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posted by LaminatorX on Friday November 28 2014, @01:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the and-so-it-begins dept.

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.

 
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Lagg on Friday November 28 2014, @02:53PM

    by Lagg (105) on Friday November 28 2014, @02:53PM (#120849) Homepage Journal

    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] 🗿
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  • (Score: 1) by Nuke on Friday November 28 2014, @05:24PM

    by Nuke (3162) on Friday November 28 2014, @05:24PM (#120895)
    Lagg wrote :- "Debian is quite possibly one of the most forked distributions around. Many are listed here, some of them are little more than modified images"

    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.