SoylentNews

One of Debian's Developers Takes Vacation from Packaging systemd

posted by martyb on Monday January 21 2019, @07:14AM   
from the their-way-or-the-highway dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

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.]

---

Original Submission

• Re:Debian also distributes non-free Re:Debian also distributes non-free (Score: 3, Informative) by PinkyGigglebrain on Monday January 21 2019, @09:04PM (1 child)

  by PinkyGigglebrain (4458) on Monday January 21 2019, @09:04PM (#789775)

  "his is in stark contract to Devuan, who couldn't care less, and who install non-free packages automatically and silently, providing them whether needed or not."

  When I did a clean install of Devuan ASCII a few weeks ago I had to add "non-free contrib" to sources.list after the installer finished. So, at least as far as the net-installer.iso version I downloaded and used is concerned, Devuan did not include the non-free repositories by default.

  --
  "Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		+1
  Informative=1, Total=1
  Extra 'Informative' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		3

• Re:Debian also distributes non-free (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Tuesday January 22 2019, @05:38PM

  by requerdanos (5997) on Tuesday January 22 2019, @05:38PM (#790154) Journal

  Devuan did not include the non-free repositories by default.

  No, Devuan includes non-free firmware packages on all official media; it doesn't also add the "contrib non-free" to sources.list.

  Per https://files.devuan.org/devuan_ascii/Release_notes.txt [devuan.org] :

  All Devuan 2.0 ASCII install media make non-free firmware packages
  available at install time.... It is possible to avoid the automatic installation and
  loading of needed non-free firmware by choosing the "Expert install"
  option in the installation menu.

  Devuan 2.0 ASCII desktop-live and minimal-live images come with
  non-free firmware packages pre-installed. You have the option of
  removing those non-free firmware packages from the desktop-live and
  minimal-live after boot, using the "remove_firmware.sh" script
  available under /root.

  So, in Debian, there's no non-free packages and you have to work if you want them. In Devuan, there's always non-free packages, and you have to work if you want to get rid of them.

  Both sane choices, differing only in what's important to you, freedom-purity or non-free-world hardware working out of the box. And both important to know in advance, for just those reasons.

  IMO, always, always having non-free packages but still making the user add "contrib non-free" as if they weren't there, is misleading; you yourself seem to have been thusly misled.

  Parent