SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 18 submissions in the queue.
SoylentNews
Greybeard-built Debian fork bringing init freedom on track for early 2017 release
The self-proclaimed "Veteran Unix Admins" forking Debian in the name of init freedom have released Beta 2 of their "Devuan" Linux distribution.
Devuan came about after some users felt it had become too desktop-friendly. The change the greybeards objected to most was the decision to replace sysvinit init with systemd, a move felt to betray core Unix principles of user choice and keeping bloat to a bare minimum.
Supporters of init freedom also dispute assertions that systemd is in all ways superior to sysvinit init, arguing that Debian ignored viable alternatives like sinit, openrc, runit, s6 and shepherd. All are therefore included in Devuan.
-- submitted from IRC
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
systemd Free Linux Distro Devuan Releases Second Beta
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 82 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
You are a fluke of the universe; you have no right to be here.
(Score: 5, Informative) by fritsd on Saturday December 03 2016, @10:24PM
MikeeUSA was more active (as in: toxic radioactive??) on the mailinglist than actually fixing packages, I think.
He managed to troll lots of people away from Devuan though, before Jaromil kicked him off the mailinglist.
I hope he's in Syria now with his underage bride(s).
I think you just said: "The Devuan devs have proven that, with only the effort of changing 7 packages, the yoke of systemd can be cast off." Right?
Thank you for your appreciation and confidence in our distro!!! :-)
(Score: 1) by butthurt on Saturday December 03 2016, @10:51PM
When contributing to Devuan did he use the handle "sgryphon"?
https://web.archive.org/web/20161203223325/https://osdir.com/ml/debian-user-debian/2016-04/msg00891.html [archive.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by fritsd on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:39PM
I don't remember. The mailinglist is fairly high-volume, often I just browse it.
I think in june 2016 it was "concernedfossdev".
This is a link to a link to a discussion of mikeeusa:
https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/20160611.125957.f0c41553.en.html [dyne.org]
I'm glad he was banned, nobody else pulled the level of discussion down as much as him. It was really not normal what he all said (even for the Internet).
That's why I got annoyed at the comment here about Devuan: "mikeeusa and his team".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:54PM
yes.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday December 06 2016, @09:05PM
The OP insinuated that MikeeUSA was the project's leader, but he doesn't seem to be listed at all among the project's principals:
https://devuan.org/os/team/ [devuan.org]
I'm inclined to believe the message linked by fritsd that says MikeeUSA was banned from the project's mailing list, and I'm inclined to believe fritsd's statement that MikeeUSA was more active on the mailing list than in contributing code. I would assume that his code, if any, has received extra scrutiny.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 11 2016, @12:24PM
MikeeUSA contributes only to videogames in freedom.
ChaosEsque Anthology has been submitted for packaging, though it takes up a full dvd...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 03 2016, @11:03PM
Heh, good point! They aren't rebuilding every piece of Debian here...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 04 2016, @10:34AM
The Devuan devs have proven that, with only the effort of changing 7 packages, the yoke of systemd can be cast off.
So you say Devuan forked Debian over *seven* packages? And took over two years for that?
And that to change the default init system to another one supported in Debian?
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Sunday December 04 2016, @04:06PM
Um.. Devuan sounds a bit pathetic, the way you put it across.. lemme try to express it a bit more positively.
I don't speak for the others, but I just wanted to keep on using Debian!
We didn't want to fork, it just ended up that way :-) because we felt that we had to.
My general impression is that it was not an act of hubris, but instead "This needs to be done. Looks like nobody else wants to do it, so we will have to, even if we're maybe not the best."
I have a strong *belief*, i.e. cannot prove rationally, it's just a hunch from personal experience, that systemd is an evolutionary dead-end, because of the complexity caused by unnecessary interdependency.
Also, there's the fact that the Debian leadership has chosen to support systemd as the only init system from Debian Jessie onwards.
Also, I and others found out that it is very difficult to un-install systemd and choose another init system (e.g. sysvinit, although nobody claims it's the bee's knees)
I *believe* (no proof) that, the way systemd has been developed, it would only become more and more difficult in the future to construct a basic low-level Linux infrastructure, based on Debian,
that does not depend on systemd.
In conclusion to what i just said, I really *believe* that the Debian project, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and other projects, have tied the millstone of systemd around their necks. Voluntarily. And that it will drag them down, unless they cut loose from it.
I need Linux for work! That's a tragedy, if they all become crappy distros!
Debian in particular forms the basic groundwork of lots of smaller specialized distros.
picture: humongous family tree [wikimedia.org]
That picture proves that in practice, Debian is particularly suited as a basic disc of prepared dough to make all kinds of different pizzas with (some tastier than others).
But now Debian is inextricably tied to systemd. Then you can either just give up and learn to love systemd, or you can try to fork Debian sooner rather than later.
All the wailing and gnashing of teeth, and bitching at L.P., on the mailinglist was fun and cathartic, but after a few months, a few people in the world decided to do something difficult but constructive and actually go ahead and fork Debian, and that's how Devuan saw the light.
I have enormous respect for all the work that Debian people have done in the past 20 years. But for me personally, I really think Devuan has more future, because it still has the resilience and flexibility(*) of the Unix philosophy, just like Debian Wheezy.
So when I have time and energy, I try to help the Devuan project.
It is discoverable (with lots of effort)
It is maintainable (with effort)
It is repairable (with effort)
just like all Linux distros before, and like the big Unix stuff before that.
(*) (Personally I dislike D-bus, logind and consolekit as well, but maybe I'm just crazy)
Um.. yes? Feel free to help out if you have time and energy to spare. In fact, feel free to hire me for .deb packaging contracting work, I'll have LOTS more time and energy available then.
Yes. In order to preserve the ability for Devuan Linux users to switch to MuchBetterInitSystem2030 in 2030, if you want to put it like that.
There are developers of alternative init systems that have shown interest in Devuan, so maybe we'll be able to provide a few that Debian doesn't have.
There can be only one init system running, and Debian has systemd and it won't let go, so I can't see a future for any init systems other than systemd in Debian and descendants.
Even when (not if!) something better is developed. Future progress in this arena is now permanently blocked in Debian!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09 2016, @09:43AM
I have a strong *belief*, i.e. cannot prove rationally
Nothing more needs to be said.
Devuan, Trump, ...: all about "feels" and "beliefs", less about reasoning or rational conclusions.
the fact that the Debian leadership has chosen to support systemd as the only init system from Debian Jessie onwards
And as usual mixed with untrue statements presented as "facts". Welcome to post-factual reality!