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posted by martyb on Monday November 17 2014, @11:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the more-systemd-fallout dept.

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.

 
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  • (Score: 1) by radu on Monday November 17 2014, @12:38PM

    by radu (1919) on Monday November 17 2014, @12:38PM (#116678)

    I'm gonna try BSD anyway

    I read this a lot during the last few month and kept waiting for someone mentioning servers. Didn't happen so I'll start here, even if it's not quite on topic.

    I'm running a few VPS, no host seems to be offering BSD, only different Linux flavors. At least not in the price range I'm paying now (~5-15€/month for 512-2048MB RAM). Gentoo and/or Slackware (no plans to default to systemd yet) are also quite difficult to find (and somehow more difficult to administrate)

    What do we do when/if no wide-spread Linux distribution without systemd is available any longer?

  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday November 17 2014, @12:54PM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 17 2014, @12:54PM (#116686) Journal
    You google "cheap vps bsd".
    E.g. https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/freebsd-hosting-shared-vps-etc.21472/ [freebsd.org]
    Seems many are Europe based.
    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
  • (Score: 1) by SNK on Monday November 17 2014, @01:09PM

    by SNK (243) on Monday November 17 2014, @01:09PM (#116698)

    You might want to try RamNode http://www.ramnode.com [ramnode.com]

    It is even cheaper if you take 5 mins to google for discount coupons.

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by zocalo on Monday November 17 2014, @01:12PM

    by zocalo (302) on Monday November 17 2014, @01:12PM (#116699)
    Been there, done that, currently mid-migration. We were generally unhappy with RHEL6 (so initially nothing to do with SystemD) and started looking around for other Linux distros, but general discontent with the way SystemD was going prompted us to include BSD in our evaluations. We have mostly servers (physical and virtual), but also admin workstations and so on, and BSD won hands down for us - YMMV of course. We're seeing significant performance boosts across the board and the package interdependencies are much cleaner so there's left cruft installed which makes it easier to harden the system post install. Ironically for all the claims SystemD makes about improving boot times many of our BSD servers boot up to an operational state slightly faster than the SystemD based Linux distros we looked at, probably down to the lack of extra cruft.

    Downsides... Well, there was obviously a learning curve, but nothing a competent *NIX admin would struggle with; no different from moving between any two unicies, really. We also have some COTS software which either won't run on BSD (not yet really looked into why that is in most cases) or runs but isn't supported/certified on BSD (in discussion with the vendors), but we're mostly still working through the standard builds that are easy migrations at the moment. We also have some systems that are so crufty and/or reliant on Linux specifics that we've not even considered moving them to BSD yet, plus personal preference - several of our staff are sticking with Linux on their desktops and we'll also be maintaining some Linux servers for testing & development work in addition to any production servers we can't migrate.
    --
    UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
    • (Score: 2) by forsythe on Monday November 17 2014, @03:53PM

      by forsythe (831) on Monday November 17 2014, @03:53PM (#116775)

      I'm simply replying to this post because it's the first reply I happened to see using the spelling, but why are so many posters calling the software ``systemD?'' It seems to call itself ``systemd'' pretty clearly, for example in the Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org], where I would expect to find the correct capitalization.

      • (Score: 2) by novak on Monday November 17 2014, @05:51PM

        by novak (4683) on Monday November 17 2014, @05:51PM (#116839) Homepage

        Maybe it was a typo and he meant to write substance D. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Scanner_Darkly [wikipedia.org]

        I think it fits. Substance D splits the two hemispheres of the brain, causing them to conflict, not unlike the two camps in the linux world.

        --
        novak
      • (Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Monday November 17 2014, @06:31PM

        by GungnirSniper (1671) on Monday November 17 2014, @06:31PM (#116863) Journal

        Capitalizing the D makes it look less like a typo if you are already capitalizing the S in System per English language conventions for proper nouns.

        • (Score: 2) by fnj on Monday November 17 2014, @09:39PM

          by fnj (1654) on Monday November 17 2014, @09:39PM (#116955)

          Rather than get bogged down in whether systemd is a proper noun or not, I would just settle for long established Unix-type-OS practice. Other damons are not capitalized; it's "httpd" and "smtpd". It gives of a dumb hick smell to spell it System-D. In fact executables in general are not capitalized; it's "cp" and "rm".

          freedesktop.org's systemd home page [freedesktop.org] even tells you how to spell it.

          "Spelling

          "Yes, it is written systemd, not system D or System D, or even SystemD. And it isn't system d either. Why? Because it's a system daemon, and under Unix/Linux those are in lower case, and get suffixed with a lower case d. And since systemd manages the system, it's called systemd. It's that simple."

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 18 2014, @04:17AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 18 2014, @04:17AM (#117102)

            As an intact Christian, your use of daemonic eunuchs disgusts me.