from the I-hope-we-don't-regret-this dept.
Ian Jackson's general resolution to prevent init system coupling has failed to pass, the majority vote deciding that the resolution is unnecessary. This means that not only will Debian's default init be systemd, but packages will not be required to support other init systems. Presumably, this means that using other init systems on Debian (without using systemd as a base) will not be possible without major workarounds, or possibly at all. It also leaves the future of Debian projects such as kFreeBSD unclear, as systemd is linux specific.
The vote results can be found here
The winners are:
Option 4 "General Resolution is not required"
Related Stories
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?
I found this to be a very good read (Score:4, Informative)
https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2014/11/msg00002.html [debian.org]
Damnit (Score:3, Insightful)
As an Arch user on all my personal machines, this doesn't mean a whole lot to me; I've been on systemd for a while, though I reserve the right to bitch about it. As a sysadmin who usually puts debian and derivatives on servers I now have to revisit Slackware as my server distro of choice.
Bustin' makes me feel good. (For the clueless... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9We2XsVZfc&t=165)
Re:Damnit (Score:5, Insightful)
This issue extends far beyond individual distros, and far beyond Debian.
Over the past few years, we've systematically seen several large and significant open source projects utterly trashed by the same sort of hipsters who are pushing systemd into Debian. These people are destroying decades of work and effort in a very short amount of time.
GNOME: Once the premiere open source desktop environment, it became a complete laughing stock thanks to GNOME 3. Despite a majority of the user community expressing complete and utter disapproval of the direction it took, the developers ignored them and released an unusable product. GNOME 2 users fled to KDE, Xfce, LXDE, and other environments rather than use GNOME 3.
Firefox: Once the premiere open source web browser, it became a complete laughing stock thanks to Firefox 4 and later. Despite a majority of the user community expressing complete and utter disapproval of the direction it took, the developers ignored them and released an unusable product. Firefox users fled to Chrome, Opera, Safari and even IE rather than use Firefox.
Ubuntu Linux: Once the premiere user-friendly Linux distro, it became a complete laughing stock thanks to Unity, Upstart and Amazon tracking. Despite a majority of the user community expressing complete and utter disapproval of the direction it took, the developers ignored them and released an unusable product. Ubuntu Linux users fled to Linux Mint, Debian and other distros rather than use Ubuntu Linux.
And now we can add:
Debian: Once the premiere Linux distro, it became a complete laughing stock thanks to systemd. Despite a majority of the user community expressing complete and utter disapproval of the direction it took, the developers ignored them and released an unusable product. Debian users fled to Slackware, Gentoo and even FreeBSD rather than use Debian.
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Dark Day (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a dark day for not just Debian, but linux. I've heard some people anticipating Debian's demise as a result of systemd, but I don't think so. It just has too much inertia, regardless of how much has been lost in this fight. I think linux is going to get worse, but Debian will probably stay about where it was before in relation to other distros, since systemd is almost a given at this point.
Well, I won't be using it again.
novak
Re:Dark Day (Score:5, Informative)
My desktop is now in the middle of a migration to FreeBSD
Same here. Hows it going? I've been keeping notes.
What do you think of their bootloader? Its only been 20 years of LILO later GRUB for me so its interesting to see something new. rc.ng or whatever its called is subjectively about twice as fast as systemd on the same hardware doing the same tasks which makes me laugh and laugh.
Everything is intense deja vu very similar to Debian but different. Wasn't it a trip seeing the installer basically being the same and asking the same questions, almost but not quite? I swear you could slap "Debian Jessie" on it and search/replace some strings and totally prank someone... So similar but some differences in the details.
So the docs are in subversion, and the core OS has one updater, and there's a binary package system, and the ports system, or you can install stuff by hand, sounds crazy but apparently they "work together" well enough. So far I have done Nothing with ports at all. All packages. On my to do list.
I haven't gone ZFS yet. On bare metal linux for a decade (or more?) I always LVM to make drive upgrade/migration easy and haven't adjusted my workflow to the BSD way of thinking. This will require some thought and screwing around and reinstalling.
I found installing X to be really weird. You have to enable hal and dbus then install xorg, then you get "Elf Binary type 3" errors which means you need to load up the linux shim in order to load the linux nvidia driver which unfortunately my peculiar card requires. Isn't the BSD equiv of linux's /etc/modules baroque? So there's entries in /boot/defaults/loader.conf but you override them in /boot/loader.conf, which is similar but different from /etc/rc.conf (isn't everything conceptually supposed to be in /etc/rc.conf... except for what isnt?)
xmonad doesn't automatically pull in hs-mobar and dmenu and trayer so manually install those packages. And what is up with this hs- prefix?
The HAL found my mouse and moused worked perfectly on the VCs and I've enabled allscreens_flags="-m on" but the blasted X wouldn't detect the mouse until I rebooted. What is this F-ing windows? Craziest thing ever. Willing to ignore it as just bad luck or cosmic rays or something. But windows style "you've installed a mouse, you need to reboot" type BS... Grrr.
I had the usual X startup entertainment from memory xmonad didn't put in a desktop stanza, my favorite *DM doesn't run on freebsd, I ended up starting xmonad in .xinitrc. On the Debian boxes it usually lives in .xsession. I think this very *DM dependent and itsn't really a BSD issue.
Speaking of XDM you manually edit /etc/ttys to turn it "on". Really, freebsd? Really?
I have a monitor that is insane and reports its 1024x768 even though its physically 1600x1200 and its a PITA under both linux and freebsd to "force" the video card to output the correct resolution. Fun fun fun but my problem not linux or BSDs problem.
Sound autodetected and works perfectly, basically the typical linux experience since the early 90s with the exception of the hideous pulseaudio years. Boring! Networking hardware and config was the same way, nice and boring and predictable and simple. I don't do any GUI foolishness or "network mismanager" or any of that much harder more agonizing stuff. Just works.
LDAP install was interesting (I used kerberos and ldap at home) and the client lives in BOTH /usr/local/etc/ldap.conf and /usr/local/openldap/ldap.conf. That was interesting. I also had to edit /usr/local/etc/nss_ldap.conf and /etc/nsswitch.conf. That done, its a perfectly behaved LDAP client. Hurray! I had some hilarity where my linux login shell isn't in the same place as BSD's login shells but BSD doesn't mind following a symlink, thankfully.
Kerberos was excruciatingly boring and predictable. Shockingly /etc/krb5.conf is the same thing on linux and BSD. There's some funkiness where its "linux speak" to put a deny at
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Re:Dark Day (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the dark days were the multiple resignations resulting from the way the debate has been carried out, including personal and physical threats against people. I don't care which side such things are coming from but, to me, people being threatened away from working on FOSS is a lot darker than _any_ technical decision.
The vote result may be good from that point of view - a massive majority against FD and clear support for the process working as it already is. It's not a split or close vote like the TC, and again that is good - it's not going to split Debian in two.
None of this takes away your choice of init system - one of Joey Hess's pre-resignation posts made it clear that the init system package maintainers were working together in consensus to maintain choice of init system. Assuming they haven't all been driven away by threats now, that is very reassuring (less good is that Joey seemed to feel that the GR was stomping all over that consensus way of working).
Dependencies don't take away your choice of init, though they might create consequences from it, and they aren't created by package maintainers either - the maintainers job (surely?) is to assess and document the dependencies that are already there from upstream. Blaming maintainers or Debian as a whole for dependencies introduced elsewhere is just shooting the messenger. Indeed, I think the GR could conceivably have lead Debian into demise - if Gnome devs make it irreversibly dependent on systemd, and KDE does the same, and maybe the other desktops too, where would that leave Debian if the GR had passed, without a desktop, as a headless server-only distribution ?
The way it is, if Gnome requires systemd then Gnome users can still use Debian and non-systemd users can still use Debian, the only restriction is that you can't use Gnome and not-systemd, but that will be the same for every distribution so Debian continues to give you as much choice as possible. Under the GR as far as I can see if Gnome becomes irreversibly dependent on systemd then it would have to be dropped from Debian, thus reducing choice.
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Time to switch back to NetBSD. (Score:0)
NetBSD sysupgrade reminds me of the old Debian installers that just unpacked the base system from a tarball, before they started that bullshit of installing every individual base package separately.
The only reason I stopped using NetBSD was binary upgrades really sucked. Well you know, with sysupgrade and pkgin they don't fucking suck anymore.
Goodbye Linux. It wasn't nice knowing you, bitch.
Stop discussion (Score:2)
Interestingly, the winning vote was for stopping any further discussion of init systems.
With the 4 resignations just before the vote blaming the discussion for their decision, it seems that the victimisation technique worked for the acolytes, even if it was mostly received with laughter when the prophet tried it and attacked all Linux community.
It Might Work In 20 Years (Score:3, Informative)
In a month when two decade old bugs were found in Windows and bash, you'd expect people to have enough foresight to see that they'll be finding systmemd security [seclists.org] flaws [seclists.org] for the next two decades. Not using symlinks, shell scripts and/or globbing to boot a system does not change the fact that symlinks, shell scripts and globbing still exists [soylentnews.org] but is certainly a method to introduce new problems. Specifically, reducing boot time by a faction of a second has caused considerable reduction in reliability and security and has greatly increased the coupling of components. However, anyone who notes this supposedly hates [google.com] disabled people [youtube.com].
Now is a good time to clear your cookies.
Sh** (Score:1)
Now I'm going to have to switch distros again. I guess I had a good run with Debian, but I'm not going to stay with a distro that doesn't care about what the users want. I usually expect that crap from proprietary software projects, so I'm just amazed this is happening.
From having used GNOME since the pre 1.x days and having to switch to XFCE a few years back, to Mozilla supporting H.264 support (but only for operating systems that already licensed the codec) and other very questionable decisions, and now to this - the last few years haven't been great for what was once some of the most popular and well respected free software projects.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
Re:Sh** (Score:5, Informative)
Now I'm going to have to switch distros again. I guess I had a good run with Debian, but I'm not going to stay with a distro that doesn't care about what the users want. I usually expect that crap from proprietary software projects, so I'm just amazed this is happening.
I'm not giving up on using Debian just yet. It still has systemd separated, so you only run it as init if you install systemd-sysv, and can instead install systemd-shim if something else on the system needs to use the other parts of systemd (like systemd-logind). That means it's possible to pin systemd-sysv to -1 priority and not have to worry about abrupt init and logging system changes, which is what I did.
I created a file (name doesn't matter, but I used nosystemd) in /etc/apt/preferences.d/ with the following contents:
Package: systemd-sysv
Pin: release o=Debian
Pin-Priority: -1
With that in place, systemd-sysv can't be installed, so the worst that will happen is an update will try to install systemd-shim instead and you'll get the parts of systemd that the desktop bits (upower, policykit, etc) want without changing your init or logging. With that done it's just another annoying dbus/hal/etc layer of bullshit and is mostly harmless.
(Another note for anyone upgrading from wheezy: you'll want to install sysvinit-core before doing the full update because of the old sysvinit package becoming a transitional one)
I don't really like the situation, but it's still better than most distros and I'm not ready to jump ship to BSD yet. Ubuntu purged sysvinit a while back in favour of upstart and others are doing the same thing for systemd now. Debian still gives you some choice in the matter in a way that's reasonably flexible, so I'm taking a "wait and see" approach for now.
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Damn Shame (Score:0)
With the Debian packaging, Linux became "modern" (for those of us coming from Slackware). Back to the ancient tar balls, then. Might as well fiddle with FreeBSD, too.
The community is more important than software (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't have a community based project that rides roughshod over half that community... the community is the engine that makes things possible! If the new constitution is so caustic I can understand people quitting over it. No matter if you liked this particular decision or not, it was made too soon and has badly damaged the community. This has engaged people from much further afield than just registered Debian developers. People CARE about this. Imagine what a couple of years of furious put-up or shut-up time could have achieved - the number of brains willing to spend concentrated time on this problem RIGHT NOW is huge! This could have been (and perhaps could still be) an opportunity to create something great, and if cooperation was extended to the BSD world it could have even closed the great SysV/BSD init divide with something considered genuinely better by most. That would save so much dev time in the long term.
Are you sure this means what you think it means (Score:2)
To all the people flying off the handle: I understand the frustration, (I in fact share it), but I'm going to set all that aside and ask: are you sure this means what you think it means?
One way to interpret the decision is to see it as "WTF? How is this even a problem?". Let me explain just a tad. For the sysadmin crowd at the center of controversy, Debian is a server OS. Now the only packages that depend on systemd are a bunch of cruft that nobody of competence would install on a server in the first place. Gnome is the only one I can think of at the moment. If you're not going to install Gnome, just customize your installation to remove systemd and substitute the init system of your choice. Presto. You're cooking with gas.
Now, this sidesteps the long term "creeping tentacles" issue, and correct me if I'm wrong, but as of right now, and as of Debian 8, how does the present situation mandate that in order to avoid systemd, anybody HAS to jump ship NOW? Yes, systemd avoiders will have to develop the exact procedure to keep systemd out, and yes, that may become more and more difficult with time as systemd-itis spreads its tentacles into linux. Everybody has to make their own decision what to do and when to do it long term. But why right now?
I have no issue with anyone abandoning Debian (and linux!) because of the direction it's drifting, but as I understand it, that is at this time more of a statement of principle than an actual necessity.
Option 1 is style... so why not? (Score:2, Insightful)
Option 1 "Packages may not (in general) require a specific init system"
Can someone explain, in a technical manner, why this was not desired?
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
Interesting split of the anti-vote (Score:4, Interesting)
https://vote.debian.org/~secretary/gr_initcoupling/tally.txt
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
while(<>) {
my ($a1,$a2,$b) = ($_ =~ m/V: (.)(.).(.)./) or next;
if ($a1 eq '-'){$a1=6;}
if ($a2 eq '-'){$a2=6;}
if ($b eq '-'){$b=6;}
my ($min,$max) = $a1<$a2 ? ($a1,$a2) : ($a2,$a1);
if($b<=$max and $b>=$min) { print; }
}
phil@bazspaz:~/tmp$ perl tally.pl < tally.txt | wc
90 457 3634
phil@bazspaz:~/tmp$ wc tally.txt
483 2450 19433 tally.txt
So nearly a fifth of the vote had "4" (keep head in sand) separating "1" and "2". I've not got a condorcet calculator, but if you replaced "1" and "2" with preferred("1","2"), I have a feeling the outcome would have been different. In particular as it was fairly close.
It's easy to say it was gerrymandered that way, but if the "1" and "2" preferrers aren't smart enough to see that they have more in common than they do with the enemy, then they deserve to lose.
And I'll join the masses now in ex-Debian Diaspora. It's getting harder and harder to find an OS which supports my hardware, my philosophy, and my way of working.
Making a public pledge to no longer contribute to that other place, whatever it was called
Debian Fork? (Score:2)
I am not a deep, Linux greybeard like some here. I started out on RedHat long ago and moved to Debian when it became obvious APT was a far superior package management system. Ubuntu was therefore a convenient transition, and when I switched to XFCE in later iterations to escape the Unity and Gnome3 nonsense my happiness continued unabated. Not having to spend days and weeks troubleshooting low-level aspects of my operating system is a plus for me, because I can spend more time working on my own software.
So being on the edges of the systemd debate, I have heard mentions of the possibility of forking Debian. Is this serious? I would really like to know, because I don't want to get sucked into vendor-lock-in, especially if it's coming from RedHat. This would be my preference, because I am quite fond of APT and moving to BSD would be a serious drag.
Washington DC delenda est.
fork this! (Score:1)
attempts to excise the problem have failed. it seems like a good reason to fork.
Clear as mud (Score:2)
Do these Debian people *try* to make these votes as confusing as possible?
If I'm interpreting this correctly, the only option that would actually stop systemd from sinking its tentacles into everything is the "NO FOAD" vote? Sounds like all the other options leave the door open that the tentacles are already flowing into. The level of "all or nothing" this whole debate has prompted is ridiculous.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
social engineering? (Score:1)
I'm sorry Debian but ... (Score:2)
After all the years (13+) we've been together, all the learning, and all the years of happy computing I've decided that it is time to say goodbye.
And time to say "Hello, Slackware"
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
Gnome3, Cinnamon, Systemd and FreeBSD (Score:1)
All this talk of systemd as a dependency had me thinking that maybe gnome3 and cinnamon would never make it into the official FreeBSD ports tree. This morning both of them were added when I updated the tree. I think I'll try building cinnamon over the weekend and see how it works on my FreeBSD laptop.
Which version of Debian pre-systemd? (Score:0)
Which version does not contain it? I want to download that version before it is no longer available.
To Ian Jackson (Score:0)
I ask you to spearhead the debian fork effort. You've been with Debian long enough and deep enough to know what it takes to run a distro. You may be surprised to find there are enough new hands willing to pitch in (who till now mostly been users) to preserve Debian(-nesque) distro going without systemd (and other similar ) affliction.
Re:systemd trolls and BSD trolls (Score:2)
KINDLY CUT THE SHIT THANK YOU
I think they have the exact same thing to say about systemd...
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
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