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Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available

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Re: Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available

#41

Post by irl_ »

sverige wrote: post #20
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #17

Devan is an useful and important distro. I just hope they integrate back with Debian at some point (I don't know how, but I'd love o see that happen.)

That seems unlikely unless Debian drops systemd or the ecosystem becomes so dependent on systemd's ever-expanding reach that it becomes impossible to build a Linux distro without it.

Debian doesn't actually have anything against sysvinit or OpenRC. Those are just not the defaults. Both sysvinit and OpenRC are available in Debian.

It probably would be easier to have a non-systemd system were the Devuan developers to upstream their packaging and patches to Debian.

As Devuan has a stated goal of not using systemd though, I would guess they take the easy route of not maintaining systemd compatibility. The longer it remains a fork without effort to upstream changes, the more it would diverge and the more work it would be. It would also be more work to keep the fork going, so I guess at some point it would either have to be a hard fork or it would die.

Re: Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available

#42

Post by badsectoracula »

sverige wrote: post #18
gsich wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

compare this to sysvinit, a no longer suitable init process.

I have yet to hear the argument that convinces me sysvinit (or openrc or runit) was "no longer suitable." In need of updating and revision? Sure. So broken that a completely new init that swallowed up a bunch of other processes and services was the best answer? Hardly. Systemd was initially sold as providing faster boot times. Objections to its cancerous spread to other services beyond init were dismissed without pro…

> The systemd fallout is demonstrating something I always thought was the weakest part of Linux compared to the BSDs, which is that the Linux userland is developed completely independently of the kernel. People do whatever the fuck they want, and frequently the relationships seem to be hostile.

TBH i think this is its biggest strength because it makes easier for people to switch components that they dislike. After all, you can still use another init system, audio server, desktop environment, shell and other pieces of the userland if you dislike the defaults without having to change the entire OS. On the other hand with BSDs if you dislike something you have to switch to a fork that affects everything.

Re: Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available

#43

Post by spiraldancing »

self_awareness wrote: post #28

Don't want to troll or anything, just a question from curiosity: don't you think that massive popularity of systemd is a result of a massive demand for software like systemd?

widespread use != massive popularity

Ask your average Windows user.

Re: Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available

#45

Post by tialaramex »

vbernat wrote: post #23
hedora wrote: post #8

I’ve been running the beta on my desktop. In this release, they have also established sane defaults for a wider range of window managers and desktop environments. The rough edges I’ve hit can all be attributed to systemd brain damage (like the fact that the linux kernel no longer has a working, synchronous, “probe the network cards and create a logical interface for each one” primitive). My only beef with devuan is t…

> The rough edges I’ve hit can all be attributed to systemd brain damage (like the fact that the linux kernel no longer has a working, synchronous, “probe the network cards and create a logical interface for each one” primitive). Multithreaded device probing exists far before systemd. It was introduced around Linux 2.6.18.

It's your basic grand conspiracy theory setup. You see a bunch of sensible features that don't add up to any particular larger plan, they see a sprawling plot by innumerable enemies to destroy a status quo that never actually existed outside their imagination.

It is amusing to me that they call themselves "Veteran Unix Administrators" because an operating system needs _software engineers_ or at the very least _hackers_ and the last people you want doing this would be sysadmins I think all the very worst software I have to interact with was built by sysadmins who had the idea that programming wasn't that hard so they'd do a bit in their spare time...

Re: Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available

#46

Post by tannhaeuser »

self_awareness wrote: post #28

Don't want to troll or anything, just a question from curiosity: don't you think that massive popularity of systemd is a result of a massive demand for software like systemd?

On the desktop where you need to deal with WLAN interfaces going up and down, maybe a monstrosity like systemd has its place, but even there my opinion is systemd just isn't worth fragmenting and polarizing the whole Unix ecosystem with systemd's total lack of mental discipline and attitude of wrapping each and everything under the sun including binary logging, mandatory systemd-only APIs for loggin in, cron replacement, etc.

On the server-side where Linux has its mainstay, using systemd is even more pointless IMHO since services and network interfaces don't come and go. Loosing portability for saving a couple lines of shell code for starting/stopping services is IMHO a trade-off that just doesn't make sense from an engineering PoV. All the more so since systemd doesn't shield you from the intricacies of dealing with demon programs; if something is going south on your server, have fun with systemd binary logs to analyze what has happened.

Now RedHat (who are shouldering a large part of Linux development anyway) sure aren't stupid; therefore I have to conclude that they're playing the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish game here to subvert Linux into SystemD-OS.

Devuan has become a very important key project to prevent that from happening to the Debian code base. Btw congrats to the Devuan project! I wasn't quite sure they'd be able to deliver a couple years ago when they started; now I think Devuan (along with Gentoo, Slackware, Alpine) is going to save Linux' ass as a "real" F/OSS community effort going forward, no less. My hope is Arch Linux with its great community and documentation gets a systemd-less fork as well.

Re: Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available

#47

Post by jhkaghjkga »

tialaramex wrote: post #45
vbernat wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The rough edges I’ve hit can all be attributed to systemd brain damage (like the fact that the linux kernel no longer has a working, synchronous, “probe the network cards and create a logical interface for each one” primitive). Multithreaded device probing exists far before systemd. It was introduced around Linux 2.6.18.

It's your basic grand conspiracy theory setup. You see a bunch of sensible features that don't add up to any particular larger plan, they see a sprawling plot by innumerable enemies to destroy a status quo that never actually existed outside their imagination. It is amusing to me that they call themselves "Veteran Unix Administrators" because an operating system needs _software engineers_ or at the very least _hacker…

The main driver behind the initial fork isn't even a sysadmin, but an art student who initiated Devuan as part of an art project and his PhD thesis: https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/handle/10026.1/11101

As a fun fact the thesis is released under a Creative Commons license, but states "no quotation from the thesis and no information derived from it may be published without the author's prior consent". Forbidding quotations and building further work on it is also an interesting approach to the idea of science.

Re: Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available

#48

Post by alxlaz »

pmden wrote: post #32
tannhaeuser wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, to start nginx and sshd you need like 2 lines of shell code in a BSDish rc.conf - one for starting each service. Why do you think systemd bringing in 10s and 100s of megabytes of black magic binary code is a trade-off worth making, especially on a non-desktop without a need for reacting on up/down events of network interfaces?

Systemd isn't one component, so you'd be mistaken assuming everything in the systemd project is necessary to start a service. But second to that, I'm not sure why you think nginx_enable='YES' is fundamentally less opaque than an nginx.service file. Both are parsed by another application. As for why someone would make that 'trade-off' - I much prefer being able to add "Restart=on-failure" than using daemontools, and I…

> But second to that, I'm not sure why you think nginx_enable='YES' is fundamentally less opaque than an nginx.service file. Both are parsed by another application.

That's true of both plain-text configuration files and Windows Registry keys ;-).

Re: Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available

#49

Post by digi_owl »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #46
self_awareness wrote: post #28

Don't want to troll or anything, just a question from curiosity: don't you think that massive popularity of systemd is a result of a massive demand for software like systemd?

On the desktop where you need to deal with WLAN interfaces going up and down, maybe a monstrosity like systemd has its place, but even there my opinion is systemd just isn't worth fragmenting and polarizing the whole Unix ecosystem with systemd's total lack of mental discipline and attitude of wrapping each and everything under the sun including binary logging, mandatory systemd-only APIs for loggin in, cron replacem…

Systemd exist for two groups, macbook packing cypherpunks and devops "cattle farms".

All the rest have to grin and bear it until Pottering and crew gets bored, run into those corner cases that made the older systems so gnarly to maintain, and move on.

Re: Devuan “ASCII” 2.0 Release Candidate is now available

#50

Post by andrewshadura »

nextos wrote: post #3

Devuan is basically Debian without systemd. While I still prefer to run Linux distributions with systemd (NixOS and Arch in particular), I'm increasingly worried about the complexity systemd brings in. I like how clean and standardized the init process is now. I don't like the bloat prize we've paid, though. I've been stracing my workstation for a few days. Journald starts eating a ton of RAM, ~100 MB upon boot, and…

> Devuan is basically Debian without systemd.

You can already run Debian without systemd today. There's absolutely no need in the fragmentation Devuan creates.

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