Debian Moves Closer To Voting On Proposals Over Init System Diversity

[Antartica]

No they haven't forgotten it. First of all, systemd is free software and second, if the users *want* systemd, than everything is fine. On popcon they are only 45 people reporting using elogind, 44 for openrc, 520 for runit and 130 for s6. systemd on the other hand has 157516 reported users. So basically the amount of people using a systemd only system is around 99.5%, which is basically everyone.

You forgot the popcon for sysvinit-core (that is, regular sysvinit). Right now it says that it is 2293 (1.13%). For something that you have to manually enable and put on hold so that a random package install don't upgrade it to systemd, I think it is rather remarkable.

Anyway, the thing is that Debian has to make some decision. Any decision to a path forward is better that the current confusion.

Ironically, I don't mind much systemd for desktop usage, but I really don't stand it for [one-duty] server usage. Mind you, I'm mostly on embedded with an aim to kept at minimum the running processes and a systemd distro is a lot harder to prun.

[Britoid]

No. Like someone said this is relevant diversity talk. What I liked the most in Linux systems in the beginning was that I had the choice, there was real diversity. In Windows I had very little choice when compared. I was locked down. It is widely accepted that consumers want choices and enjoy of choices. For example even car manufacturers offer choices inside the same model. It is factory customization, but some make choices even after that and mod their cars and computers and what not a lot. The age of T-Ford is long gone.

Also it seems Debian has forgot, among many other things, what their social contracts say.

4. Our priorities are our users and free software

https://www.debian.org/social_contract.en.html

That has been grossly forgotten.

Note that I am happy personally with systemd.

Slavery has been outlawed for quite some time now. It's impossible to please everyone and you shouldn't try.

[Britoid]

I think it's almost too late to rip out systemd. The biggest problem with it is that it's a blob that's slowly eating all of the userspace facilities and system functionality.

That's my main gripe with it - that it defies the concept of modularity. They should've focused on standardizing a set of interfaces, so that different services could be swapped out for various duties. Instead, we're now forced with an all-or-nothing proposition. If given the freedom to choose the bits I want, I might even opt for many of systemd's components. But, that's what's missing - the freedom to choose.

I don't hate systemd. I even recognize it as progress. I just don't appreciate this attitude that any complaints about it are seen as anti-progress and that any issues with systemd are fundamentally irreconcilable, and therefore trivially written-off.

I should add that I've also been bitten by my share of systemd bugs and poor documentation - both things that might've been at least partly a consequence of too much ambition, on the part of the systemd team. If they'd focused on the userspace system architecture and not tried to implement everything themselves, maybe they would've been even more successful in their goals.

Unfortunately genuine conversations and criticsm of systemd have been made nearly impossible because of the amount of mud and lies that were spread and are still spread.

[starshipeleven]

Someone linked to the *BSD-originated nosh project in the last post on this subject.

A tarball on a website created in vi? What about mailing list, bug tracker and git server.

Might be great, but it looks like a hobby project of a single guy.

Don't take me wrong, I wouldn't mind seeing a distro built around it and taking it for a spin, but eeeh as it is it does not inspire much confidence as-is.

With nosh's ability to convert (some?) systemd files, it should be trivial to maintain a system with nosh taking on the bulk of the conversion work. In theory at least.

I don't understand what is hard to convert in systemd config/service files. It's plain text files that are standardized and easy to parse for anything.
I could whip together a script that can parse them and convert them into workable init scripts in a weekend or so. (But I don't really want to)

Nosh also has the interesting property that it is already tested on BSD. Thus, coalescing around nosh for the purposes of running Debian atop a FreeBSD kernel might be the sensible option.

More niche stuff none really cares about. I don't even know if it still ships the freeBSD kernel packages at all.

I also quite like the idea of the daemontools concept on which nosh is based and I hope that one of the (re-)implementations of that concept (i.e. nosh, s6, runit, daemontools-encore) rise to the top as a counterbalance to the impending systemd hegemony, because "competition improves the breed" as they say.

Scripts don't belong in proper application design, they are supposed to be and remain a hack to overcome limitations in the field and work around issues.
Anything that relies on scripting to function is bad design imho.

[waxhead]

I think Debian should only support systemd especially since we got projects such as Devuan. For me systemd solves more problems than it creates for both desktop and server use, and the biggest issue in my point of view is that the BSD world don't have a systemd equivalent and that is where the manpower should be spent instead of discussion whether to continue to support non-systemd use cases.

[starshipeleven]

Yes, that's why you avoid adding any unnecessary restrictions.

I think I said loud and clear that you are not talking about this topic already.

[starshipeleven]

If they decide to ditch the idea of supporting any other init, their distro will become even worse than it already is.

Nah, they will have half-hassed systemd support the same way they have half-assed script-based-init support.

If I had a dime for all the systemd services that are in fact just wrappers to call a script or even outright scripts in the rc.d folder I still see in my Debian ARM devices... I'm so glad I migrated to OpenSUSE years ago.

[moilami]

No they haven't forgotten it. First of all, systemd is free software and second, if the users *want* systemd, than everything is fine. On popcon they are only 45 people reporting using elogind, 44 for openrc, 520 for runit and 130 for s6. systemd on the other hand has 157516 reported users. So basically the amount of people using a systemd only system is around 99.5%, which is basically everyone.

Really? Then it is pretty much case closed unless pure overwhelming good will is offered to very minor minority.

[starshipeleven]

Init Diversity is as stupid as Desktop Diversity. A waste of effort that only brings drama.

Not really, DEs can be swapped pretty easily.

[9Strike]

4. Our priorities are our users and free software

https://www.debian.org/social_contract.en.html

That has been grossly forgotten.

No they haven't forgotten it. First of all, systemd is free software and second, if the users *want* systemd, than everything is fine. On popcon they are only 45 people reporting using elogind, 44 for openrc, 520 for runit and 130 for s6. systemd on the other hand has 157516 reported users. So basically the amount of people using a systemd only system is around 99.5%, which is basically everyone.