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Debian 8 "Jessie" was released on 25 Apr. A link to the Debian release page shows the changes and you can follow the release in 'real-time' should you desire to do so.
This release will be supported for 5 years and includes "improvements" to the UEFI software (both 32- and 64-bit) introduced in the previous version, "Wheezy". It also is the first release to use systemd as default init system replacing the earlier sysvinit, which is still available in the repos should you wish to revert the change. What effects such a change might have on the remainder of the system is not clear. Improvements to the support of Debian software include the ability to browse and search all source code distributed in the latest release.
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Nasrudin walked into a teahouse and declaimed, "The moon is more useful
than the sun."
"Why?", he was asked.
"Because at night we need the light more."
(Score: 4, Informative) by hendrikboom on Monday April 27 2015, @12:37AM
What on earth do feminism, misogyny or misanthropy have to do with systemd? Or anti-systemd?
There are a lot of posts in this discussion that complain about feminism as if it is the key to the whole systemd situation.
I, frankly, don't see the connection. Nor can I even see from the discussion which side of the systemd debate the feminists or antifeminists are on.
Can we keep the discussion on topic? Or at least present evidence that all this pro/anti-feminist stuff *is* on topic? Or else shut up about it if there's no evidence to be had?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 27 2015, @12:44AM
> http://etbe.coker.com.au/2015/04/26/anti-systemd-people/ [coker.com.au]
For some reason the men in the Linux community who hate women the most seem to have taken a dislike to systemd. I understand that being “conservative” might mean not wanting changes to software as well as not wanting changes to inequality in society but even so this surprised me. My last blog post about systemd has probably set a personal record for the amount of misogynistic and homophobic abuse I received in the comments. More gender and sexuality related abuse than I usually receive when posting about the issues of gender and sexuality in the context of the FOSS community! For the record this doesn’t bother me, when I get such abuse I’m just going to write more about the topic in question.
While the issue of which init system to use by default in Debian was being discussed we had a lot of hostility from unimportant people who for some reason thought that they might get their way by being abusive and threatening people. As expected that didn’t give the result they desired, but it did result in a small trend towards people who are less concerned about the reactions of users taking on development work related to init systems.
The next thing that they did was to announce a “fork” of Debian. Forking software means maintaining a separate version due to a serious disagreement about how it should be maintained. Doing that requires a significant amount of work in compiling all the source code and testing the results. The sensible option would be to just maintain a separate repository of modified packages as has been done many times before. One of the most well known repositories was the Debian Multimedia repository, it was controversial due to flouting legal issues (the developer produced code that was legal where they lived) and due to confusion among users. But it demonstrated that you can make a repository containing many modified packages. In my work on SE Linux I’ve always had a repository of packages containing changes that haven’t been accepted into Debian, which included changes to SysVInit in about 2001.
The latest news on the fork-Debian front seems to be the call for donations [4]. Apparently most of the money that was spent went to accounting fees and buying a laptop for a developer. The amount of money involved is fairly small, Forbes has an article about how awful people can use “controversy” to get crowd-funding windfalls [5].
MikeeUSA is an evil person who hates systemd [6]. This isn’t any sort of evidence that systemd is great (I’m sure that evil people make reasonable choices about software on occasion). But it is a significant factor in support for non-systemd variants of Debian (and other Linux distributions). Decent people don’t want to be associated with people like MikeeUSA, the fact that the anti-systemd people seem happy to associate with him isn’t going to help their cause.
(Score: 1) by fritsd on Monday April 27 2015, @11:06AM
It's all very muddled due to the personalities involved.
On the Devuan mailing list, MikeeUSA has been banned now. Twice.
Here's my datapoint: at least one "anti-systemd" Devuan fan is more or less a feminist, not a misogynist anyway. I'll let you draw your own conclusions about my sanity from my other postings here... (oh dear).
So, I can say truthfully that nowadays, the discussions on the Devuan mailing list are mostly technical, and that I personally believe that Devuan *will* release a systemd-less fork of Debian Jessie.
When it's ready.
Mailing list archive: http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.linux.devuan.devel [gmane.org]
Advantages of Devuan, when it is released:
(1) if your system is currently using sysvinit to boot it will stay that way
(2) attempts to stay as flexible and universal as Debian Wheezy. Because Debian Jessie now depends on systemd, and systemd is Linux-specific due to cgroups, Debian is going to drop the option to use a different kernel: The Debian GNU/kFreeBSD option is going to go, I believe
(3) there's a not fully developed idea in the Devuan group and groupies, that core user-space system programs should be simple, discoverable and maintainable. One person is almost finished working on a udev fork (vdev), and I had a crazy (oops.. there's that word again) idea about splitting DBus in three.
About the Debian/kFreeBSD kernel:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2014/11/msg00005.html [debian.org]
There may also be an unofficial release of kfreebsd:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2015/04/msg00605.html [debian.org]
PS I am not a spokesperson for Devuan and have about as much to say as MikeeUSA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 27 2015, @07:56PM
I hope you're right and they release and become the new debian.
I hope jaromil stops smoking pot and does something with his life.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 27 2015, @08:36PM
vdev is a new /dev daemon, not a fork of a existing one.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Monday April 27 2015, @11:47AM
Hey, AC, aren't you that Australian developer who understands SELinux? I've read your name before.
If so, I'm not surprised that systemd's complexity is not daunting to *you*, after dealing with SELinux.
But consider the many people more stupid than you, who still have to manage production Linux systems for their corporations :-)
I just read your blog post. You wrote "Abuse is evidence of the absence of technical errors.". I disagree, I think the two issues are orthogonal. Also I must protest "the fact that the anti-systemd people seem happy to associate with him isn’t going to help their cause", I believe that he associated himself with the anti-systemd people, which is something those anti-systemd people can't be blamed for.
Are you sure it's more than one misogynist? If so, well.. I really don't know either why the issue attracts those people. It sure leaves a lingering stench of "misogynists" around "us" people opposed to systemd, I can understand that.
Maybe the reason is in your comment on your own blog:
If a feeling of powerlessness to change things leads to frustration, than maybe frustration leads to those kind of comments.
On the topic of the fork: I think Marillat had a lot of work keeping his stuff in sync with fast-moving Debian, but such is life. I wonder why the ancient Debian "non-US" branch was removed, it seems perfectly usable for US-patent-encumbered stuff like libd*dc*s etc.
But the Devuan fork is about approximately 20 packages IIRC, so that's manageable (famous last words).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 27 2015, @01:30AM
It's a push to replace existing software with SJW software that wasn't developed by troublesome individuals who don't conform to their dogma, we see this also in things like feminist programming languages and other such nonsense. The focus on this might be biased, but these trends are nontheless linked.