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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: 2) by HiThere on Monday November 17 2014, @07:20PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 17 2014, @07:20PM (#116896) Journal

    Well, it made my system unbootable, too, but there's a reason that Jessie is called Debian testing. If you want stable, you pick stable.

    That said, I don't support systemd, and nobody has yet made a decent case for it that I understood. I've seen lots of arguments against it that I understood. But I'm *NOT* an expert in the field. I don't trust systemd, and it looks like a disaster waiting to happen, but I could easily be wrong.

    So after my system crashed, I switched to Debian stable. I did modify it to NOT install systemd. And I'm going to wait awhile before deciding...say 5 years. (FWIW, though, Ubuntu 14.04 worked on my system without problems, so systemd isn't inherently unusable.)

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  • (Score: 2) by arashi no garou on Monday November 17 2014, @08:41PM

    by arashi no garou (2796) on Monday November 17 2014, @08:41PM (#116937)

    FWIW, though, Ubuntu 14.04 worked on my system without problems, so systemd isn't inherently unusable.

    If you're using 14.04 you're using Upstart. Ubuntu didn't start using systemd until 14.10.

    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday November 19 2014, @09:30PM

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday November 19 2014, @09:30PM (#117858) Journal

      Thanks. I'm not using it anymore, but I used it to test that my system wasn't actually broken, just the installation. So I couldn't check by looking. (I went back to Debian stable.)

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