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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.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Arik on Monday November 17 2014, @05:00PM
But adoption is not being driven by any technical advantages. It is 100% political. RedHat is the biggest player in terms of paying people to work on Free Software, and they are the ones developing this and pushing it into every distro they can get to, by hook or by crook.
I havent been too involved with debian, and I am glad at this point, because the way it's been co-opted would certainly have my blood at a full boil if I had been. What's the point of having such clearly defined rules and procedures if you cant be bothered to follow them anyway?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by novak on Monday November 17 2014, @06:15PM
I've used Debian since about 2008, it's not my main desktop but I have some servers on it. That's fairly recent by most people's standards here, but I've always been more of a slackware guy.
I'm still hoping that the Debian general resolution to preserve init system choice passes. Maybe this is wishful thinking but here's how I see it: more distros depend on Debian than any other, and I don't want every linux locked into systemd. Most of these are crappy knock-offs that really don't set themselves apart in any way- it's usually "debian with X default desktop" or "Ubuntu with a few programs installed by default to do Y." But you know, one of the great things about linux is that you have the freedom to do whatever you want, and that includes making distros that I think have no real purpose. Who even cares what I say? Some of these little distros have done pretty well for themselves. I really don't want to see every distro forced into using the ever-expanding monster that is systemd.
novak
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday November 17 2014, @06:56PM
Same here, but I have used Debian on and off when it fit my needs.
"I'm still hoping that the Debian general resolution to preserve init system choice passes."
Here's what I dont understand. Maybe I am missing something, but by my reading of the debian by-laws, this is the only way the change could have been accomplished in the first place. The technical committee doesnt have authority to re-architect the system by fiat, and fake manufactured bug reports cannot change that.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by novak on Monday November 17 2014, @07:40PM
Yeah, I don't really know or care who has the authority (except to fight back against systemd). In my experience, the best distros are those made for the distro maintainers, and are often basically dictatorial (obviously slackware comes to mind here, among others). Running everything via a massive bureaucracy has its downsides. Everyone keeps claiming that there has been a 'coup' in Debian. I honestly don't know if that's true, I don't keep track of who is in charge of what or where they are from, especially not for something on the scale of Debian. I'd rather stick with something higher quality made by people I trust, instead of trusting a giant system to not screw itself.
That being said, Debian is the only distro (that I know of at least) which has both been taken over by systemd, and is fighting the takeover. I applaud their efforts to keep choice open. There are any number of popular userspace daemons for various tasks, and I don't want a single replacement, especially one as poorly made as systemd. Gentoo and Slackware won't be able to hold out forever on their own, as systemd's roots go deeper. Once the big boys go down, smaller ones like crux and voidlinux will have an even harder time keeping their heads above water.
novak
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 18 2014, @04:20AM
We do agree on the merits, we don't repeat it over and over because you read the reasons years ago and just don't care.
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html [0pointer.de]
Maybe people are too busy name-calling the author to believe that he explains the reasons why the old sysadmins in charge of the decisions are often choosing systemd. ;)
There is really no reason to explain the reasons over again when they came on the box when it was first being introduced to the world.