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Shall we fork Debian?

debianfork.org

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Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#81

Post by CrLf »

As much as I dislike the idea of systemd, I'm starting to think it's pointless to fight it. There's still a large chunk of people that think the desktop is important for Linux's future and will keep pushing for turning it into a brittle mess of opaque components, unaware of what's really important to maintain and troubleshoot servers on a daily basis, and unaware of what has made Linux so successful in this area.

It may happen that systemd ends up being a good thing, or it may happen that something else takes the place that Debian and Red Hat currently occupy in the server space. That thing may very well be something other than Linux, and I don't care if it is anymore.

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#82

Post by the_why_of_y »

captainmuon wrote: post #21
qznc wrote: post #5

How does forking Debian solve anything? The issue is that Gnome, KDE, and other software requires systemd. You need to fix/maintain their compatibility with other init systems. Then it is easy for Debian user to switch init systems.

> The issue is that Gnome, KDE, and other software requires systemd. This I can't wrap my head around, why does Gnome for example need systemd? There are standard ways on GNU/Linux to do everything it needs in a unix fashion (by deferring to small specialized tools): shutdown reboot whoami uname mount ... These and similar tools (or libc functions) give you all information you need (username, etc.) and system functio…

Please read these posts by David Herrmann to get an idea of the improvements in reliability that systemd-logind provides to desktops:

http://dvdhrm.wordpress.com/2013/08/24/session-management-on...

http://dvdhrm.wordpress.com/2013/08/24/how-vt-switching-work...

http://dvdhrm.wordpress.com/2013/08/25/sane-session-switchin...

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#83

Post by mverwijs »

pantalaimon wrote: post #56
TheSwordsman wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who manages a large Debuntu fleet, please don't speak on my behalf. If I had the opportunity to vote for systemd it would have been 'no'.

Have you ever used it?

I have. I ran Arch for 3 years, up until 3 months after they implemented systemd. It made a KISS situation incredible complex. I switched back to Debian on my desktop after that. If Debian switches to systemd, I'll switch to Slackware, until SystemD has proven iteself to be stable and simple to administer. Not before.

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#84

Post by cliffbean »

fapjacks wrote: post #14

Yes. My spidey sense has been tingling about a Debian fork, given the facts mentioned on the link, consistent problems with at least one of Lennart Poettering's previous projects (pulseaudio), and the strong likelihood that politics played a bigger part in the "adoption" of systemd versus technical merit. If the answer from systemd people is that we have no choice but to use systemd, then I hope that a fork happens,…

One thing I struggle with: how does one calibrate one's spidey sense? Reading comments in online forums is likely to bias one towards the people talking the most, which is not a good bet as a representative sample. It's not just systemd; it's any topic of heated discussion. All we hear from on many topics are the people with the strongest emotions. How can we compensate?

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#85

Post by broodbucket »

I know this is just a nitpick, but calling it "SystemD" everywhere on this page when everything written about systemd asks you very nicely to call it "systemd" shows these guys are either not as familiar with systemd as you should probably be if it's that much of an issue for you, or they're deliberately trying to be edgy. Neither of which inspires confidence in their ability to maintain a potential fork.

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#86

Post by monochr »

buster wrote: post #28

Or just shut up and put your efforts into maintaining https://packages.debian.org/jessie/systemd-shim Also, critique starts with "We like controlling the startup of the system with shell scripts that are readable".. How on earth is a systemd service file less readable then a hundreds of lines bash script? Also relevant: http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/65684-deb...

Being a developer and being an admin are completely different jobs.

A admin needs to know a dozen languages and codes in bash most of the time, they have a hand written folder with glued in scraps next to their terminal which explains why they did what, how and why. This folder has entries like "reboot three times, do an rain dance and run godHelpYou.bash as root" because that's the only way that you've found out how the libraries actually talk to each other.

For people like this "do one thing and do it well" is the only way that you can beat the impossible complexity of a modern machine back into a running computer even some of the time. When you have a single point of failure which is a black box you're just back to windows land: restart the service, reboot the computer, reinstall the system.

From this point of view devs look like a tribe of monkeys building a shit pyramid over your village. They just keep flinging more shit at the top thinking they are the greatest ever monkeys. When the shit pyramid collapses and buries everything you know and love under a few meters of shit, probably killing someone in the process, these monkeys just shrug say a few words about how that was the best shit pyramid anyone had ever build and start making a new one one or two valleys over.

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#87

Post by asdfaoeu »

TheSwordsman wrote: post #40
0x006A wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, have you ever used systemd and ran into a problem where your service file screwed up and you had yo read systemd's source code or are you making this up?

Experience from a few years back. Bug was fixed and all, but left a bad taste in my mouth.

What was the bug?

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#88

Post by cbsmith »

csirac2 wrote: post #76
cbsmith wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using shell scripts to do decryption seems dicey at best...

It's dicey to obtain key material from external hardware because...?

Shell scrips have issues with race conditions (which is why they aren't setuid) and just generally create a lot of points of exposure.

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#89

Post by thu »

Something's wrong with this thread. Being for or against systemd is one thing. Bashing the people who are ready to do some hard work to bring more choices to the table is another.

If someone wants to write another Ruby (or whatever programming language) implementation, would you bash her/him ? Would you say "leave me alone, I'm very happy with MRI" ?

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#90

Post by nslqqq »

nslqqq wrote: post #59

Apparently 'Veteran Unix Admins' can't even spell systemd right. It not necessarily correlates with their overall knowledge of systemd, but it's still very strange

Ha, they fixed it. It was spelled SystemD before
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