The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Nov 29, 2014 2:57 UTC (Sat) by hadrons123 (guest, #72126)
Parent article: The "Devuan" Debian fork

There must be countless debian derivatives or forks, why does this fork deserves the attention in LWN?

All I can see with my experience is that this fork would probably not even have finances to run their website, leave alone the development.

The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Nov 29, 2014 3:11 UTC (Sat) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link] (9 responses)

> why does this fork deserves the attention in LWN?

Because vast numbers of professional Debian users don't want their highly successful server and embedded systems to be borked by a tiny FreeDesktop crowd?

The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Nov 29, 2014 3:29 UTC (Sat) by hadrons123 (guest, #72126) [Link] (4 responses)

You indirectly insinuate that using systemd on production servers leads to a borked system. Do you have any evidence for your claims?

The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Nov 29, 2014 3:43 UTC (Sat) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link] (3 responses)

> Do you have any evidence for your claims?

You sound like you're asking for another systemd bug report or CVE. Sorry, I'm busy doing productive work but if you like systemd go ahead and use it. I'm not trying to stop you.

Software engineers and sysadmins have determined that in their professional judgment systemd is a bad idea - bad design and bad policy and bad politics and bad business. By an interesting variety of routes we are coding around the systemd roadblock.

The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Nov 29, 2014 4:16 UTC (Sat) by nickbp (guest, #63605) [Link]

Given how much time you spend posting these, I assume *this* is what you consider doing productive work?

The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Nov 29, 2014 9:23 UTC (Sat) by Xiol (guest, #87394) [Link] (1 responses)

Professional Linux sysadmin here - how dare you speak for me or my colleagues. I work with 20 other admins with anything from 2 to 15 years experience and we are all looking forward to seeing systemd deployed more. The features provided by systemd are very welcome and will make our jobs easier and more productive.

The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Nov 30, 2014 8:53 UTC (Sun) by linuxrocks123 (guest, #34648) [Link]

Keep it cool, man. He didn't say "all software engineers and sysadmins" believe as he does. I think we can safely asssume at least one other professional Linux user agrees with him :)

The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Nov 29, 2014 7:25 UTC (Sat) by vanicat (guest, #14776) [Link]

sytemd is optional in Debian. You don't have to install it. If you want Debian without systemd, you already have it. It's named Debian.

The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Nov 29, 2014 12:35 UTC (Sat) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah right, because professional users don't want systemd. Oh wait, they do:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/01/msg00287.html

The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Nov 30, 2014 1:45 UTC (Sun) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

Nobody disputes that some people want systemd. Nobody is trying to prevent the people who want systemd from using it.

However, there are some people who don't want to use systemd, and they are asking for you to let them.

The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Nov 30, 2014 12:13 UTC (Sun) by krake (guest, #55996) [Link]

> ....by a tiny FreeDesktop crowd

There is no such thing as a FreeDesktop crowd.

FreeDesktop.org is a host to facilitate cooperation between developers of different projects.

It also provides project infrastructure in case hosting at one of the particpating projects is not an option.
Basically being a non-associated git hub.

The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Nov 29, 2014 3:26 UTC (Sat) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link] (2 responses)

No... so far as I know there aren't any existing Debian "forks". There are tons of derivatives but they all use the common Debian-created package set... perhaps with a few dozen or more added/replaced packages. I would assume a "fork" would take the entire Debian package universe, forking every package in such a way it becomes independently maintained... otherwise it wouldn't be a fork.

A fork of Debian would indeed be news and something LWN should cover... just like they cover many distributions. As you may or may not recall, 3+ years ago Fuduntu forked Fedora and it was mainly over GNOME 3 and the move to systemd. That was a lot of work and they lasted about 2 years before their comparatively small development team burned out. Here's hoping Devuan can muster a large and diverse enough development team to not only get it off the ground but keep it going for some time to come. Why? While I'm definitely pro-systemd, it doesn't hurt to hedge ones bets just in case, right?

The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Nov 29, 2014 3:45 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

>Why? While I'm definitely pro-systemd, it doesn't hurt to hedge ones bets just in case, right?

Yes but they are hedging their bets on sysvinit instead of something actively maintained which doesn't seem to be a good path forward to me. Afaik you can continue installing Debian without systemd anyway and if in the future some package grows a hard dependency on systemd and one is willing to fork it and write patches, one might just work within the existing project with a large community of contributors.

Win-win?

Posted Nov 29, 2014 14:33 UTC (Sat) by CChittleborough (subscriber, #60775) [Link]

If Devuan produces a viable distro, then the rest of us benefit from having that distro available.

If Devuan is not so successful, there will (probably) be some useful lessons we can learn from it.

In either case, those of us not involved in Devuan come out ahead. Only the people who work on (or donate to?) Devuan are risking anything. Good on them.