According to an email sent to the Debian debian-devel-announce mailing list by Adam D. Barratt, the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD port is in grave danger of being dropped from the upcoming Debian 8 "Jessie" release. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD runs the GNU userland tools, the GNU C library and the Debian package set on top of the FreeBSD kernel.
Barratt states:
We remain gravely concerned about the viability of this port. Despite the reduced scope, we feel that the port is not currently of sufficient quality to feature as a fully supported release architecture in Jessie.
We therefore advise the kFreeBSD porters that the port is in danger of being dropped from Jessie, and invite any porters who are able to commit to working on the port in the long term to make themselves known *now*.
We will assess the viability of kFreeBSD in Jessie on or after 1st November, and a yes/no decision will be taken at that time.
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A grave bug has been introduced into the "wine" package of Debian Jessie, just days before the November 5th freeze deadline. The /usr/bin/wine launch script fails with an "error: unable to find wine executable. this shouldn't happen." message.
Debian has already suffered much unrest lately over the inclusion of systemd, with threats of a fork being issued, along with the possible cancellation of the GNU/kFreeBSD port and the possible dropping of support for the SPARC architecture. After so much strife and disruption, can Debian afford to have such a serious bug affect such a critical package so soon before such a major freeze?
Longtime Debian contributor Tollef Fog Heen has announced his resignation from the Debian systemd maintainer team. His announcement states that "the load of the continued attacks is just becoming too much."
He has since written a detailed blog article surrounding the circumstances of his resignation. As he puts it,
I've been a DD for almost 14 years, I should be able to weather any storm, shouldn't I? It turns out that no, the mountain does get worn down by the rain. It's not a single hurtful comment here and there. There's a constant drum about this all being some sort of conspiracy and there are sometimes flares where people wish people involved in systemd would be run over by a bus or just accusations of incompetence.
This is yet another dramatic event affecting the Debian project in recent months. The adoption of systemd has been extremely controversial, even going so far as to result in calls for Debian to be forked. There have been other problems as of late, too, ranging from a serious bug breaking Wine just days before the Jessie freeze deadline, to the possibility of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD being dropped from Debian 8. And it was only just over a week ago that Joey Hess — another longtime Debian contributor — left the project, citing the "very unhealthy directions" that Debian has been led in lately.
Is the internal tension and strife caused by systemd about to tear the Debian project apart? Recent events such as the aforementioned have suggested that this is becoming more and more of a possibility. The repercussions of this drama will no doubt be felt wide and far, given Debian's own popularity, as well it forming the basis of other major Linux distros such as Ubuntu and Linux Mint.
The Debian project has suffered from a long string of negative events recently, ranging from severe discontent over the inclusion of systemd, to talk of forking the project, to a grave bug affecting the important 'wine' package, to the resignation and reduced involvement of long time contributors.
The latest strife affecting Debian revolves around a request for a Debian package of the GPC-Slots 2 software. This request has been rejected with little more than an ad hominem attack against the software's author.
In response to the request, Stephen Gran wrote,
This is code by someone who routinely trolls Debian. I doubt we want any more poisonous upstreams in Debian, so I at least would prefer this never get packaged.
Jonathan Wiltshire proceeded to mark the request as 'wontfix', and closed it.
While Debian does strive to maintain high standards regarding the software it packages, the negative and personal nature of this rejection, without any apparent technical or licensing concerns, appears to conflict with Debian's own Code of Conduct. Such a personal attack could be seen as contradictory to the Code of Conduct's mandate that Debian participants "Be respectful", "Be collaborative", and most importantly, "Assume good faith".
Given its recent troubles as of late, many of them concerning the poor treatment of Debian developers and users alike, can Debian really afford to get embroiled in yet another negative incident?
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @01:34AM
I mean, isn't GNU just another term for Linux?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @01:36AM
Also, is this the work of those feminists that I keep hearing have supplanted all the devs for Debian?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by velex on Wednesday October 08 2014, @02:47PM
My tinfoil is on rather tight today. I'd appreciate it if the person putting forward that theory would please substantiate it. (For those not browsing at -1, the theory is that systemd and other "rot" is a feminist conspiracy.)
I love a good conspiracy theory, but this seems too far-fetched. Feminism is content to go "all men this," "all men that" and push for sexist policies, but actually being involved in the open source community at a level that could get these changes implemented seems far-fetched. Now, I have accused Poettering of being a white knight a few times, so that would be an attack vector, but I just don't see a motive here.
At least, I don't see why this conspiracy theory would make sense. Those of us who have absolutely no intention of running systemd will simply route around systemd. Distros come and go, but free software abides. Remember Mandrake? (Granted, it is disturbing that Debian of all distros is being affected.)
I'm aware of outreach efforts to encourage women to join the open source community, and some of those haven't gone so well. I'm mostly ambivalent about those. More women in the open source community is a good thing. However, the "bring a horse to water" principle applies.
It also seems that projects such as Ubuntu that are associated with those efforts (Canonical) are where the "rot" comes from (e.g. Unity, GNOME 3, systemd, Amazon search on the desktop just to be handy!). So, I can see a connection.
Of course, I'm a happy Gentoo and Ratpoison [wikipedia.org][1] user, so I haven't been affected by all this.
([1] My Linux from Scratch build blew up after compiling binutils in chroot! Next step before reaching E19 is to figure out why make check is failing.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:06AM
You might want to read this https://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html [gnu.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mtrycz on Wednesday October 08 2014, @09:07AM
Short story:
GNU created open-source alternatives to closed-source programs from the unix era, containing most of a base OS (and more) *except* the kernel. Then Throvalds stepped in and made a kernel. The whole OS is called GNU/Linux, meaning base OS utils with a Linux kernel. You can also have GNU/Hurd, meaning base OS utils with a Hurd kernel (while Linux is a macrokernel, Hurd is a microkernel), and a number of other alternatives. GNU utils have a clearly defined, stable API (coming from before GNU), and is also portable to, for eg., FreeBSD.
Currently, with corporate sponsoring form the Red Hat, GNU/Linux is being gradually substituted with systemd/Linux (gradually refering to: the amount of utils rewritten and the rate of adoption in the open).
The philosophy of systemd/Linux is very much against all the principles of unix philosophy (the way poeple have operated their systems for decades, and for real life proven reasons). Also systemd is notably not compatible with FreeBSD, or anything alse, it's declared Linux specific.
While it's true that systemd is open source, it's creating a closed system, deliberately doing so.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @01:45AM
This is really making me sad. All of the open source software I used to use and love is dying or dead now.
XFree86? Dead.
Firefox? Dead.
GNOME? Dead.
Perl? Dying.
GCC? Dying.
Debian? Dying.
:(
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday October 08 2014, @02:09AM
- XFree86? Dead.
X.org ?
- Firefox? Dead.
Are you sure?
- GNOME? Dead.
Use Gnome2? and does one need Gnome at all?
- Perl? Dying.
Are you sure?
- GCC? Dying.
Clang?
- Debian? Dying.
Slackware, Gentoo, FreeBSD?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @02:46AM
Neither Perl 6 nor Python 3 look super-healthy.
Meanwhile Perl 5 and Python 2 keep chuggin along.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @03:02AM
Perl 6 died years ago. Christ, it has been almost 15 years since it was announced, and there's still no implementation of it.
Yeah, I know about Rakudo. It's shit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @03:28PM
You mean, it was once alive? I must have missed that.
Did they even finish specifying it?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:27AM
There is no "open source community" but a roving band of corporations.
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:45AM
XFree86? Not really dead, as X.org is a fork and no one worked on the original after the fork, so it's more a rename than anything else.
Firefox? Really? I use it on Android all the time. They're under pressure from Chromium to implement a proper sandboxing mechanism though, so I don't know how long they'll last.
GNOME? Possibly, I haven't used it for over five years so I've no idea what the current state is. MdI seemed intent on copying every bad idea from Microsoft and ignoring any good ones.
Perl? Maybe not as widely used as before, but cpan is still full of actively developed things. There's now competition from Python, Ruby, Lua and so on, so it's no longer a case that every problem has to be solved with C or Perl, but I don't see that having more options is bad.
GCC? Well, the license is annoying and we're now seeing the exactly how much harm the open source ecosystem suffered from GCC's refusal to put in clean layering. While GCC is still slightly beating clang on optimisation (I reluctantly admit, as an LLVM developer), LLVM is used in pretty much every other language and embedded in the graphics stack. I saw my framerate for XBMC with no GPU acceleration jump from 3fps to 30fps when I switched from the old MESA code to the LLVM softpipe driver. We could have had that kind of improvement 20 years ago if GCC had been released under a license that allowed incorporation in X drivers and with sensible layering that made such adaptation possible. Most GPU drivers are also using LLVM for optimisation, so we're now seeing the real benefits of open source: code reuse in places the original designers didn't imagine. LLVM started life as a new optimisation framework for GCC (and was offered to the FSF, who rejected it), but now it's most widely used to JIT compile shader languages (including RenderScript on Android). Even a quickly written LLVM-based JIT typically gives a speedup of 5-10 times over a well-written interpreter (30+ over a badly written interpreter).
Debian? So what, it's a distribution. They aggregate the work of others. There will always be more people willing to do that.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 08 2014, @12:10PM
"MdI seemed intent on copying every bad idea from Microsoft and ignoring any good ones. "
Sounds like a creeping featuritis init system thats been widely discussed lately.
I tell ya, EEE embrace extend extinguish is whats going on. After EEE gets far enough, some submarine patent is going to surface and its bye bye linux hello marketing FUD for the competitor. SCO 2.0
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Wednesday October 08 2014, @01:16PM
You seem to be forgetting that it's not an init system, but a base OS. It does contain an init system, logically, but it's certainly not limited to one, neither in practice nor by design.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @04:15PM
I disagree in that ...
... but I fully agree with that.
Indeed, I'd argue that by making the code intentionally hard to dissect and adapt, Stallman has effectively made gcc less free, as in less supporting of the four software freedoms he himself stated; more exactly, of the following freedom:
"The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1)."
The design of gcc means that you are actively hindered from learning how the program works, and from changing it to do your computing as you wish. This was done explicitly from the the fear that someone would use those freedoms in order to circumvent them.
Yes, you can do all those things with the source of gcc (and there are certainly people who did). But then, you also can do all those things from a normal executable, by disassembling it. It's just yet again more work.
Lesson: When trying to protect freedom, be careful not to damage it by the very measures you're trying to protect it with.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @10:39AM
To add to what others have said, if you're really concerned about GNOME being "dead" (which it isn't; but GNOME 2) is, you'd probably be advised to go off looking for MATE, which is just a maintained version of GNOME 2. XFree86 is no loss, Firefox is running along happily enough irrespective of whether you like its UI changes or not, and declaring gcc as dying seems somewhat premature to me. I still use it fairly frequently, though I do alternate between it and clang for c/c++ work and when someone puts out a reasonable F03/08 frontend for LLVM I'll doubtless jump between that and gfortran, too.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday October 08 2014, @02:27PM
What? did you bother to look up it's history? X.org = xfree86. The Xfree project changed its license to one which was incompatible with the GPL. The last GPL compatible version was forked and became x.org. So xfree86 lives on as x.org and xfree86 project died the death it bought upon itself.
I loved FF for quite some time. Then it began to have more and more stability issues and a single bad page (usually flash was the culprit) would take the whole browser out. Good sandboxing does not exist meaning security is weak and is why I switched to Chrome. Chrome took the Unix fork() route and uses a multi process approach. That means each tab is its own process managed by a parent browser process. All communicate via IPC and a compromised tab can't read the memory of another tab. Firefox is vulnerable as all tabs share the same process memory space. On the modern web this is completely unacceptable. FF is looking to fix this and go the multi process route but I am not holding my breath.
It committed suicide after it developers decided to throw away everything that made gnome good and foist upon us a shell that flies in the face of good UI design. It pulled a Windows 8 before Windows 8 could. I guess the Gnome team wanted Linux to be first at something, even if was first to fail at UI design. It isn't dead but it should be.
Pearl sucks. Ever try to read someone elses perl code? There was a time when perl was all the rage but its not the only game in town. Python stole a lot of its thunder. Nothing lasts forever, better things come along. Get over it.
Yea, you might want to think about that a bit more. GCC still beats clang in terms of optimization, and in many cases, generated code is faster than clang/llvm. Plus it is mature and supports just about every processor arch out there. But, competition is always good. Does GCC have problems? Of course it does. But that dont mean its dying. The push to move OS X and FreeBSD to Clang/LLVM is because the license is more permissible than the GPL. So it fits their eco system better. We are also close to building the Linux kernel with Clang/LLVM too. Only a matter of time.
Plenty of life in Debian. Stop being an alarmist. The GNU/Hurd and GNU/kfreebsd ports might be dropped as they are niche projects (systemd is also helping). It's nice that Debian put effort into them, but you can't spread yourself thin. Sometimes the hard decision has to be made and projects axed. I played with both Hurd and kfreebsd and I really like the idea of kfreebsd. Too bad. But, this is open source world. They can be picked up and maintained by others. This isn't Microsoft where EOL means goodbye forever.
There is a pill for that :)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 08 2014, @03:07PM
"but you can't spread yourself thin. Sometimes the hard decision has to be made and projects axed."
Debian is a volunteer org and if you want to work on kfreebsd you will. Its very hard to actively stop a maintainer. If someone finds a way successfully to stop you, almost certainly you just "full stop", not move over to the emacs team, unless you wanted to anyway.
The release team can put up a list of minimums to meet a cutoff for something they're doing (such as, coordinating a release)
The problem kfreebsd is having, is not having enough volunteers to handle the workload of reaching the minimums and/or the interpretation of what the minimums should be may or may not be fair and/or the interpretation of where they are WRT the minimums at this time and in the near future around release time. But it has almost nothing to do with "the boss told you to work on XYZ and now you're on the ABC project"
Something that confuses the culture is at least some devs work for an employer who tells them what to do, both labor (obviously) and rumored for voting. So its not totally free will for everyone involved, but it is for most people.
(Score: 2) by cykros on Wednesday October 08 2014, @07:49PM
It's a matter of democracy not actually being the best way to organize the politics of every type of project under the sun. For human civilizations? It's terrible, but all workable alternatives we have have been worse. For software? All it takes is something getting popular for the democratic process to utterly kill most any project. Technocracy might be worth fearing in civic government, but it is an absolute necessity if you're going to have a remotely healthy software project. And when it's free software, you don't have to feel like you're depriving someone of their say, because if they have an idea, nothing stops them from forking your codebase and improving the diversity of options available, bringing more open competition to the world.
Instead, we have projects like Debian, where democracy worked for years, falling victim to its own success as the hipsters rip away every last vestige of the once great distribution. Meanwhile, it's stodgy old Slackware with it's dictator for life that has been getting all of the praise. Sometimes, we need to remember that one of the freedoms granted by free software is freedom to make a unilateral decision without asking everyone else for permission to do so. Failure to do so will bring more slowdowns with development while bickering and debate rages on about what should be done (while nothing actually gets done), as well as manipulation and propaganda campaigns bringing about problems of monoculture such as systemd has been bringing to more and more distributions and more and more aspects of those distributions since it was shat into the world.
(Score: 2) by cockroach on Wednesday October 08 2014, @01:55AM
I've been using Debian GNU/kFreeBSD on one of my servers as a guest system in FreeBSD jails. I really liked having Debian's package and security update mechanisms combined with FreeBSD's jails. Sure, some things were a bit quirky (eg. I just couldn't get Postgres to run in that setup) but I was hoping that the situation would improve.
On the positive side I really like FreeBSD's new package system (it's quite similar to apt) and may just switch over for good, now that the whole systemd thing is coming...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @02:51AM
FreeBSD just keeps on impressing, while Debian keeps on failing.
2015 will be an interesting year. By the end of it, Debian will be suffering. FreeBSD will be thriving. Gentoo and Slackware will be much better off than they were just a year earlier.
Systemd will kill Debian.
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:54AM
2015 Year of BSDesktop?
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @10:42AM
Well, when I get my flashy new desktop I'll be putting PCBSD on it. Or just vanilla FreeBSD - I've not decided that one yet.
(Score: 2) by danomac on Wednesday October 08 2014, @04:50PM
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday October 08 2014, @05:50PM
You mean they'll integrate X11 into systemD?
No wait .. they'll integrate Wayland. And then make X11 dependent on Wayland.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Wednesday October 08 2014, @10:22AM
I think there'll be enough unhappiness with systemd that Debian may fork,
FreeBSD is still missing one thing I need, Xen Dom0 support....
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday October 08 2014, @01:42PM
Slackware has it though: http://slackbuilds.org/repository/13.1/system/xen/
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Wednesday October 08 2014, @04:03PM
Systemd will kill Debian.
And if you listen carefully, you will hear redhat having a party.
(Score: 2) by cykros on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:28PM
While there's no direct monetary reason for them to be too happy, indirectly, it'd seem you're onto something. If the hobby crowd uses Fedora more, not only does Redhat get more testing, but they also look more attractive to employers who are less likely to get the "Yes I use Linux" from an employee only to be followed up by "Why isn't apt-get working on your systems?"
"Learn Redhat, Know Redhat" is just as true today as it ever was. As far as I'm concerned, they're the Android of the desktop/server/workstation Linux world...and seriously have problems playing well with others. Methinks that hat is red because it's been soaked in the blood of software they've walked over. Not that I'd necessarily say they don't have a right to most anything they're doing, but why anyone puts up with it is beyond me. It'll definitely do its share to keep Unix-like Linux usage right where it was in 2000, as people leave Windows not to it, but to systemd and its dark path.
I have to wonder if they're being a bit foolish, however. You'd think that overhauling the system that the userbase already knows how to use would work against their ability to gather more customers in the form of businesses, who absolutely need people trained to use the system in order to justify switching to it. More complexity and constant reinvention of the wheel simply can't be good business on their end.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by kaszz on Wednesday October 08 2014, @01:59AM
Could this be related to increased workload due systemd adoption?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @02:59AM
Yes, I think it's safe to blame this on systemd and the disruption it has caused to the entire Debian ecosystem and community.
(Score: 2) by pe1rxq on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:14AM
Since systemd is closely tied to the linux kernel it would be very convenient for the maintainers if the only incompatible kernel in the debian ecosystem would disappear.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Marand on Wednesday October 08 2014, @02:03AM
The kFreeBSD port has always been a niche thing with fewer people and resources, so this isn't particularly surprising. During the "technical committee" farce that decided to replace sysv-init with systemd for Jessie, when the kFreeBSD port was mentioned as a roadblock to switching, the argument (and port) were summarily dismissed as irrelevant.
Once systemd "won" and became the upcoming default init, what options were left? Maintain two official inits, one specifically for a single port; port systemd to non-linux; or drop kFreeBSD port. GNOME and systemd devs have made it clear in the past that the Linux kernel is the only one that matters and they want to create the One True OS that provides the entire stack, so porting isn't likely. Maintaining a second official init is a lot of work that many will see as a waste of time, especially for a niche port.
No, the most likely solution is to put the port that doesn't play nice with systemd on the chopping block. Even if it makes it into Jessie somehow, its days are likely numbered. I had some hope that the kFreeBSD port would help retain some non-systemd sanity in Debian, but it's not looking good.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @02:57AM
Systemd is like leprosy. It infects the host, Debian in this case, and slow eats away and irreparably damages it. First Debian's community is disrupted. Then its governance is corrupted. Then its ports, like kFreeBSD, are killed off, one by one. Soon enough Debian's quality and reliability are failing. This drives away the few remaining users. Finally, Debian is nothing but a corpse; a rotting carcass.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:18AM
I have mod points, but there is no option to mod the parent "poetical" :(
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @04:21PM
One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them,
One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
in the land of SystemD where the shadows lie.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by forsythe on Wednesday October 08 2014, @06:45AM
Leaving aside the obvious politics behind this, I wonder what will happen to Debian GNU/HURD?
Debian is currently (for better or worse) the biggest, indeed almost only, distribution of GNU/HURD, and the HURD has benefited from having a dedicated team of talented developers handling porting of packages. I notice that hurd-i386 is listed as an architecture that will not be part of Jessie's release, but I'm not sure if that means they are dropping it altogether, or whether it will persist in a tier-N state as a not-really-officially-supported arch.
(Score: 2) by marcello_dl on Wednesday October 08 2014, @10:15AM
I don't think that "the universal operating system" is going to hold as a motto for debian. Even if the phrase were not supposed to mean that the OS is kernel agnostic, I don't think that the systemd suite will work on exotic architectures and old PCs and embedded stuff ever. Debian should be init system agnostic to be universal, IMHO, and technically it was it until systemd dependencies crept in.
(Score: 1) by barnsbarns on Wednesday October 08 2014, @03:43PM
This exactly. Systemd is a limitation to freedom and therefore a indifference to Debian's ability to be a "universal operating system".
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 08 2014, @12:41PM
So... for people who don't know much about the innards of Debian, which is apparently a lot of people, I will try to explain aside from the politics of systemd etc.
So drop some acid or close your eyes and imagine or whatever helps you adsorb analogies. Debian has a gigantic pool of packaged software and each package file has a version number tag. Not entirely unlike git, at least conceptually. Many lists are made of a subset of those package versions. Theres a list called "experimental" and thats crazy brand new technology demonstrator alpha stuff that may or may not blow up and some brave poor bastard needs to test it. Theres a list of slightly older and cleaner packages and their version tags called "unstable" which is run of the mill fresh off github and it probably works and at least attempts to follow all of Debian policy so it plays well with others and is "safe-ish" to run although not on a production server. Theres a list of yet slightly older and even cleaner packages called "testing", and finally another list called "stable". And some other lists like "old-stable" but I don't want to confuse things.
Stuff tagged with "unstable" moves automagically to "testing" in 10 days if no one files a significant bug in the bug tracking system on the unstable package. This is onesie twosie individual package at a time movement. Every day, actually every couple hours, a new batch of presumably clean and healthy packages is promoted from unstable to testing.
Likewise there's a process for moving stuff from being tagged "testing" to being tagged "stable". This (semi-manual) process picks up all of testing on "release day" and throws it into stable. The way this stuff is decided is a cabal decides what moves and when. Now don't freak out about it being a cabal, its more or less a meritocracy and a do-ocracy and all that good stuff and they have done excellent work. Just pointing out it isn't the project leader or an election or something, its a cabal. Releases sometimes take a couple years, sometimes like 9 months, it varies based on major transitions and installer new features and issues, and probably astrological stuff and general mood too. Well we could sit here and wait for KDE 5 or kernel 4.0 but maybe we should drop a "stable" instead of waiting. There is both more, and less, coordination with major projects than you'd think, in other words it varies, including your definition of what a major project is, LOL.
Different "lists" have different levels of support from various teams. The release team isn't burning old fashioned legacy optical install media with your unstable packages, sorry just aint happening they only use stuff from stable (uh sort of, other than periodic point security releases). The security team is hyper about stable and old-stable and has become more vigilant about testing, experimental you're kinda on your own its called experimental for a reason, and old-old-old-stable you're kinda on your own. And the installer team is very interested in getting stable to work and not so interested in unstable other than at the start of a cycle.
Anyway all this announcement means is kfreebsd is probably not going to have its list of packages tagged as "stable" and a bunch of other archs are or are not going to get a stable release this time around.
Not releasing does mean you're not going to get a legacy old fashioned DVD with a brand new Debian label on release day. And release notes aren't going to list an arch that isn't released (duh). The website and PR team are definitely not going to announce in headlines and press releases "debian 8.0, which includes (your arch that didn't release)" And a couple other things.
This has happened with HURD and m68k aka 68000 and now kfreebsd and happened to the s390 zOS before it got popular enough and likely others. I think from memory amd64 missed the first release cutoff but it was fine after that (doesn't really matter, this is just from memory) Old sparc, pre sparc64, at least I think that got cut a long time ago. Alpha (the early 90s architecture, one of the first widespread 64 bit pro-sumer-ish archs) got cut a long time ago.
It does not mean, at least not today, at least not with this announcement, that an archive or BTS section or website section or wiki section is getting rm -Rf treatment. Could very well happen in the future. Or maybe not.
So enough factual stuff. Now wild speculation commences:
From my limited experience with freebsd so far, pkg based binary packages being more or less apt ported to freebsd, that probably reduces a lot of the demand for freebsd kernel on Debian. "Oh you really want something like apt-get on freebsd, well post-2013 or so, just type pkg instead of apt-get and you're mostly all good" Although I like and would miss Debian policy and DFSG and the social contract (despite however much they might not be followed, at least they try).
(Score: 2) by forsythe on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:42PM
Thanks for the explanation - this addresses the post I already made in the story that prevents me from modding you up.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 08 2014, @09:10PM
Watching the innards of Debian while a release is hatched is analogous to watching sausage being made. I had a good analogy going with pink slime but we're all better off with me leaving it out. Everything in the post was 100% factual other than the conjecture at the end. I would imagine the release of FreeBSD 10.0 with pkg functionality took a lot of wind out of the debian-kfreebsd sails.
Imagine if Debian threatened to port apt-get into Windows as a supported arch (sounds insane, but not impossible) and before they're done, Microsoft actually put their own apt-get into winders 10.0 to head them off at the pass. Madness.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Wednesday October 08 2014, @07:37PM
Why do I want to use systemd?
(Score: 2) by cykros on Wednesday October 08 2014, @08:47PM
A.) You're a catholic, and really like the medieval style of penance. Systemd is great for that!
B.) Choice makes you nervous. Have no fear; systemd promises you a Linux environment with less choice getting in the way than ever before!
C.) You're really an all or nothing person. If one thing breaks, the entire system should go down, Windows 95 BSOD style. Fear not; the systemd devs are working tirelessly to bring back this experience formerly loved by millions.
D.) The text editor wars have you entirely unable to decide which one to use. You're in luck! With systemd, you don't need a text editor to read the logs or configure anything, because even if you had one, you'd still be using binary utilities, because that's just How Things Are Done (TM).
E.) You believe that we really should have one program on our computers that does everything, or at least remains heavily in control of any programs that haven't yet had their functionality mapped into the one application to rule them all. Pipes scare you, and bash scripting may as well be forbidden magic. Systemd is for you! It's currently on track to make sure that everything on your system will be wrapped up in its loving grasp, and if you've accidentally forgotten to install it (the horror!) don't worry, because nothing else will have the audacity to work until it is properly installed. If your favorite software doesn't yet have this safeguard, stay tuned, because systemd reliance will surely come for your favorite utilities next!
And lastly,
F:) Because Red Hat says so. What good is a free system without a corporate overlord to ensure that it is used exactly as they prescribe?
I apologize if you were actually looking for someone to tell you why you should use systemd, but as we've shown over the last few months here, I don't think any of us could dig you up a single good reason to do so. The official story seems to be "make boot time faster!"...which everyone surely is willing to give up everything else for, for those biannual reboots. Perhaps they're planning on making it a more appreciated thing, once rebooting your Linux box becomes more of a necessity with systemd at the helm.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday October 25 2014, @06:51PM
I wouldn't worry about D, I'm fairly sure both vi and emacs will be included as hard dependencies in the next release.
(Score: 2) by cykros on Wednesday October 29 2014, @02:38PM
That's probably true. Emacs, because systemd aspires to do everything, and Vim, because it also needs a decent text editor.