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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:14PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:14PM (#117604)

    That's a bit of hyperbole. Debian testing/unstable are not stable distros. Updates are expected to break things; it's great that that doesn't happen often, but there's no guarantees to that effect. I've had my Debian Sid system rendered unbootable by updates on multiple occasions (the install is 8 years old now so it's been through a lot). Yes, systemd was one of them. I fixed it (I believe it was a known bug in some configuration so it was pretty simple to fix once I figured out the right thing to Google for). (The others were due to grub, I think.) If I didn't want to deal with debugging issues like that I would run a stable distro. And, in fact, for exactly that reason most of my computers run Xubuntu (Mint, etc. work too if you don't like Canonical).