[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
Related Stories
It's like Debian Linux, but without systemd.
Release notes are at https://devuan.org/os/debian-fork/ascii-stable-announce-060818.
Previously: Devuan ASCII Sprint -- 15-17 Dec. 2017
(Score: 5, Informative) by Appalbarry on Wednesday December 13 2017, @07:25AM (4 children)
A minor thing that the submission lacked: https://devuan.org [devuan.org].
(Score: 5, Interesting) by canopic jug on Wednesday December 13 2017, @07:54AM (3 children)
Thanks.
Another link that I should have added to the summary is to a blog post about why Devuan has become increasingly important [ungleich.ch].
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Bot on Wednesday December 13 2017, @10:03AM
I am in a parallel universe with debs and no (or reduced presence of)systemd with antix and mx linux, but I am surely going to check the beta out. Whoever does things without systemd helps you too.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 13 2017, @07:21PM (1 child)
The Devuan developers and users are free to use their software as they like in the spirit of free-as-in-freedom software. I wish them all success and happiness.
But I don't get the horror stories over systemd. I've been using it for years without problems. We use it on hundreds of bare metal and virtual servers at work without problems. Literally tens of millions of servers, maybe hundreds of millions, use it without problems.
The only time I had a systemd problem was when I had an entry in /etc/fstab for an NTFS drive that was not cleanly powered down by Windows when we lost power. Systemd failed to mount the drive at boot, and halted the boot process because it couldn't reach the local-fs.target. After five minutes of research, I booted the machine from a USB flash drive and modified /etc/fstab to put a 'nofail' option on the entries that aren't critical to the boot process. Restarted, and all was well. Note that this isn't a bug that would affect a casual Linux user because I had entered the original fstab entry by hand myself, the installer hadn't done it for me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 14 2017, @11:47AM
It's nice if you don't have gotten any grief because it. But are you aware of the design decisions like the "root by default" thing? It's not exactly awe inspiring. Also the devs have a not-so-small god complex and brush aside everybody they disagree with just because. Then there's the Linux == Red Hat perspective which is not too healthy either. And the mission creep. etcetc
Just saying that even if many people boast they use windoze or OSSUX without any issues doesn't mean all is fine.
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Wednesday December 13 2017, @07:31AM (9 children)
Why on earth did they choose "ASCII" as name? Do they want to suggest that they don't have proper Unicode support?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 13 2017, @07:45AM (1 child)
https://devuan.org/os/releases [devuan.org]
Still don't know why they picked ASCII. If they wanted to pick a Minor Planet with a Computer Science themed name, they could have picked Adalovelace.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 13 2017, @08:44PM
> they could have picked Adalovelace.
Ya, pornstar names would have worked better.
[thatsthejoke.jpg]
(Score: 5, Informative) by KritonK on Wednesday December 13 2017, @07:55AM (2 children)
When Devuan was first forked, just about the only information one could find about it was that its distributions would be named after minor planets. For compatibility with Debian, they'd start with 10464 Jessie, so that their Jessie fork would have the same name, and then they'd switch to names beginning with successive letters of the alphabet, starting with A: 3568 ASCII, 38086 Beowulf, 1 Ceres, and so on. They probably chose ASCII for the name of their first distribution after Jessie, because of the association of the name with computing. I don't know if there is a minor planet named Unicode but, if there is, I wouldn't be surprised if they use it, when the time comes to pick a name beginning with U.
(Score: 5, Informative) by MadTinfoilHatter on Wednesday December 13 2017, @09:32AM (1 child)
To expand a bit on that, since it could be misinterpreted so that the Devuan release following "Beowulf" is going to be "Ceres", which is not the case. Ceres is (forever) the name of the unstable Devuan release, corresponding to Debian Sid. Ceres was picked simply because it's minor planet #1. When the time comes for a "C"-named Devuan, some other name than that will be used.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 14 2017, @03:19AM
If there's an astronomer reading this: please discover a minor planet and name it CentOS. :)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 13 2017, @09:20AM (2 children)
They also made a mistake in naming their initial release jessie leading to name collisions in scripts the naturally assumed jessie was debian, making conversion to support devuan a pain. ascii, again poor choice. beowulf, means clustering to every one else.
Odd choices.
(Score: 1, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Wednesday December 13 2017, @02:26PM
A lot of our cyber companies give away their cyber. They call it free cyber. But they make it very confusing to use. Very confusing. So folks will buy the support. They make their money, the companies make their money, on the support.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 13 2017, @03:05PM
It is a convenient name to stay under the radar of meddling busybodies who would FUD Devuan in an organization. When an update to a new version happens, and the busybody says "why a minor fork, support, blah blah", you can say "it has been rock solid here for two years!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 13 2017, @03:55PM
ASCII no questions.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Wednesday December 13 2017, @11:46AM
It was slightly a disappointment to find out that they actually ship with very old packages. But KDE was snappier, so I went on.
Their testing (referred here as ASCII) is mostly broken if you want to use KDE, so thins is a good news for me. Not because I want the latest version of KDE, no! But because currently ASCII won't let you run KDE at all. And I want a version of cmake that is at least 3.1 which added support for C++11.
Meanwhile, I have compiled my own binary of latest cmake, so the problem is mitigated.
All in all, I am quite happy.
(Score: 3, Informative) by zeigerpuppy on Wednesday December 13 2017, @02:09PM (5 children)
Thankfully it's pretty easy to install Debian without systemd.
See here for instance: http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Debian_Stretch [without-systemd.org]
While that is still possible (and it doesn't seem like Debian is abandoning sysvinit currently) then I don't really see the point of Devuan. Of course I wish them luck and it all helps to put pressure on Debian to dump systemd.
(Score: 5, Informative) by MadTinfoilHatter on Wednesday December 13 2017, @02:58PM (3 children)
True, but to my understanding YMMV a great deal with how well it works. E.g. the Debian maintainers make little to no effort in making sure their packages actually work with sysv, the angband-packages are not necessarily up to date from what I understand, et.c. So while it's possible to run Debian without systemd, you're relegated to 2nd class citizen status if you do. It's kind of like running Windows software on wine: It might work today - it might even work very well, but there are no guarantees that an update won't break everything to hell and back when systemd suddenly decides it needs a hard dependency to ${random_software_package}.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 13 2017, @08:57PM
Angband? Quit playing games at work!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 13 2017, @10:28PM
> Thankfully it's pretty easy to install Debian without systemd.
Alcoholics Anonymous has 12 steps. Your instructions have 14.