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Devuan.org announces:
Devuan is spelled in Italian and it is pronounced just like "DevOne" in English.
[...]is it really a fork?
This is just the start of a process, as bold as it sounds to call it a fork of Debian.
[...]Devuan aims to be a base distribution whose mission is protect the freedom of its community of users and developers. Its priority is to enable diversity, interoperability and backward compatibility for existing Debian users and downstream distributions willing to preserve Init freedom.
Devuan will derive its own installer and package repositories from Debian, modifying them where necessary, with the first goal of removing systemd, still inheriting the Debian development workflow while continuing it on a different path: free from bloat as a minimalist base distro should be. Our objective for the spring of 2015 is that users will be able to switch from Debian 7 to Devuan 1 smoothly, as if they would dist-upgrade to Jessie, and start using our package repositories.
Devuan will make an effort to rebuild an infrastructure similar to Debian, but will also take the opportunity to innovate some of its practices. Devuan developers look at this project as a fresh new start for a community of interested people and do not intend to enforce the vexation hierarchy and bureaucracy beyond real cases of emergency. We are well conscious this is possible for us mostly because of starting small again; we will do our best to not repeat the same mistakes and we welcome all Debian Developers willing to join us on this route.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NoMaster on Friday November 28 2014, @02:04PM
You do know there's a number of existing Debian forks, don't you? (Yes, true 'forks', not just downstream distros like Ubuntu, Mint, & SteamOS). So nothing particularly "bold" there...
Well, there's dumb premise #1: Debian was never envisioned to be "a minimalist base distro"
Yeah, good luck with that!
Now all you need is blackjack and hookers...
Live free or fuck off and take your naïve Libertarian fantasies with you...
(Score: 2) by Sir Garlon on Friday November 28 2014, @02:43PM
Actually, no. Would you care to enlighten us and/or demonstrate that you're not just making shit up, Mr. Know-It-All?
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Lagg on Friday November 28 2014, @02:53PM
Normally I'd be fine with telling someone who says stuff like this to show or shut up but honestly next to slackware Debian is quite possibly one of the most forked distributions around. Many are listed here [debian.org], some of them are little more than modified images but a lot of them have actually diverged heavily. There is also a ton of ubuntu forks which diverge even more than ubuntu does from debian. Nevermind the internal forks that companies like to use for their own stuff (in a manner similar to what happened to RHEL occasionally).
It's hard to discuss what constitutes an actual fork when it comes to a distribution since at their core all they are is a package manager, repos of precompiled packages (sometimes not even that) and a kernel with a surrounding philosophy on how to manage those 3 things. Many forks of debian do different kernel compile opts, probably have their own repos but also use debian's own. I doubt many mess with the dpkg and apt code but there are a good number of wrappers.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 1) by Nuke on Friday November 28 2014, @05:24PM
Your link leads to a list of what appear to be Debian derivatives, not forks. I admit there are some I do not recognise, but if they are all like eg Mepis, (which I am using now) and Ubuntu, which are both on the list, then they are all derivatives. I too would be very interested to know of any true forks of Debian.
"It's hard to discuss what constitutes an actual fork"
Well it is becoming easier. If they do not adopt systemd then you can say they are a fork, not a derivative.
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Friday November 28 2014, @04:00PM
http://debianfork.org [debianfork.org]. The look of the website suggests that it might be one and the same as Devuan.
I assume that you have having a bad day? There is no need for the sarcasm though.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday November 28 2014, @04:02PM
Confirmed - it is the same project but now renamed. It's been around for quite a week or more now.
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Friday November 28 2014, @07:13PM
How about GNUtron?
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by Lagg on Friday November 28 2014, @02:45PM
Yeah, don't know why people treat debian like something special in topics of forking nor do I get why people think its goal was anything about minimalism. Their downstream patching and default images pretty much show that isn't what it's aiming to be. Didn't Ian (Murdock, not the jackass that was being an obstacle) say it was meant to give a more robust and stable linux distribution with strong review where it was lacking? Hardly minimalist. Anyway, these days I ignore pretty much anything that whines about systemd without actually trying to fix it but just this once I was willing to give it a chance because I actually like the idea of a Debian without the worthless bureaucracy. This isn't the one that's going to do it if it even does get off the ground though. It's just going to be yet another "X, but with systemd yanked out" crap pile at best.
Whatever, I stopped using debian years ago precisely because of aforementioned bureaucracy so it's not like I would switch to such a thing even if it did get inertia.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 28 2014, @04:33PM
2edgy4me
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday November 28 2014, @04:57PM
Didn't Ian (Murdock, not the jackass that was being an obstacle) say it was meant to give a more robust and stable linux distribution with strong review where it was lacking?
Maybe, but here's the original manifesto
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ap-manifesto.en.html [debian.org]
And it seems to boil down to grievances about post release support being non-existent, and distro makers ignoring the licenses of software, Also in the early 90s the commercial distros, what ones existed, were a bit sketchy.
Its funny reading him trash talk SLS, which I started using around Oct 1993. When SLS worked, it was OK, but it was fire and forget as Ian wrote, the idea of having a security infrastructure or packing smaller than a category "The X series of disks when untarred install xwindows, the C series of disks when untarred install GCC and all the fixings".
Around 97-ish I switched everything at home and work to Debian because of the DFSG solving all my at work software licensing problems and at home because why not?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Friday November 28 2014, @06:29PM
Why on earth do you imagine people that do not want or need systemd would waste their time trying to 'fix' it?
Anyway even if we tried, you cannot 'fix' a bad design, you have to start over with a good one.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by CRCulver on Friday November 28 2014, @08:10PM
Even many of systemd's harshest critics feel there is a need to overhaul Sysvinit, and projects like OpenRC and Upstart (just to mention the largest two alternatives, there are even more still in the hobbyist stage) certainly need more manpower. Perhaps that's what the OP meant. The uselessd project has also been very successful in reducing systemd from a gargantuan and ever-growing monster to a strictly defined init service, though I fear they will always be playing catchup with Red Hat.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Friday November 28 2014, @09:18PM
Some seem like very good systems, but they all have the same problem. Very few people need them, so they have a hard time drumming up support or getting anyone excited about replacing the well-worn old system they already know how to use for little to no gain.
Systemd is no better (in fact considerably worse from what I know) than the others technically, but it has considerable political backing, and that's the only reason they are seeing adoption.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 29 2014, @05:00AM
Debian SysV is allready overhauled.
It supports and uses parallel booting since 2 releases ago.
It's just as fast as systemd in reality.
(Score: 2) by CRCulver on Saturday November 29 2014, @11:47AM
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday November 29 2014, @07:12PM
Automatically restarting crashed daemons is a good idea...in a FEW use cases. Generally, however, that's not what you want. And making it a part of an init system seems brain-dead. It should be a settable parameter, and NOT a part of the init system, but of some later process.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by monster on Monday December 01 2014, @03:05PM
As HiThere already states, it's ok for some cases, not always. Anyway, that's what watchdogs are for.