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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: 3, Insightful) by novak on Monday November 17 2014, @07:40PM

    by novak (4683) on Monday November 17 2014, @07:40PM (#116909) Homepage

    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.

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    novak
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