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Michael Biebl, long-time maintainer of systemd for Debian (2010 or earlier, based on changelog.Debian.gz), is taking undetermined holidays from packaging it. The e-mail was short:
Will stop maintaining systemd in debian for a while.
What's going on is just too stupid/crazy.
This takes place after he discussed a bug in which he expected systemd to respect local settings, and not rename network devices:
@yuwata a default policy like /lib/systemd/network/99-default.link should never trump explicit user configuration.
Later he seems surprised about how things roll there:
I'm amazed that I have to point this out....
The issue is locked currently, and also archived just in case, so everyone can read the initial report and the replies he got.
Opinion: It seems distribution developers are starting to get the stick too, not just users with their "errors" (taken from a reply). Will distributions finally wake up or is that they don't still grok the attitude of projects like this? [Or is it something else? --Ed.]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by pTamok on Monday January 21 2019, @08:55AM (3 children)
Debian is important because other distributions base themselves upon it, so decisions made by the Debian maintainers affect other distributions. While some people would prefer it if Debian mandated that packages were init-agnostic, the Debian maintainers have not done so*, and followed their own procedures** in doing so. So there is no rule that packages must support use any, a blessèd group of some, or all init systems. You can see why maintainers do this - it is the least effort approach. It takes a lot of effort to ensure your package works in the environments created by the different inits - if no-one is paying for it, it makes sense to choose just one - the most used (I carefully did not say the most popular).
Other distributions show it is still possible, just, to operate a linux-kernel based system without using systemd, but I would not be surprised to see linux become gnu/systemd/linux for notebook and desktop computers. IoT devices will still be capable of being operated without systemd as there are strong incentives to do so: small system resource constraints lead to stripped down kernels with minimal inits and busybox shells. With no desktop environment, whether the desktop environment is dependent upon systemd is irrelevant.
*While Debian does not mandate that systemd is used, some package maintainers only bother to accommodate systemd requirements, and others make their packages reliant upon systemd-only facilities.
**There is some argument over this. It is water under the bridge now.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by requerdanos on Monday January 21 2019, @07:21PM (2 children)
While admittedly the only such small devices I own are the NanoPC T3 and the Olinuxino Lime 2, I must say that manufacturer's Debian images for both include systemd, and it works frankly perfectly on those underpowered-arm devices.
The "resources are valuable" argument, in my opinion, should apply pretty much everywhere, not just where it's critical. If I can run something that leaves my resources alone (SysV? OpenRC?) with no downside, why wouldn't I?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 21 2019, @09:30PM (1 child)
Olimex tries to use whatever is avaliable, so if Debian has systemd, that's what they use, no optimizations. Now Olimex is even trying more generic images, one that supports multiple versions instead of a single board, to reduce work. They picked Ubuntu Bionic Desktop and Debian Stretch Server as base. https://olimex.wordpress.com/2019/01/07/new-univeral-a20-image-released-which-works-with-all-our-a20-boards-and-auto-detect-and-configure-on-boot/ [wordpress.com]
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Tuesday January 22 2019, @05:48PM
That sounds very sane to me, to be honest.
I bought three of the Olimex boards because Debian's website advised me that they could be booted and used productively without using any non-free firmware. The only problem area is the still-incomplete free support for the MALI GPU and, running them headless, I haven't had much problem in that area.
Specifically, systemd has given me no problems. it doesn't take a lot of memory, doesn't slow things down much*, and gives features in return for what it takes away.
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* A great experiment to test faster/slower wrt systemd is to install Bochs and get it working (alchemy required), then boot, say, Debian wheezy (no systemd), then boot Debian jessie (with systemd). The inherent dirt dog sluggish slowness of the emulation amplifies the effect of anything that takes a longer or shorter time and gives you a better overall picture.