              • (Score: 2) by CoolHand on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:27PM

                by CoolHand (438) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:27PM (#117778) Journal
                icedtea-web does not work... I believe the Linux kernel emulation was the other option at which I was looking, but there was some bugaboo with 32bit vs 64 bit, and it just sounded messy, and since I had umpteen other conversion issues and ton of real work to get finished, I quit there. I will revisit it someday..
                --
                Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Pav on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:34PM

    by Pav (114) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @01:34PM (#117646)

    You can't have a community based project that rides roughshod over half that community... the community is the engine that makes things possible! If the new constitution is so caustic I can understand people quitting over it. No matter if you liked this particular decision or not, it was made too soon and has badly damaged the community. This has engaged people from much further afield than just registered Debian developers. People CARE about this. Imagine what a couple of years of furious put-up or shut-up time could have achieved - the number of brains willing to spend concentrated time on this problem RIGHT NOW is huge! This could have been (and perhaps could still be) an opportunity to create something great, and if cooperation was extended to the BSD world it could have even closed the great SysV/BSD init divide with something considered genuinely better by most. That would save so much dev time in the long term.

    • (Score: 2) by CRCulver on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:02PM

      by CRCulver (4390) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:02PM (#117655) Homepage

      You can't have a community based project that rides roughshod over half that community... the community is the engine that makes things possible!

      A few Debian devs so far have said that the engine that makes things possible is developers, and if the developers chose a tool that makes life easier for them, the uncontributing community has no right to demand they use something else instead.

      I oppose systemd myself and will probably move from Debian, but you can't force people to use a technical solution they don't like.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:05PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:05PM (#117657)

        you had me at "uncontributing community has no right to demand"

        • (Score: 2) by CRCulver on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:47PM

          by CRCulver (4390) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:47PM (#117720) Homepage
          To be clear, by "uncontributing community" I do not mean to employ that the whole Debian community does not contribute. Many Debian users file bugs, contribute patches and help move development along. I mean only that some portion of the community only use the distro and do not contribute back, and certain Debian developers find it offensive for that portion to be so demanding about technical decisions.
          • (Score: 2) by emg on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:21PM

            by emg (3464) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:21PM (#117751)

            Which is exactly the problem.

            Devs say 'I'm gonna do X, it's shiny and cool!'
            Users say 'WTF? I don't want X, what the hell are you thinking?'
            Devs say 'STFU, you're just a user, I know what's best for you.'

            And the users don't respond, because they' just moved to a different distro.

            This has been happening far too much in Linux lately, as more and more devs think they're the next Steve Jobs.

          • (Score: 2) by fnj on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:53PM

            by fnj (1654) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:53PM (#117762)

            But there is no goddam use for the thing except for the user community. It would be just a shiny monument if nobody used it. And those users do not have to "contribute" to be the only reason that the distro exists. It is gratuitously disgusting to suggest that "non-contributors" do not matter. If the users want X and those in the ivory tower only deign to provide Y, sorry, those in the ivory tower are assholes.

            OTOH obviously you can't please everybody all the time. In due course we shall see whether the distro has jumped the shark or continues to flourish.

            • (Score: 2) by CRCulver on Thursday November 20 2014, @05:30AM

              by CRCulver (4390) on Thursday November 20 2014, @05:30AM (#118002) Homepage

              But there is no goddam use for the thing except for the user community.

              Free Software in general has long been developed by people to scratch a need of their own, not to selflessly serve some unknown mass of people out there. Many Debian developers probably got involved in Linux for such a reason. Thus even if some group of uncontributing users get pissed off at the developers, so what? The technology already works for the developers.

              Indeed, those of us who are leaving Debian because of systemd are moving to distros where we probably will have to be quite hands-on to make it fit our needs, and maybe contribute a few patches and bug reports back to automate that tweaking. Will we do all that because we want to serve the world? No, we'll do it because we had to meet our own needs.

              If the users want X and those in the ivory tower only deign to provide Y, sorry, those in the ivory tower are assholes.

              No, this is a case of conflicting needs, not one party being an asshole. Users (some users, let's not overestimate the amount of people who are passionate about systemd) want one tool they think makes their life easier, while developers want another tool that they think makes their life easier. The correct thing in such a case is for the Debian population to split up. Hopefully the non-systemd-distros, once they get an influx of energetic new developers, will fare well enough to avoid systemd in the long term. I am sure that Debian will continue to do just fine.

      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:28PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:28PM (#117672)

        You can product tie to wedge stuff no one wants into place. Thats how we got systemd today instead of decade ago when it was technically possible but no one wanted it. The innovation of systemd is combining "nobody wants gnome but nobody wants to get rid of it" with "maybe we could product tie our project with gnome, using it to force us in"

        Two other issues. Devs have never been king of their castle. If the FTPmasters don't like the license (usually because the dev totally Fed up documenting it) then its not going in. Or if you insist on not following Policy, out it goes, the easy way or the hard way. Or if you insist on not following the social contract / constitution, if someone wants to enforce that (not this time) then the dev is out. And there's a common sense machine usage policy (like no turning your private file space into a warez site or spamming) and a couple other rules.

        Its mythological that the dev gets to be a tyrant over all the rest of humanity. systemd upstream actually thinks that way. Devs in general do not, and when they screw up its mostly honest ignorance or philosophical disagreement, or they haven't thought thru false assumptions, or occasionally I believe their paycheck is what is doing the talking although thats quite rare. Truely crazy debian devs are pretty rare. Upstream, maybe not so rare.

  • (Score: 2) by fnj on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:30PM

    by fnj (1654) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:30PM (#117673)

    To all the people flying off the handle: I understand the frustration, (I in fact share it), but I'm going to set all that aside and ask: are you sure this means what you think it means?

    One way to interpret the decision is to see it as "WTF? How is this even a problem?". Let me explain just a tad. For the sysadmin crowd at the center of controversy, Debian is a server OS. Now the only packages that depend on systemd are a bunch of cruft that nobody of competence would install on a server in the first place. Gnome is the only one I can think of at the moment. If you're not going to install Gnome, just customize your installation to remove systemd and substitute the init system of your choice. Presto. You're cooking with gas.

    Now, this sidesteps the long term "creeping tentacles" issue, and correct me if I'm wrong, but as of right now, and as of Debian 8, how does the present situation mandate that in order to avoid systemd, anybody HAS to jump ship NOW? Yes, systemd avoiders will have to develop the exact procedure to keep systemd out, and yes, that may become more and more difficult with time as systemd-itis spreads its tentacles into linux. Everybody has to make their own decision what to do and when to do it long term. But why right now?

    I have no issue with anyone abandoning Debian (and linux!) because of the direction it's drifting, but as I understand it, that is at this time more of a statement of principle than an actual necessity.

    • (Score: 2) by cockroach on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:14PM

      by cockroach (2266) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:14PM (#117700)

      Yes, systemd avoiders will have to develop the exact procedure to keep systemd out, and yes, that may become more and more difficult with time as systemd-itis spreads its tentacles into linux

      I've been thinking the same thing but eventually realized that rather than investing my time into a project which doesn't share my ideals (and permanently hacking my way around said project's idea of an init system) I would probably be happier if I just went somewhere else. There are alternatives and I think it makes sense to support them.

      • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday November 19 2014, @04:08PM

        by tangomargarine (667) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @04:08PM (#117732)

        I'm going to go out on a limb and say maybe you've switched from Firefox to Pale Moon? (genuinely curious)

        That was a pretty direct comparison I saw. I had a list of all the options to un-set in about:config, until the point where I realized you can't disable Australis via that route even (which had seemed to be a core Firefox set-in-stone guideline, that there was nothing you couldn't turn off via a:c). And yes, there's Classic Theme Restorer, but that isn't a complete solution either, so why not just leave for the sane-by-default option.

        --
        "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
        • (Score: 2) by cockroach on Wednesday November 19 2014, @04:17PM

          by cockroach (2266) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @04:17PM (#117736)

          Heh, I'm afraid I was speaking of Debian. I haven't tried Pale Moon yet, any good? I.e. does it sync, run on Linux / the BSDs etc?

          • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday November 19 2014, @04:49PM

            by tangomargarine (667) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @04:49PM (#117746)

            They have an "official unofficial" build for Linux, but I think the update process may be semi-manual on Linux.

            Haven't used sync myself so can't say on that front.

            --
            "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
    • (Score: 1) by Fauxlosopher on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:24PM

      by Fauxlosopher (4804) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:24PM (#117708) Journal

      how does the present situation mandate that in order to avoid systemd, anybody HAS to jump ship NOW?

      To turn your question around as an answer: why must those who see systemd as a sinking ship stick around? If systemd is seen as a critical flaw, then why spend any more time than necessary with an organization that does not share your goals?

      The more admins that jump ship now, the more options and support for the same may be available later.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:53PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:53PM (#117799)

        Debian worked superbly for decades without systemd.

        It's only within the past year that systemd has come along, and completely ruined Debian.

        Systemd is the problem. It is just a really big bug, basically. If systemd is removed, then the bug is fixed, and everything is good again.

        Systemd and its supporters should obviously be the ones to leave. They should move to using Fedora instead, and leave Debian alone.

        • (Score: 1) by Fauxlosopher on Thursday November 20 2014, @08:38AM

          by Fauxlosopher (4804) on Thursday November 20 2014, @08:38AM (#118045) Journal

          I agree that systemd is the problem, and that up until recently, Debian worked just fine. (Slackware and Debian are the two distros I've chosen to use most often.)

          The progression of events, including this most recent vote, appear to suggest that those who are actually holding Debian's reins do not agree with us, and that they desire that systemd be included in Debian going forward. The risk that I and others see is that systemd will soon cease to be an option, and will become mandatory. Combined with questionable-at-best design decisions such as binary logs, the justification offered to replace the entire init system is completely farsical. First-time init script setup admittedly can be a bit crufty in certain situations, but in those same situations, almost the entirety of the initial system configuration could be considered crufty - for that reason, others hire people like myself to take care of those systems for them, and for anyone with a modicum of familirarity with Linux basics, init script customization is so far down the list of annoyances as to not even register on the radar.

          To administrative "end users" like myself, systemd came out of nowhere to solve a problem that didn't exist and also created tremendous uncertainty in the process.

          Thus, the only obvious solution for those in my situation is to jettison Debian now, and focus on traditionalist Linux distributions... and/or investigate the BSDs.

    • (Score: 2) by jackb_guppy on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:12PM

      by jackb_guppy (3560) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:12PM (#117771)

      I am currently living with system lite in Ubuntu. Daily, I have 8 to 9 system errors in that wonderful thing. Been reporting bugs for months, to no avail. I am not going to stay on a broken function. I can not get it out, Ubuntu will not allow it. I was looking to go to Debain to get out of these and have a similar system, since Ubuntu was based on Debain. Now, Debian will have this same broken systemd install. I am done with this branch of Linux.

      I am also part of another distro, IPCop a firewall distro. No GUI. We are based on LFS. I am looking at going LFS, since Gentoo is also now broken from my home use (will not build anymore on 128MB system). So it is LFS or BSD. Prefer LFS since it is still in my wheel house. But I like the long term support and group sprit of large distro, so 'BSD maybe a the better way to go.

      • (Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:29PM

        by Arik (4543) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:29PM (#117781) Journal
        You should look at slack as well, it may offer a good middle ground that will work for you.
        --
        If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
        • (Score: 2) by arashi no garou on Wednesday November 19 2014, @07:32PM

          by arashi no garou (2796) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @07:32PM (#117814)

          I wholeheartedly second this. Slackware takes getting used to as there is zero dependency resolution, but (at least for me) that's a blessing in disguise as for one thing, I only end up with the packages I truly need, and two, I've learned a ton over the years about how GNU/Linux really works under the hood thanks to it. I've taken what I learned exploring Slackware and applied it to other distros like Arch and Debian, to fix issues there that would otherwise have required a lot of search-and-try sessions.

          As for installing software and libraries, you have the choice of using Slackware binary packages, rolling your own packages via Slackbuilds (highly recommended, and can be semi-automated via sbopkg), using a third party package manager like slapt-get which emulates Debian's apt system, or building and installing from source (also highly recommended, especially if you are interested in tweaking or patching the code before compiling/installing, or if there isn't an existing Slackbuild for that program).

          I don't know if Slackware will ever cave to the systemd cabal, but I highly doubt it. And if they ever do, well you can take a lot of what you learn in Slackware and apply it to LFS, Gentoo, and *BSD.

          • (Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday November 19 2014, @07:52PM

            by Arik (4543) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @07:52PM (#117823) Journal
            It is a blessing, and I never thought it was in disguise. When I first heard about the .deb concept my reaction was 'that actually sounds like a rather bad idea' and while I respect Debian and have used it on occasion where it was a good fit for the job, I still think all the automagical package stuff is a misfeature. Debs arent as brittle as RPMs in practice but the whole system is just a mass of unnecessary complexity to solve 'problems' that have never bothered me.

            I also agree it seems highly unlike Mr Volkerding will ever package systemd. He was way ahead of the crowd in saying no to GNOME and PAM and we thank him for it.
            --
            If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
    • (Score: 2) by RedBear on Thursday November 20 2014, @04:39AM

      by RedBear (1734) on Thursday November 20 2014, @04:39AM (#117995)

      Now, this sidesteps the long term "creeping tentacles" issue, and correct me if I'm wrong, but as of right now, and as of Debian 8, how does the present situation mandate that in order to avoid systemd, anybody HAS to jump ship NOW? Yes, systemd avoiders will have to develop the exact procedure to keep systemd out, and yes, that may become more and more difficult with time as systemd-itis spreads its tentacles into linux. Everybody has to make their own decision what to do and when to do it long term. But why right now?

      If you know the captain of the boat you're on just suddenly decided to change course and will end up eventually arriving at a destination you have no interest in going to, it's a hell of a lot easier to jump ship when it's still at the dock, or just about to leave the harbor. You describe in this paragraph the very reason for leaving Debian right now.

      The biggest problem with systemd is that it continues to be a giant, two-handed up-yours to what were some of the most zealous and talented Linux advocates and developers. Whether or not it is technically superior to anything no longer matters. It must be abandoned, or those who dislike it will simply keep abandoning Linux wholesale. Seems the latter is what will be the primary outcome of this upheaval.

      --
      ¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
      ... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by zugedneb on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:31PM

    by zugedneb (4556) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:31PM (#117677)

    Option 1 "Packages may not (in general) require a specific init system"

    Can someone explain, in a technical manner, why this was not desired?

    --
    old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:44PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:44PM (#117686)

      It was and is desired. Systemd, however, is not an init system. It is a cancer.

      Proponents cannot point out the former without revealing the truth of the latter.

    • (Score: 2) by tibman on Wednesday November 19 2014, @08:39PM

      by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 19 2014, @08:39PM (#117839)

      A daemon/service should not require init source code in order to build itself. Init should not require the daemon source in order to build. They should both be capable of building without knowing about each other. An optional intermediary that understands the daemon and the init can be used by the init system to start the daemon. That intermediary is usually a configuration file and/or script that the init understands. It depends on both the init system and the daemon. This allows you to use the same service with various init systems. The only thing required to make the service function with a new init is a new intermediary. The developers of the daemon/service don't even have to know about the new init system. They don't care about init systems, they care about their service. Usually a distro package manager would care about such things.

      An alternative is the service developer using defines that can be toggled on and off at build time. So it becomes possible for a service to optionally depend on a specific init/library. This allows for the developer to directly support functioning with a foreign project but still allow the service to function if that foreign project dies, is forked, or becomes deprecated.

      If you tie yourself to a foreign project then you tie yourself to its fate. If you want your software to continue functioning no mater what happens with the rapidly fluctuating open source ecology then you need to minimize hard dependencies.

      --
      SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by FatPhil on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:42PM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:42PM (#117683) Homepage
    I consider both "1" and "2" to be anti-total-systemd-dominance stances

    https://vote.debian.org/~secretary/gr_initcoupling/tally.txt

    #!/usr/bin/perl -w

    while(<>) {
            my ($a1,$a2,$b) = ($_ =~ m/V: (.)(.).(.)./) or next;
            if ($a1 eq '-'){$a1=6;}
            if ($a2 eq '-'){$a2=6;}
            if ($b eq '-'){$b=6;}
            my ($min,$max) = $a1<$a2 ? ($a1,$a2) : ($a2,$a1);
            if($b<=$max and $b>=$min) { print; }
    }

    phil@bazspaz:~/tmp$ perl tally.pl < tally.txt | wc
              90 457 3634
    phil@bazspaz:~/tmp$ wc tally.txt
        483 2450 19433 tally.txt

    So nearly a fifth of the vote had "4" (keep head in sand) separating "1" and "2". I've not got a condorcet calculator, but if you replaced "1" and "2" with preferred("1","2"), I have a feeling the outcome would have been different. In particular as it was fairly close.

    It's easy to say it was gerrymandered that way, but if the "1" and "2" preferrers aren't smart enough to see that they have more in common than they do with the enemy, then they deserve to lose.

    And I'll join the masses now in ex-Debian Diaspora. It's getting harder and harder to find an OS which supports my hardware, my philosophy, and my way of working.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:51PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:51PM (#117690)

      Yes, the sophistry can be avoided and the questions can be more accurately stated.

      1. Systemd as the only init with packages depending on its bundled payload
      2. Systemd as an availiable init with no packages depending on its bundled payload
      3. Do not care

      That is the situation and it seems option 2 would have won that one eh?

      • (Score: 2) by gringer on Wednesday November 19 2014, @07:34PM

        by gringer (962) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @07:34PM (#117815)

        Your option 1 is closest to Option 3 "Packages may require specific init systems if maintainers decide".
        Your option 2 is closest to Option 1 "Packages may not (in general) require a specific init system".
        Your option 3 is closest to Option 4 "General Resolution is not required".

        Bear in mind that the text for these options was bashed out and agreed upon by voters. Any one person may have a view of options that they think is better than the ones that are used, so the chosen options are necessarily a compromise.

        Because you include the apathy option, it wins over all others. There were no situtations in the vote where another option defeated option 4. Here are the fights for the closest matches to what you suggested:

            Option 3 defeats Option 1 by ( 263 - 183) = 80 votes.
            Option 4 defeats Option 1 by ( 323 - 147) = 176 votes.
            Option 4 defeats Option 3 by ( 308 - 135) = 173 votes.

        In the ordering, this would be 4 > 3 > 1, or using your numbers, 3 > 1 > 2. I find it doubtful that a re-wording of the options would change the ranking that much to put last place into first place.

        --
        Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]
    • (Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:07PM

      by opinionated_science (4031) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:07PM (#117698)

      I wondered about the voting options too. Opensuse has had systemd wrapped in init-scripts for a few years now. I don't have a problem with systemd, with the exception I don't like the binary blob logs. They should use zip like everyone else!!

      Anyway, we should remember the enemy is the non-FOSS proprietary industry that exists solely to lock-in consumers.

      I would hope well all remember this.

      • (Score: 2) by mechanicjay on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:53PM

        by mechanicjay (7) <reversethis-{gro ... a} {yajcinahcem}> on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:53PM (#117761) Homepage Journal

        Opensuse has had systemd wrapped in init-scripts for a few years now.

        Yes, 12.3 was okay, but 13.1 was basically broken because of it. With 13.2 they seem to have completed the transition to systemd, which is good as the init system is actually controllable now.

        I'm still torn on the whole thing, honestly. systemd is maturing and working better, which is good. I don't really have a good technical argument for or against it. It just breaks with the historic philosophy of doing one small thing well, and chaining together the tools, which is why I'm upset about it.

        A technical argument cannot overcome a philosophical divide, which I think is what this whole thing boils down to: People who have a philosophical objection to a tool like this, and those who don't. Unfortunately, this ends up with straw-man argument flame-wars, rather than keeping everyone happy and staying init system agnostic -- which baffles me.

        --
        My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
        • (Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:59PM

          by opinionated_science (4031) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:59PM (#117763)

          exactly - so long as it works i am not bothered. My only technical complaint about systemd it the opaque logs - maybe it is buried in a manual somewhere, but any log i cannot open with less/vi is broken.

          Logs are for humans - databases are for machines.

        • (Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday November 19 2014, @08:05PM

          by Arik (4543) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @08:05PM (#117826) Journal
          "I'm still torn on the whole thing, honestly. systemd is maturing and working better, which is good. I don't really have a good technical argument for or against it. It just breaks with the historic philosophy of doing one small thing well, and chaining together the tools, which is why I'm upset about it."

          You need to think on this more clearly. That historical philosophy is either important and should be followed for technical reasons (which I believe to be correct) or else it's not relevant at all here.

          You do one thing and do it well, because it's possible to verify a simple tool with a clearly defined role actually does what it's supposed to do, and not more, and doing that is the key to keeping a sane system that works as it should.

          You avoid designing monsters like systemd not for some disconnected 'philosophical' reason but because decades of experience show that monsters like that are impossible to do right. They are far too complicated to verify - too much code and too many code-paths. Too many pieces of it that will rarely be executed, where bugs can sit for years without being noticed.

          If systemd is still in use in 10 years, they will just be beginning to find the bugs they are writing today.
          --
          If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
          • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:57AM

            by cafebabe (894) on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:57AM (#117985) Journal

            You do one thing and do it well, because it's possible to verify a simple tool with a clearly defined role actually does what it's supposed to do, and not more, and doing that is the key to keeping a sane system that works as it should.

            As fairly well defined and protocol specific examples, some of problems in bind and Apache httpd have occurred due to the conflated role of serving authoritative data and caching data from other servers. Neither of these implementations are doing one thing well.

            --
            1702845791×2
    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:34PM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:34PM (#117713) Homepage
      V: 14532 iwj Ian Jackson

      So even IJ preferred the head in the sand approach to "Support for other init systems is recommended, but not mandatory".

      I like the guy, of all the big-name Debianites, he's probably one of the top 3 that I agree with most often, but if even he can't work out the consequences of such voting, then he's as naive as the other 89. He needs to watch /The People vs. Larry Flint/, and understand that in order to keep the small thing you want alive, you sometimes have to keep bigger things, not all of which you want, alive.

      And here's his resignation letter:
      """
      The majority of the project have voted to say that it was wrong of me
      to bring this GR at this time. Despite everything that's happened, I
      respectfully disagree.
      """

      And on that, I call bullshit. He put "the GR was wrong of me to call" *higher* than "Support for other init systems is recommended, but not mandatory".
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 2) by mechanicjay on Wednesday November 19 2014, @04:07PM

      by mechanicjay (7) <reversethis-{gro ... a} {yajcinahcem}> on Wednesday November 19 2014, @04:07PM (#117731) Homepage Journal

      Maybe I need more coffee this morning, but the results seem needlessly obfuscated with a results matrix. Did I miss where the raw vote count is?

      --
      My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
      • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday November 20 2014, @08:26AM

        by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday November 20 2014, @08:26AM (#118042) Homepage
        It's condorcet, there's no "simple" result.
        --
        Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Wednesday November 19 2014, @07:09PM

      by cafebabe (894) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @07:09PM (#117805) Journal

      So, the amendments split the vote? That's a lesson for the future.

      --
      1702845791×2
  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:59PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @02:59PM (#117693) Journal

    I am not a deep, Linux greybeard like some here. I started out on RedHat long ago and moved to Debian when it became obvious APT was a far superior package management system. Ubuntu was therefore a convenient transition, and when I switched to XFCE in later iterations to escape the Unity and Gnome3 nonsense my happiness continued unabated. Not having to spend days and weeks troubleshooting low-level aspects of my operating system is a plus for me, because I can spend more time working on my own software.

    So being on the edges of the systemd debate, I have heard mentions of the possibility of forking Debian. Is this serious? I would really like to know, because I don't want to get sucked into vendor-lock-in, especially if it's coming from RedHat. This would be my preference, because I am quite fond of APT and moving to BSD would be a serious drag.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
    • (Score: 2) by fnj on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:24PM

      by fnj (1654) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:24PM (#117707)

      I am quite fond of APT and moving to BSD would be a serious drag

      Re-examine your tenets. I happen to think yum after it matured was far superior to apt, but I had no problem migrating to FreeBSD. FreeBSD's pkg is fine.

      • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday November 19 2014, @08:23PM

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @08:23PM (#117832) Journal

        Ok, taken under advisement. Still hope debian forks, though. I had really enjoyed how widely supported and easy the distribution has been.

        --
        Washington DC delenda est.
      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday November 19 2014, @10:25PM

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 19 2014, @10:25PM (#117878) Journal

        I couldn't find any BSD that would handle a large ext4 filesystem, and I'm reluctant to make that large a change with no way back. So the BSD option seems to be out. I could convert to another file system that both BSD and Linux would handle, but I'm not aware of any that handle large file systems.

        --
        Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
        • (Score: 2) by fnj on Thursday November 20 2014, @12:50AM

          by fnj (1654) on Thursday November 20 2014, @12:50AM (#117923)

          AFAIK there is no single FS that is full read-write portable between linux and BSD except NTFS (NTFS-3g) (but problems with file ownership and modes) and (ugh, hack, spit) FAT. Since ZFSonLinux went full production-ready you can "sort of" add ZFS to that.

          I have no idea why there isn't a full UFS read-write on linux and a full ext2/3/4 read-write on FreeBSD, at least in fuse add-on form. I hate to say it, but not-invented-here seems to be the only reason on both sides.

          Of all of the above, FAT is the only one that is a first-class built-in FS on both sides. And it of course is a non-starter for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which being that it has no concept of file ownership or of file modes beyond trivial things like global read-only.

          • (Score: 2) by cafebabe on Thursday November 20 2014, @04:06AM

            by cafebabe (894) on Thursday November 20 2014, @04:06AM (#117990) Journal

            I have no idea why there isn't a full UFS read-write on linux and a full ext2/3/4 read-write on FreeBSD, at least in fuse add-on form. I hate to say it, but not-invented-here seems to be the only reason on both sides.

            There is a perfectly good reference implementation of UFS but it is under the wrong license. Likewise for Ext. This fragmentation of licenses also seems to be (one of many reasons) why GPL systemd was conceived rather than using Apache license launchd. Overall, the fragmentation of licenses (and languages) is causing a large amount of unnecessary work.

            --
            1702845791×2
            • (Score: 2) by fnj on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:03PM

              by fnj (1654) on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:03PM (#118119)

              Yet ZFS has a license that is not compatible with GPL, yet that in no way stopped ZFSonLinux from producing a first-class file system (basically I mean not fuse). So nobody can bring it into a distro, but that doesn't stop a package from being available and any user can just add that package to his own linux installation.

  • (Score: 1) by Gravis on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:04PM

    by Gravis (4596) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:04PM (#117696)

    attempts to excise the problem have failed. it seems like a good reason to fork.

    • (Score: 2) by fnj on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:20PM

      by fnj (1654) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:20PM (#117704)

      I found it much easier simply to adopt the far superior FreeBSD for server OS.

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:30PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:30PM (#117711)

    Notice how they're both very vocal and all over the place? It's probably because they're the same people...

    Yes, Debian did a bad decision and yes, there might be a conspiracy behind systemd and the Debian vote.

    But it's disgusting to see the BSD crowd trying to turn this into a marketing campaign.

    KINDLY CUT THE SHIT THANK YOU

    • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday November 19 2014, @04:14PM

      by tangomargarine (667) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @04:14PM (#117735)

      KINDLY CUT THE SHIT THANK YOU

      I think they have the exact same thing to say about systemd...

      --
      "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
  • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:38PM

    by tangomargarine (667) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @03:38PM (#117715)

    Do these Debian people *try* to make these votes as confusing as possible?

    If I'm interpreting this correctly, the only option that would actually stop systemd from sinking its tentacles into everything is the "NO FOAD" vote? Sounds like all the other options leave the door open that the tentacles are already flowing into. The level of "all or nothing" this whole debate has prompted is ridiculous.

    --
    "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
    • (Score: 2) by choose another one on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:28PM

      by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:28PM (#117779)

      Only option 1 might sort of do what you want, and even then at the cost of losing packages, since Debian can't _stop_ upstream developers depending on systemd.

      I agree the options make it complicated, but I don't think they do a straight yes/no vote so if the options are option 1 or "further discussion" then option 1 wins not because it is what everyone wants, but purely because everyone is fed up of discussing it. In fact, option 1 is the _least_ popular "real" option - beaten by everything except "further discussion".

      However, I may be missing something in the numbers, because the proposer of option 1 actually says "30-40% of the project who agree with me" (see https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/11/msg00091.html [debian.org] ), and if options order of popularity is 4 > 2 > 3 > 1 > 5 then I can't for the life of me see how option 1 is 30-40%, so yeah, maybe it is as confusing as possible - not sure I know anymore.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:26PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:26PM (#117753) Journal
    I noticed that some of systemd's alleged cancerous qualities comes from what appears to me to be social engineering takeovers of various critical components like D-Bus and udev which were then transformed by systemd developers into having dependencies on systemd. Is this accurate?
    • (Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:03PM

      by sjames (2882) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:03PM (#117766) Journal

      Sadly, yes. One of the takeover tactics seems to be gratuitous dependencies.

    • (Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:26PM

      by Arik (4543) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @06:26PM (#117777) Journal
      Unfortunately, yes, you are completely correct.

      This is a political/social project, not a technical one.
      --
      If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
    • (Score: 1) by fritsd on Wednesday November 19 2014, @07:31PM

      by fritsd (4586) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @07:31PM (#117813) Journal

      Yes, that's it.

    • (Score: 1) by EmeraldBot on Wednesday November 19 2014, @10:38PM

      by EmeraldBot (2917) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @10:38PM (#117879)

      I noticed that some of systemd's alleged cancerous qualities comes from what appears to me to be social engineering takeovers of various critical components like D-Bus and udev which were then transformed by systemd developers into having dependencies on systemd. Is this accurate?

      It breaks my heart to say this, but yes, systemd is an entirely political project, and its developers are more akin to politicians than programmers.

      --
      Give a man a fire, and he's warm for a day. Light a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
  • (Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Wednesday November 19 2014, @08:38PM

    by PinkyGigglebrain (4458) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @08:38PM (#117837)

    After all the years (13+) we've been together, all the learning, and all the years of happy computing I've decided that it is time to say goodbye.

    And time to say "Hello, Slackware"

    --
    "Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
  • (Score: 1) by srobert on Wednesday November 19 2014, @09:24PM

    by srobert (4803) on Wednesday November 19 2014, @09:24PM (#117853)

    All this talk of systemd as a dependency had me thinking that maybe gnome3 and cinnamon would never make it into the official FreeBSD ports tree. This morning both of them were added when I updated the tree. I think I'll try building cinnamon over the weekend and see how it works on my FreeBSD laptop.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @12:50AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @12:50AM (#117924)

    Which version does not contain it? I want to download that version before it is no longer available.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:16PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 20 2014, @03:16PM (#118126)

    I ask you to spearhead the debian fork effort. You've been with Debian long enough and deep enough to know what it takes to run a distro. You may be surprised to find there are enough new hands willing to pitch in (who till now mostly been users) to preserve Debian(-nesque) distro going without systemd (and other similar ) affliction.