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[Ed's note: ASCII is the name given to the next release of Devuan]
"Dear D1rs,
there will be a Devuan ASCII sprint on 15-16-17th December 2017 (this coming weekend). The aim is to squash a few outstanding bugs in Devuan ASCII, with the view of preparing a beta release.
Some of the tasks require "hands-on" to the repos and other services, but virtually everybody else can help by testing packages, fixes, upgrade paths, patches, installation material, and so on, so anybody with some time to spare over the next week-end is welcome to join.
A list of currently outstanding bugs relevant for ASCII can be found at:
http://bugs.devuan.org//cgi/pkgreport.cgi?which=tag&data=ascii
If you can provide more info on those bugs, or patches, or anything, be prepared to do so.
There is no fixed schedule so far, but the best way to get in touch and "do things" is probably by hanging around on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday on #devuan-dev. More detailed information will be provided sooner [closer?] to the date.
Come on, let's put ASCII out.
The Dev1Devs "
https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/20171211.190051.843303de.en.html
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 13 2017, @04:52PM (1 child)
What you say about Debian's sysv-init support is unfortunately true.
But then Devuan people do not contribute to Debian, so they are not helping to improve sysv-init support of Debian. That is perfectly fine of course, but Devuan has only forked a couple of packages and forwards download requests for the rest straight to debian servers. So Devuan gets hit by all the changes made in Debian and passes all those problems in Debian on straight to their users thanks to their automatic import of all Debian changes happening several times a day. There is no extra testing involved, every change in Debian packages is visible right away in the Devuan package archives. This is a direct consequence of redirecting to Debian packages on Debian servers and could be avoided by mirroring all packages. With a mirror you can controll the contents, with a redirector you have to make sure it is always pointing to the stuff on the other server as is or your users will hit dead links.
Most of the few packages that Devuan has actually forked are about branding, changing "Debian" to "Devuan" in strings and such. Of the rest the majority is mostly concerned with the removal of libsystemd0 dependencies. So basically with adding "--without-systemd" to configure calls in the packaging scripts, so that the software does not depend on a library that is there to allow software to work with and without systemd. The only other change Devuan does is block some packages (e.g. systemd itself, most of the task packages IIRC and things like gnome), some of which work fine in Debian with sysv-init. One prominent example is of course gnome, which runs fine with sysv-init in Debian thanks to systemd-shim provided by canonical. Unfortunately systemd-shim is of no interest to Devuan developers, which rejected it when asked whether or not they might want to conti
The highlight of ASCII is that they no longer use systemd-udev (which they did in Jessie) and replaced that with eudev from gentoo. That is significant, since it removes one big dependency on systemd after just three years of work. But then they also undid some of the libsystemd0 removals they had in Jessie (still plenty of dependecies on libsystemd0 there, too) and changed those back to packages straight from Debian instead. So more libsystemd0 seems to be staying around in Devuan, just as it is in Debian.
So why do you think the situation is any better in Devuan than it is in Debian?
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday December 14 2017, @06:07PM
That just hilights the point about systemd being difficult to dig back out once you let it get it's hooks in. Given a bigger team, Devuan might be able to do a more thorough job. But it can't attract that larger team if it doesn't exist.
It's good that many packages offer --without-systemd. It's better that there is a Debian like distro that puts it to the test and maintains knowledge of maintaining a distro using that option.