Devuan.org announces:
Devuan is spelled in Italian and it is pronounced just like "DevOne" in English.
[...]is it really a fork?
This is just the start of a process, as bold as it sounds to call it a fork of Debian.
[...]Devuan aims to be a base distribution whose mission is protect the freedom of its community of users and developers. Its priority is to enable diversity, interoperability and backward compatibility for existing Debian users and downstream distributions willing to preserve Init freedom.
Devuan will derive its own installer and package repositories from Debian, modifying them where necessary, with the first goal of removing systemd, still inheriting the Debian development workflow while continuing it on a different path: free from bloat as a minimalist base distro should be. Our objective for the spring of 2015 is that users will be able to switch from Debian 7 to Devuan 1 smoothly, as if they would dist-upgrade to Jessie, and start using our package repositories.
Devuan will make an effort to rebuild an infrastructure similar to Debian, but will also take the opportunity to innovate some of its practices. Devuan developers look at this project as a fresh new start for a community of interested people and do not intend to enforce the vexation hierarchy and bureaucracy beyond real cases of emergency. We are well conscious this is possible for us mostly because of starting small again; we will do our best to not repeat the same mistakes and we welcome all Debian Developers willing to join us on this route.
Related Stories
System adminsitrator Chris Siebenmann has found Modern versions of systemd can cause an unmount storm during shutdowns:
One of my discoveries about Ubuntu 20.04 is that my test machine can trigger the kernel's out of memory killing during shutdown. My test virtual machine has 4 GB of RAM and 1 GB of swap, but it also has 347 NFS[*] mounts, and after some investigation, what appears to be happening is that in the 20.04 version of systemd (systemd 245 plus whatever changes Ubuntu has made), systemd now seems to try to run umount for all of those filesystems all at once (which also starts a umount.nfs process for each one). On 20.04, this is apparently enough to OOM[**] my test machine.
[...] Unfortunately, so far I haven't found a way to control this in systemd. There appears to be no way to set limits on how many unmounts systemd will try to do at once (or in general how many units it will try to stop at once, even if that requires running programs). Nor can we readily modify the mount units, because all of our NFS mounts are done through shell scripts by directly calling
mount; they don't exist in/etc/fstabor as actual.mountunits.
[*] NFS: Network File System
[**] OOM Out of memory.
We've been here before and there is certainly more where that came from.
Previously:
(2020) Linux Home Directory Management is About to Undergo Major Change
(2019) System Down: A systemd-journald Exploit
(2017) Savaged by Systemd
(2017) Linux systemd Gives Root Privileges to Invalid Usernames
(2016) Systemd Crashing Bug
(2015) tmux Coders Asked to Add Special Code for systemd
(2016) SystemD Mounts EFI pseudo-fs RW, Facilitates Permanently Bricking Laptops, Closes Bug Invalid
(2015) A Technical Critique of Systemd
(2014) Devuan Developers Can Be Reached Via vua@debianfork.org
(2014) Systemd-resolved Subject to Cache Poisoning
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NoMaster on Friday November 28 2014, @02:04PM
You do know there's a number of existing Debian forks, don't you? (Yes, true 'forks', not just downstream distros like Ubuntu, Mint, & SteamOS). So nothing particularly "bold" there...
Well, there's dumb premise #1: Debian was never envisioned to be "a minimalist base distro"
Yeah, good luck with that!
Now all you need is blackjack and hookers...
Live free or fuck off and take your naïve Libertarian fantasies with you...
(Score: 2) by Sir Garlon on Friday November 28 2014, @02:43PM
Actually, no. Would you care to enlighten us and/or demonstrate that you're not just making shit up, Mr. Know-It-All?
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Lagg on Friday November 28 2014, @02:53PM
Normally I'd be fine with telling someone who says stuff like this to show or shut up but honestly next to slackware Debian is quite possibly one of the most forked distributions around. Many are listed here [debian.org], some of them are little more than modified images but a lot of them have actually diverged heavily. There is also a ton of ubuntu forks which diverge even more than ubuntu does from debian. Nevermind the internal forks that companies like to use for their own stuff (in a manner similar to what happened to RHEL occasionally).
It's hard to discuss what constitutes an actual fork when it comes to a distribution since at their core all they are is a package manager, repos of precompiled packages (sometimes not even that) and a kernel with a surrounding philosophy on how to manage those 3 things. Many forks of debian do different kernel compile opts, probably have their own repos but also use debian's own. I doubt many mess with the dpkg and apt code but there are a good number of wrappers.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 1) by Nuke on Friday November 28 2014, @05:24PM
Your link leads to a list of what appear to be Debian derivatives, not forks. I admit there are some I do not recognise, but if they are all like eg Mepis, (which I am using now) and Ubuntu, which are both on the list, then they are all derivatives. I too would be very interested to know of any true forks of Debian.
"It's hard to discuss what constitutes an actual fork"
Well it is becoming easier. If they do not adopt systemd then you can say they are a fork, not a derivative.
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Friday November 28 2014, @04:00PM
http://debianfork.org [debianfork.org]. The look of the website suggests that it might be one and the same as Devuan.
I assume that you have having a bad day? There is no need for the sarcasm though.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday November 28 2014, @04:02PM
Confirmed - it is the same project but now renamed. It's been around for quite a week or more now.
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Friday November 28 2014, @07:13PM
How about GNUtron?
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Lagg on Friday November 28 2014, @02:45PM
Yeah, don't know why people treat debian like something special in topics of forking nor do I get why people think its goal was anything about minimalism. Their downstream patching and default images pretty much show that isn't what it's aiming to be. Didn't Ian (Murdock, not the jackass that was being an obstacle) say it was meant to give a more robust and stable linux distribution with strong review where it was lacking? Hardly minimalist. Anyway, these days I ignore pretty much anything that whines about systemd without actually trying to fix it but just this once I was willing to give it a chance because I actually like the idea of a Debian without the worthless bureaucracy. This isn't the one that's going to do it if it even does get off the ground though. It's just going to be yet another "X, but with systemd yanked out" crap pile at best.
Whatever, I stopped using debian years ago precisely because of aforementioned bureaucracy so it's not like I would switch to such a thing even if it did get inertia.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 28 2014, @04:33PM
2edgy4me
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday November 28 2014, @04:57PM
Didn't Ian (Murdock, not the jackass that was being an obstacle) say it was meant to give a more robust and stable linux distribution with strong review where it was lacking?
Maybe, but here's the original manifesto
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ap-manifesto.en.html [debian.org]
And it seems to boil down to grievances about post release support being non-existent, and distro makers ignoring the licenses of software, Also in the early 90s the commercial distros, what ones existed, were a bit sketchy.
Its funny reading him trash talk SLS, which I started using around Oct 1993. When SLS worked, it was OK, but it was fire and forget as Ian wrote, the idea of having a security infrastructure or packing smaller than a category "The X series of disks when untarred install xwindows, the C series of disks when untarred install GCC and all the fixings".
Around 97-ish I switched everything at home and work to Debian because of the DFSG solving all my at work software licensing problems and at home because why not?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Friday November 28 2014, @06:29PM
Why on earth do you imagine people that do not want or need systemd would waste their time trying to 'fix' it?
Anyway even if we tried, you cannot 'fix' a bad design, you have to start over with a good one.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by CRCulver on Friday November 28 2014, @08:10PM
Even many of systemd's harshest critics feel there is a need to overhaul Sysvinit, and projects like OpenRC and Upstart (just to mention the largest two alternatives, there are even more still in the hobbyist stage) certainly need more manpower. Perhaps that's what the OP meant. The uselessd project has also been very successful in reducing systemd from a gargantuan and ever-growing monster to a strictly defined init service, though I fear they will always be playing catchup with Red Hat.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Friday November 28 2014, @09:18PM
Some seem like very good systems, but they all have the same problem. Very few people need them, so they have a hard time drumming up support or getting anyone excited about replacing the well-worn old system they already know how to use for little to no gain.
Systemd is no better (in fact considerably worse from what I know) than the others technically, but it has considerable political backing, and that's the only reason they are seeing adoption.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @05:00AM
Debian SysV is allready overhauled.
It supports and uses parallel booting since 2 releases ago.
It's just as fast as systemd in reality.
(Score: 2) by CRCulver on Saturday November 29 2014, @11:47AM
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday November 29 2014, @07:12PM
Automatically restarting crashed daemons is a good idea...in a FEW use cases. Generally, however, that's not what you want. And making it a part of an init system seems brain-dead. It should be a settable parameter, and NOT a part of the init system, but of some later process.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by monster on Monday December 01 2014, @03:05PM
As HiThere already states, it's ok for some cases, not always. Anyway, that's what watchdogs are for.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 28 2014, @02:11PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 28 2014, @02:33PM
More like 3-4 months. It's winter of 2014 already.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 28 2014, @04:35PM
Not if GP lives in the southern hemisphere, where spring 2014 is just now winding up.
(Score: 1) by Pino P on Saturday November 29 2014, @01:17AM
So it appears the "I'm from Australia you insensitive clod!" gang from Slashdot have made it over here already.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday November 29 2014, @09:12AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Subsentient on Friday November 28 2014, @02:44PM
For the gerbils will feast on thy flesh.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday November 28 2014, @03:00PM
If only, debian derivation attempts and/or no-systemd attempts might want to exchange info and patches between themselves. Something like the debian DEX.
https://wiki.debian.org/DEX [debian.org]
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Horse With Stripes on Friday November 28 2014, @03:07PM
Here's what I get when I try to visit their donation page [devuan.org] using Chrome:
Phishing attack ahead
Attackers on devuan.org might try to trick you to steal your information (for example, passwords, messages, or credit cards).
Google Safe Browsing recently detected phishing on devuan.org. Phishing sites pretend to be other websites to trick you.
If you understand the risks to your security, you may visit this infected site.
Hmm ... I wonder what that's about?
(Score: 5, Funny) by Nerdfest on Friday November 28 2014, @04:58PM
Someone reported them as a phishing site most likely. I can think of a few likely suspects.
(Score: 1) by dlb on Friday November 28 2014, @05:03PM
Further, the devuan.org site looks cheezy. Like some Nigerian prince made it. Whether con artists or rank amateurs, something there's not right....
(Score: 2, Informative) by Nuke on Friday November 28 2014, @05:28PM
I have had that with some areas of the Debian site itself. I click through the warnings, adding the exception.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:45AM
I just donated, and received the confirmation email from Paypal. It is legit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @10:07AM
Paypal. It is legit.
Why do I have hard time believing this AC?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @09:33PM
Original AC here. Firefox does not issue the error for me, and I received multiple confirmation messages from Paypal. The confirmation messages came from the same originating address from which I have received confirmations for donations to other sites.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 28 2014, @03:13PM
Like the first comment noted, this isn't the first "fork" of Debian, no need for antagonism.
I don't like systemd. It no doubt has positives, but all of it are overshadowed by the way it was shoved down (scope creep, dependencies, etc.).
A Debian without systemd requirement is most welcome. Systemd (and other inits) can (and should be) an option for those who want it, but not a requirement for all. We can monitor their growth and trajectory, and evolve accordingly.
It's a long road, and I encourage those concerned to contribute, particularly those like me who have been merely users, as well as the current (and continuing) Debian developers.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by agentcooper on Friday November 28 2014, @04:13PM
If the floor is open to suggestions and continuing with the alternate language meme I nominate the following Debian derivative:
Foku Debian! (Foku - Japanese for "fork"). It works on so many levels :)
I won't debate the technical merits of systemd. Like many others my introduction to systemd was after a 'dist-upgrade' with no advance warning of the change followed immediately by a system that would not boot. I don't really care one way or another about init systems as long as they work. As a server administrator I can't take those kinds of chances. It isn't an option.
As such, any effort which restores the idea of choice back to the Debian landscape is fine with me. Regular Debian for those who don't care about the init system in use and DebianNG for those who do. I hope for the success of any Debian based distro which offers me this option and in the meantime I will be experimenting with FreeBSD. In my business I deploy PfSense based firewalls and plenty of FreeNAS appliances so I guess this is the next logical step anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 28 2014, @07:51PM
Ubuntu and Mint have had to send nastygrams to folks who forked those projects (that part is OK; covered by GPL) then used the original moniker as part of the name of the "new" project without getting permission (not OK; covered by "intellectual property" law).
You may recall the pissing match with Mozilla that Debian got into when they wanted to remove the proprietary artwork in Firefox (resulting in IceWeasel, IceDove, and IceApe).
-- gewg_
(Score: 3, Informative) by cafebabe on Friday November 28 2014, @04:16PM
It reminds me of an incident when a venerable forum deployed software which completely trashed the experience for some of their users. Despite numerous warnings, those users took the old software and started their own forum. And I understand that the new forum has been thriving.
1702845791×2
(Score: 4, Funny) by buswolley on Friday November 28 2014, @04:24PM
Why don't you visit soylentnews.org sometime? it is red and has good comments.
subicular junctures
(Score: 1) by Striktarn on Friday November 28 2014, @09:40PM
(Score: 3, Informative) by hendrikboom on Friday November 28 2014, @04:16PM
There's already refracta. Please coordinate.
http://www.ibiblio.org/refracta/ [ibiblio.org]
http://refracta.freeforums.org/refracta-f14.html [freeforums.org]
-- hendrik
(Score: 1) by Horse With Stripes on Friday November 28 2014, @08:57PM
It appears that some of the Refracta users are trying to get a non-systemd version of Refracta based on Jesse working. Refracta itself hasn't chosen a side yet, and thus will end up using whatever Debian releases.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by wonkey_monkey on Friday November 28 2014, @04:32PM
Is this summary backwards, or something? The "headline" isn't much of a headline - if anything it'd be more at home at the end.
Devuan is spelled in Italian and it is pronounced just like "DevOne" in English.
Okay, that's nice and everything (although I'm not sure how a word can be said to be "spelled in Italian"), but the first order of business would seem to be telling us what Devuan is. Possibly even in the headline! Y'know, like, "Devuan announced - a new Debian fork"
[...]is it really a fork?
This is just the start of a process, as bold as it sounds to call it a fork of Debian.
So is it a fork of Debian, or what? You could have just stated that it is, instead of posting what looks like an out-of-context snippet from an FAQ...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 1) by Nuke on Friday November 28 2014, @05:34PM
I guess it can only be called a fork when it works.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 28 2014, @08:16PM
I was punchy and fixing to go to bed.
Could I have spent more time on this? Yeah.
Would it have been a whole lot better? Perhaps.
Would that alter the fact that this is a nascent project and it will be months before things gel? I don't think so.
Sorry to have ruined your whole day.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday November 28 2014, @11:21PM
Could I have spent more time on this? Yeah.
Would it have been a whole lot better? Perhaps.
Would that alter the fact that this is a nascent project and it will be months before things gel? I don't think so.
Would it could alter is someone's first impression of Soylent News.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 02 2014, @01:37AM
I was punchy and fixing to go to bed.
Dude... you should have gone to bed, and posted this later. It wasn't an emergency, honest.
Would that alter the fact that this is a nascent project and it will be months before things gel? I don't think so.
Irrelevant. If you are submitting a story, it's your job to submit a coherent and informative story. You could have done better than you did.
I have been following the whole systemd thing so I knew what this was. But you genuinely confused at least one person, who let you know about it.
Sorry to have ruined your whole day.
Learn to deal with criticism, especially reasonable commentary like GP.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 28 2014, @04:39PM
Yay
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 28 2014, @05:14PM
for those of us visiting family ... please keep the threads and comments coming we need the entertainment.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Friday November 28 2014, @05:20PM
What kind of decision makers is at the top of this fork? Any chance for similar misshandling like done in Debian? Or strategies how to handle PSYOPS?
(Score: 1) by Bill, Shooter Of Bul on Friday November 28 2014, @09:21PM
Yeah, they really are putting the horse before the cart here. I don't think it makes any sense to set project goals without working out the governance of the distro.
I don't think anything wrong happened with the outcome of the systemd by default ttce decision. But I do think the cannonical employees should have recused themselves. I think the deck was stacked against systemd.
But it would be a good idea to set policy now, especially if they think that a flaw in policy was behind the systemd decision that they weren't happy with.
(Score: 2) by jbernardo on Saturday November 29 2014, @07:22AM
Don't you mean that the 4 RedHat employees in the CTTE should have excused themselves, instead of forcing their employer goals on Debian? If anything, the stack was loaded for systemd, only RedHat employees voted for it and still those 4 were enough to commit debian.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 28 2014, @05:46PM
Jesus, people--learn how to pick a reasonable fucking name! If you have to explain how to pronounce it then it probably isn't a good choice.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 28 2014, @06:17PM
Ian naming a distribution after his girlfriend Deb was a terrible name, they're continuing the tradition.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @04:55AM
Is that the bitch who divorced him?
Yet we're told because Ian named part of his distro after a cunt who fucked him over later (as they all do), that women have contributed greatly to Debian and opensource...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @05:19AM
It's so refreshing to see someone who doesn't carry around his bitterness like a 200 pound weight.
-- gewg_
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 28 2014, @07:20PM
Given how events unfolded this was inevitable, the discontent has been obvious and even bitter on most Debian systemd related threads. They have a huge task ahead of them, and I can’t help feeling it needs some names behind the project to gain credibility.
There has been a lot of talk about do-o-cracy and here are folks who are doing exactly that, so I see little ground for criticism, unless some folks believe there should be no alternatives to systemd which doesn't make sense. Running them to the ground before they have even started is just small minded.
I think people should opt for Systemd, that's usually what happens with exciting projects that deliver a lot of benefits. They gain widespread adoption from users. People running Linux, especially servers are not illiterate and there is no reason technical folks will simply shy away from real improvements. Clearly this remains contentious and unsettled.
And its cause for concern when Debian which has always been conservative suddenly adopts systemd which is far from tested, has a large number of bugs reports as any project of this scope would, rather than letting it mature and having a transition period. The whole way systemd was introduced as a bug report??? in the TC committee itself has an element of politics about it.
The arrogance and trivialization of users around do-o-cracy is also unseemly from a community that is built on user adoption. It's only because of users that projects have traction and influence. A project without users is a dead project, reactos and haiku have developers, but its users and adoption that gives a project influence and purpose. Anyone who has started a project will confirm in the beginning with zero users every single user counts. And then to turn around after you have build a user base and influence and dismiss users as irrelevant as we are seeing on the Debian mailing lists and so many of the debates is a reflection of a completely dysfunctional community.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 28 2014, @08:13PM
Like Sly said "Different strokes for different folks".
The crowd who came of age running Windoze and who just want to get into their GUIfied apps (and who will never config anything at the system level) may just continue to use Debian with systemd.
Folks who liked Debian before systemd and who don't see a need for GNOME on their servers may find this fork to be the ticket.
Perhaps there will be cross-pollination between the 2 projects and, with time, each will become ever better for its set of users.
Extrapolating an incomplete/partially-tested one-size-fits-all approach across a broad base is what is at the heart of the current unrest.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday November 28 2014, @08:57PM
Just because people does things, doesn't mean it's a good thing to include them in the project. Perhaps some projects should have more discernment regarding what architectural, APi and code changes that is accepted.
Now we just have wait for the moles to infiltrate this project as well and introduce some bad architectural changes.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Friday November 28 2014, @09:21PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @12:58AM
Except the ReactOS project
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @03:02AM
The Lead Dev (Jsomething) has maintained a distro before.
He's an Italian guy with an afro.
His old distro was one of the only that supported wireless way back when.
So I'd say they have some talent already that can pull it off.
Sounds like they're starting small, join and they can go bigger.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @06:04AM
This was inevitable. Some years ago Debian welcomed do-nothing women into the fold (Debian-women)
They then kicked out any anti-feminist man from Debian (example: Ted Walther). Today any new
debian developer is vetted by the debian-women.
Techis love feminists. They love social justice warriors. They love the world they live in
where they are eternally denied power, respect, so on and so forth. They enjoy being
cattle prodded towards "Strong" women, and denied young girls.
They love this change that has occured in the world: it becoming a woman's world, rather than a man's.
They love that they would be imprisoned if they ever tried to marry a young girl
(Allowed in the Old Testament: Deuteronomy 22 28-29, hebrew).
They love to be hearded and forced. That is the kind of men they are.
And thus, is it any wonder, that They love the SystemD.
--MikeeUSA--
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @07:21AM
Crawl back under your bridge.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @11:02AM
No.