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Shall we fork Debian?

debianfork.org

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Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#61

Post by dnlrn »

_ak wrote: post #47
jermo wrote: post #2

The main reason for forking seems to be opposition to SystemD. Initially I was unconvinced but then I remembered the recent story of Lennart Poettering (one of the authors of SystemD) on The State Of Open Source Communities where he describes the hostility towards him personally https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859 In light of that, forking is a more civilised approach than bullying and threatening the author…

Lennart Poettering is a bully himself, with a well-documented instance where he continuously interruped a talk at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress, even going as far as taking over the stage while insulting the presenter. Lennart Poettering is a toxic person, toxic to the OSS community, and he's the last person that can complain about bullying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0

This is the talk you mean right? Have you actually seen the talk? Yes, Lennart interrupts the talk but everything he says is correct, while the presenter just spreads random FUD.

The presenter clearly shows that he doesn’t understand most of the stuff he talks about, talks about 3 year old bugs that already got fixed, etc.

Yes, it’s not the nicest way to interrupt a talk, but the presenter should have expected some kind of reaction, given the controversial headline.

People like Lennart put their heart into their software. If you shit all over it and spread random FUD, you can expect some response. What would you have done?

Also he doesn’t “take over the stage”. He comes up after the talk has ended, because people on IRC asked him to.

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#62

Post by therealidiot »

0x006A wrote: post #30
23david wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decoupling systemd is a feature desired by system administrators, who are responsible for installing and managing most debian and debian-based distros.

on the contrary, systemd is a feature desired by system administrators, who are responsible for installing and managing most debian and debian-based distros.

I'd rather not be forced to use something because some people decided it's "what system administrators want."

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#63

Post by seba_dos1 »

jermo wrote: post #2

The main reason for forking seems to be opposition to SystemD. Initially I was unconvinced but then I remembered the recent story of Lennart Poettering (one of the authors of SystemD) on The State Of Open Source Communities where he describes the hostility towards him personally https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859 In light of that, forking is a more civilised approach than bullying and threatening the author…

Yeah, especially if everything what he wrote there was like that bitcoin hitman stuff, which turned out to be just a line like "maybe we should start btc fund?" from IRC written after someone else complained about issue with systemd by guy known from his funny trolling there - and absolutely nothing more than that.

While at first I felt a bit sorry for him when I read that post, after I learned about what exactly was that "hitman threat" I lost any remaining respect to Poettering. That's just grabbing attention and playing victim. He deserves negative response for that.

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#64

Post by cbsmith »

csirac2 wrote: post #57
snogglethorpe wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anti-systemd-brigade only seems to be a small minority of Debian devs (though they're very loud, and very persistent), so I'm not sure it would have much effect on the project as a whole. If a fork would reduce the time spent arguing about the init system (which 99% of users don't care about), it could even prove beneficial for Debian. [It seems unlikely the fork would attract the critical mass of devs/users to s…

I'm not even "anti-systemd". I'm actually in the process of implementing systemd for the firmware of an embedded target in $dayjob because socket activation is actually a good idea and happened to work well when I played with it. But a switch to a different init system shouldn't break your system so badly that it no longer boots. And yet that's what happens if you rely on keyscript to unlock your drives in /etc/crypt…

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

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#65

Post by cbsmith »

jermo wrote: post #2

The main reason for forking seems to be opposition to SystemD. Initially I was unconvinced but then I remembered the recent story of Lennart Poettering (one of the authors of SystemD) on The State Of Open Source Communities where he describes the hostility towards him personally https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859 In light of that, forking is a more civilised approach than bullying and threatening the author…

> In light of that, forking is a more civilised approach than bullying and threatening the author.

Yes, but it is sad that the more straightforward approach of contributing back to the community isn't taking hold.

If you are worried about mission creep... you help stamp out a very clear mission. If you are worried about bloat, you contribute patches. If you are worried about a nasty hairball... you contribute code reviews. If you consider C code less readable than Unix shell... please don't reference the Unix Philosophy as the principle behind that thinking.

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#66

Post by bryanlarsen »

I think this is a great idea.

- I think they're wrong about systemd, but if they're right, Debian can merge their fork back in, they can say "I told you so", and we can move on.

- It gives us a place to point the anti-systemd people. Rather than spending their energy trying to fight the system, they can spend their energy productively on this fork.

- This puts the burden of maintaining the SysV scripts on the fork, rather than the package maintainers, as it would be for Ian Jackson's proposal to maintain freedom of choice[1] Maintaining the scripts probably isn't hard for most; testing them probably would be. It would require maintainers to keep a SysV init system up and running on their machines.

1: https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2014/10/msg00001.html

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#67

Post by rdc12 »

TheSwordsman wrote: post #45
0x006A wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

on the contrary, systemd is a feature desired by system administrators, who are responsible for installing and managing most debian and debian-based distros.

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'.

And you don't speak on behalf of every other sysadmin on the planet either

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#68

Post by nslqqq »

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…

Modern DE's also depend on logind. Which could be replaced with non systemd implementation that has same interface on dbus.

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#69

Post by cbsmith »

TheSwordsman wrote: post #37
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...

And if that service file screws up how do you troubleshoot it? You end up diving in to the source code of systemd, versus fixing a bug in your script. And don't get me started on binary log files. As was said before, buster, your attitude is the problem. It's the same as the systemd developers and those within the community. SysVInit has served me thus far with no issues.

> And if that service file screws up how do you troubleshoot it? You end up diving in to the source code of systemd, versus fixing a bug in your script.

? You end up diving in to the service file vs. the script.

> And don't get me started on binary log files.

Having worked with binary and plaintext log data for the better part of a decade now, I have to say that pretty much the entire set of claimed advantages of plaintext log data is very wrong, and we've wasted a ton of productivity & efficiency because of it.

If you really are sure of its superiority though, just put a little stub in front that converts the binary log to a human readable format that still needs a program in order to present to the user...

> SysVInit has served me thus far with no issues.

Speaking of attitude... there are two ways to look at that datapoint...

Re: Shall we fork Debian?

#70

Post by cbsmith »

TheSwordsman wrote: post #46
justincormack wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CoreOS is entirely based on systemd. Fleet is a distributed systemd. It is far more systemd oriented than any other distro, having built it in as a core feature form day one.

Which makes using any useful features of the project impossible.

That's a rather bold thing to say considering people are using both the useful and useless features of the project without difficulty.
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