Devuan: Debian Without Systemd

[Aeder]

Writing this here might not get any attention, but I think the composition of the groups in the systemd camp and sysvinit camp and their points are worth some attention.

From my perspective, the systemd camp is mostly comprised of an end users who are vulnerable to hype and less experienced developers while the sysvinit camp is mostly compromised of system administrators and veteran developers. Consequently, the systemd camp is bigger by head count, but that is not necessarily the case when considering technical expertise. The email to the Debian mailing list includes a quote from Roger Leigh, who is a key Debian developer in charge of sysvinit/sysvrc maintenance. He makes some fairly good points about backward compatibility and pluggability. These are things that the systemd camp could easily implement while achieving their goals, but so far, refuse to implement. In addition, Ted T'so, another Debian developer and the Linux ext4 subsystem maintainer, made a fairly detailed blog post criticizing systemd's design from the aspect of debugging:

https://plus.google.com/+TheodoreTso/posts/4W6rrMMvhWU

These are all valid points that unfortunately are being ignored. More worrisome is that systemd proponents are typically end users or rookie developers who do not understand what they are discussing. The original method of booting Linux systems involved two components called sysvinit and sysvrc. The scripts exist solely in sysvrc and can be easily be replaced with alternatives, such as OpenRC. Similarly, sysvinit can be replaced with BSD init on both Gentoo FreeBSD and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. In systemd, there is no distinction. Proponents of systemd consistently prescribe weaknesses of sysvrc to sysvinit and consider systemd is the only way of solving them. Many of the "firsts" prescribed to systemd were solved by Gentoo's OpenRC before systemd existed. Some examples are fine grained dependencies, named run levels, the elimination of `sleep` and disabling services by default (a weakness of upstart where everything is started by default). Consequently, it is absurd to say that sysinit was the problem when replacing sysvrc with OpenRC solves these issues.

I like how the idea that "all systemd proponents are inexperienced" went from an impression to a "fact" in just two paragraphs. Do you have a single shred of evidence to back that up?

And even if we assume this to be true, it's pretty evident that for the most part the opinion of end users when it comes to technical decisions has 0 impact on most open source projects. And if rookie programmers prefer to contribute to systemd, then there's nothing wrong with that, unless you have some sort of problem with people donating their time to what they want.

As far as I know even the Debian comittee couldn't find proper documentation for your beloved OpenRC, so it's not very hard to imagine why it hasn't gained any traction.

Also, being open does not mean claiming to accept patches and then rejecting them when someone is foolish enough to believe them (as I once was), but actively pursuing it themselves. In addition, it is likely possible to implement socket-based activation in script-based init systems. If that and other ideas in systemd had been done in this manner, there would have likely been no controversy.

Being Open means doesn't mean it has to accept every single one of your patches, it means that if you don't like the direction it's taking you're free to fork it. You know, like uselessd did.

Lastly, the emphasis on unification by certain parties is so great that it is essentially bullying and this likely has lead to counter bullying. This is counter to the principles of free and open source software, where people are supposed to be able to take, modify and redistribute software for any purpose. Spreading the idea that they cannot be different is to convene the license terms. This is something done exclusively by systemd proponents. However, it would make sense to think that the systemd proponents feel similarly coerced by he idea that things be pluggable. The idea that everyone must use the same software is no different than the idea that everyone must wear the same clothes, eat the same food and have the same number of possessions. Not only must it stop, but from a standards perspective, it is also quite comical when you consider the following xkcd comic:

http://xkcd.com/927/

Systemd doesn't prevent you from taking, modifying and redistributing software for any purpose. No one forces you to listen to bullies on the Internet. You analogy is flawed because no one forces you to use systemd or any software for that matter, it's just that you don't want to go through the effort of going against the mainstream, which is hilarious coming from someone who claims to be a Linux developer.

[Delgarde]

Devuan might be the answer that will allow the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and Debian GNU/Hurd ports to continue existing.

No, because Debian had already answered that question back when they decided to switch. The non-Linux ports can simply stay on their current init systems, no fuss, no bother - it may mean that any packages with systemd dependencies won't work on those ports, but since neither kFreeBSD nor Hurd pretend to run all software in the Debian repos, that's not really a problem...

[dungeon]

As far as I know even the Debian comittee couldn't find proper documentation for your beloved OpenRC, so it's not very hard to imagine why it hasn't gained any traction.

Ctte is mostly there to help (with comments, suggestions and arguments) when there is tractions about some decision, e.g. which one can considered most valuable init to be default for most users, etc... but default might not mean anything for experianced Debian users, etc... btw, you quote pretty old comment at moment when operc was't even available in debian:

https://packages.qa.debian.org/o/openrc.html

[psychoticmeow]

I like how the idea that "all systemd proponents are inexperienced" went from an impression to a "fact" in just two paragraphs. Do you have a single shred of evidence to back that up?

He's doing that to setup his big long appeal to authority. Because X and Y are experienced developers and they don't like systemd, therefore systemd is clearly broken beyond recovery!

I've only read the post by Ted that he linked to and the follow up comments, some of what Ted took issue with was due to a Debian bug misconfiguring pollicykit so that it broke NetworkManager. Ted also had trouble configuring a systemd target for low battery usage, needing to be able to see why systemd was shutting down services when performing a 'systemctl isolate battery', when it turns out the correct command to run was 'systemctl start battery' because isolate does roughly what the name suggests, focuses on a particular unit. In this particular situation it was shutting down some services started automatically based on Teds hardware.

Ted also criticised poor documentation and accused developers of treating bug reporters as idiots, both of which I feel were addressed comprehensively in the comments on Teds post. I'm not sure if ryao read all of them.

I'd follow up on the rest of the stuff, but I've been awake for 30 hours and it's suck a long damn read.

[psychoticmeow]

Ctte is mostly there to help (with comments, suggestions and arguments) when there is tractions about some decision, e.g. which one can considered most valuable init to be default for most users, etc... but default might not mean anything for experianced Debian users, etc... btw, you quote pretty old comment at moment when operc was't even available in debian:

It may be old, but it was part of the initial discussion that came before the systemd decision, so it's still relevant. Here's the quote:

It's difficult to evaluate since the OpenRC documentation is rather sparse and lacks the comprehensive manual available to both systemd and upstart, which is itself a sign of a lack of project maturity.

Things may have changed in the last year, but as he says systemd and upstart do both have comprehensive manuals.

[AdamW]

Writing this here might not get any attention, but I think the composition of the groups in the systemd camp and sysvinit camp and their points are worth some attention.

From my perspective, the systemd camp is mostly comprised of an end users who are vulnerable to hype and less experienced developers while the sysvinit camp is mostly compromised of system administrators and veteran developers.

So...you're suggesting the people who decide the technical direction of Debian, SUSE, Fedora, RHEL, Ubuntu, Mageia and multiple other distros are 'end users who are vulnerable to hype and less experienced developers'?

Ooooo...kay then.

[dungeon]

It may be old, but it was part of the initial discussion that came before the systemd decision, so it's still relevant.

It is relevent as it is, but is not releveant anymore for Jessie... systemd decision as default init system is maded for Jessie many months ago.

Things may have changed in the last year, but as he says systemd and upstart do both have comprehensive manuals.

In perfect world, users should choose what they understand and not what they not . Some people probably does not care about writing very much comprehensive manuals, when init is so simple - code reading spoke very much about it

[SebastianB]

So...you're suggesting the people who decide the technical direction of Debian, SUSE, Fedora, RHEL, Ubuntu, Mageia and multiple other distros are 'end users who are vulnerable to hype and less experienced developers'?

Ooooo...kay then.

It makes sense if by veteran developers he means people that took a programming course in high school 15 years ago, and by system administrators he means people who run their own headless file and printserver at home ...

Way i see it people actually having to do some heavy lifting in either just don't care that much about unix philosophies or crap like that, they care about having to work overtime or not, getting called to work in the middle of the night because some server went to crap or having to meddle with systemlevel stuff when working on a GUI program ...

Besides if you really cared about doing things the unix way you wouldn't use linux in the first place. For me the whole point of using linux is that its not the POS that unix was. Its the same glorification of the past we have in everything else, a mixture of elitism and selective memories. Things where not better back then, they where shit, our hardware was shit, our software was shit and we couldn't get rid of it fast enough once alternatives where there. Its the same idiotism that lets people use ancient hardware as a 24h/365d on printserver or somesuch because they got it for cheap or had it lying around, totally neglecting that the lesser powerconsumption of a modern embedded device doing the same job would prolly pay for itself inside a month or two with zero noise and smell emission. Its nostalgia plain and simple.

[GreatEmerald]

That's a waste, they would have been better off just volunteering to maintain sysvinit scripts (nobody in Debian is against accepting those). But on the other hand, at least they should stop badgering Debian developers now.

[ryao]

I like how the idea that "all systemd proponents are inexperienced" went from an impression to a "fact" in just two paragraphs. Do you have a single shred of evidence to back that up?

I never said "all systemd proponents are inexperienced". I said that from my perspective, they are mostly inexperienced. You cannot refute that because you are not in m

And even if we assume this to be true, it's pretty evident that for the most part the opinion of end users when it comes to technical decisions has 0 impact on most open source projects. And if rookie programmers prefer to contribute to systemd, then there's nothing wrong with that, unless you have some sort of problem with people donating their time to what they want.

I nver said that they were contributing.

As far as I know even the Debian comittee couldn't find proper documentation for your beloved OpenRC, so it's not very hard to imagine why it hasn't gained any traction.

It actually has some traction, but you make a valid point about documentation. The project simply does not have enough people writing documentation. This is something that I will forward.

Being Open means doesn't mean it has to accept every single one of your patches, it means that if you don't like the direction it's taking you're free to fork it. You know, like uselessd did.

Or I could just not use it.

Systemd doesn't prevent you from taking, modifying and redistributing software for any purpose. No one forces you to listen to bullies on the Internet. You analogy is flawed because no one forces you to use systemd or any software for that matter, it's just that you don't want to go through the effort of going against the mainstream, which is hilarious coming from someone who claims to be a Linux developer.

This attitude is a perfect example of peer pressure meant to prevent people from taking, modifying and redistributing F/OSS software for any purpose. It has no place in the community.