Debian To Seek A General Resolution Over Their Init System Policy

[L_A_G]

So ad hominem, opinion, and confusing user feedback and bug report replies with "the implementation". In other words the same old same old.

Look who's talking when I've explained my concerns with the damn thing to you personally at least once and you've never even tried to explain why being a rat's nest of dependencies (hence being functionally monolithic), massive feature creep and having a development team that doesn't take perfectly many legitimate bug reports seriously all at the same time isn't an issue. Either that or try to disprove the issues that me and many others have raised.

The toxic attitude towards legitimate bug reports is just the icing on the cake and the only people who even try to deny it are people who don't know about it. Even some the developers have admitted that particularly Pottering always respond to perfectly legitimate bug reports in a productive manner.

But as you said it's always the same old same old... I can point out the flaws in the implementation and development methodology, but people like you will just continue avoiding to even mention those criticisms even thou I've explained them to you personally. Seriously, if you're going to ask a question, receive an answer and then not even respond to the answer, then why do you even bother asking the question? Particularly when you keep asking the same question over and over again.

Then again maybe you just enjoy wasting other people's time rather than having a legitimate argument...

[skeevy420]

@skeevy - "Regardless of ones' distribution of choice, there's an inherent level of trust we have to have with those who maintain our distributions. When those we have to trust joke about things we have no choice but to trust them with, they lose that credibility and trust"

Oh please. So I take it you are paranoid about the gopher holes then? Think they might just suck the life right out of your favorite distro, like some kind of a wormhole in space or something? I detect a bit of concern trolling at this point.

Like I said, the actual page joke would have been just fine if their devs then didn't go on to "joke" about how their repositories and software might be compromised and how they used the server incident to play that up. When it went from "Ha, ha; sucks for them" to "Wait, is my system compromised? Am I a bot net?", that's when it went from a joke to trolling the users. If your doctor said to you after a check-up, "You have asbestos-related lung cancer......sike", would you consider that to be funny or trolling; would or wouldn't you see that doctor again; would or wouldn't you consider filing a lawsuit against that doctor?

The integrity of one's entire infrastructure, you'd think, would be one of those things that wasn't joked about. And if they'll bullshit their community about that, what won't they bullshit their community over? They took the joke too far and that lost them credibility and integrity with how I see things.

[starshipeleven]

I don't mind if the OPTION is there, what i mind is when this is no longer an option. This is why i left Debian and any distro that forces people to use systemd. I went with Devuan, Artix, Void, Slackware, Gentoo among many others that still give people CHOICE.

Only ones in the list that allows full choice is Gentoo and Slackware.

So much has been said about package maintainers doing "extra" work to support other choices, and yet you see the aforementioned "small" distros doing it. Artix is like 1 or 2 people,

Most of their OpenRC init scripts come from Gentoo afaik. It's not to say that they are "stealing" anything, it's just how opensource is, and OpenRC has a decent enough community that you can mine for pre-made scripts for all your distro needs, and it's main home is Gentoo.

Same for elogind, the systemd-less "logind" daemon. Who are the actual developers/maintainers? Gentoo people mostly, but everyone else can take it.

Devuan a small group of ex-debian, and they have done what the mainstream distros with their legions of volunteers (and even employees) don't bother doing: Restore CHOICE.

No, what they have done is more or less a respin of what Debian packagers do. Debian is the community actually committed to support multiple init systems (until they decide they don't, that is), they are just providing a custom install ISO.

The main difference here is that more or less everyone has dropped SysV as it is a hot turd, it's not as much as "systemd vs world" as it is "world vs SysV" and the latter is losing badly.

Hell, not even embedded device distros like OpenWrt that fit a whole OS with web interface in 4MB of flash are using SysVinit anymore but a more advanced init that can track processes and more.

[dwagner]

So in your perfect world the end users each have to create their own init scripts for all the daemons that they want to run at boot?

No. For the vast majority of services, it has always been totally sufficient to create one symbolic link from the installed executable into some directory dedicated to the purpose of starting everything that is linked in there.

Geez, even AmigaOS and Windows 3.1 knew the concept of some "autostart"-style directory sufficient for the purpose.

[dwagner]

Every single package is already dependent on what particular executable runs in kernel mode, namely vmlinux.

Yes, and that is why there are different operating systems for different people and use cases. Some like Linux, some like Windows or iOS better, and some FreeBSD.

I don't get this obsession with no dependencies. It makes the OS brittle, inconsistent, unpredictable and essentially unusable as a development platform.

The opposite is true: The kernel maintainers invest a lot of effort to keep up a dependable, stable, predictable ABI for userspace software. And they succeeded very well in that. Totally unlike systemd, whose maintainers could not care less about long term compatibility.

It has been repeated ad nauseam: the purpose of systemd isn't to replace init, but to replace GNU (or FreeBSD-base etc.)

Maybe, but if I have to choose between free open source software from the GNU or FreeBSD projects versus the self-proclaimed-god-given elaborates from the systemd maintainers, I choose the former any day.

[andyprough]

The main difference here is that more or less everyone has dropped SysV as it is a hot turd, it's not as much as "systemd vs world" as it is "world vs SysV" and the latter is losing badly.

"Losing badly" means "used by the most wildly popular distro of 2019"? MX is just unbeatable at this point. I feel confused reading your latest up-is-down, white-is-black, night-is-day rants. Of course, you'll probably correct me by telling me that using sysvinit with systemd dummy packages and pointers and shims is ACTUALLY using systemd itself. If so, it's a better systemd than systemd, I can tell you.

[starshipeleven]

"Losing badly" means "used by the most wildly popular distro of 2019"?

OpenSUSE is using Systemd, so I don't know what you are talking about.

MX is just unbeatable at this point.

Oh look, another Debian respin where someone has reskinned stuff that is maintained by Debian community and called their own, and will topple and die the second Debian decides to pull the plug.

What about you find me a distro that is actually independent and with some kind of standing AND has chosen SysV as their main init?

Void : Runit (also main developers)
Gentoo : OpenRC and systemd
Alpine : OpenRC
OpenWrt : Procd (a very light OpenRC-like init)

and these are the only noteworthy ones I think about and recommend (well not OpenWrt as it's aimed at replacing network device firmware) if someone does not want systemd.

[Karl Napf]

"Losing badly" means "used by the most wildly popular distro of 2019"? MX is just unbeatable at this point.

5000 clicks per day on some very obscure website does not make a distribution popular.

[andyprough]

OpenSUSE is using Systemd, so I don't know what you are talking about.

Oh look, another Debian respin where someone has reskinned stuff that is maintained by Debian community and called their own, and will topple and die the second Debian decides to pull the plug.

What about you find me a distro that is actually independent and with some kind of standing AND has chosen SysV as their main init?

Void : Runit (also main developers)
Gentoo : OpenRC and systemd
Alpine : OpenRC
OpenWrt : Procd (a very light OpenRC-like init)

and these are the only noteworthy ones I think about and recommend (well not OpenWrt as it's aimed at replacing network device firmware) if someone does not want systemd.

Ahhh, moving the goalposts are we? How very starshipeleven of you! I'll throw a couple at you - Slackware and PCLinuxOS. Let me know how that humble pie tastes.

[andyprough]

5000 clicks per day on some very obscure website does not make a distribution popular.

You are going to be hearing a LOT about MX, I can assure you, and not just from the DW fanboys. Move aside, Mint.