The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Dec 1, 2014 10:24 UTC (Mon) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266)
In reply to: The "Devuan" Debian fork by epa
Parent article: The "Devuan" Debian fork

> By the time Debian does start to drop support for SysV init, a year or two from now,

This is *Debian*. The distribution which has support for more than one non-Linux kernel. The distribution which has support for *Hurd*.

I don't think they'll drop support for sysvinit so soon. It wouldn't surprise me if they add support for even more init systems instead. It wouldn't surprise me if they create an overengineered system to generate configurations for multiple init systems from a single text file (in the style of the Debian menu package), which no other distribution will use.

Yeah, systemd will be the default and what almost all of their users will be using. Doesn't mean they will drop the alternatives (IIRC the "alternatives" system several distributions use came from Debian, which shows how much they like alternatives).

The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Dec 1, 2014 15:22 UTC (Mon) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link] (3 responses)

> This is *Debian*. The distribution which has support for more than one non-Linux kernel.

Not any more. It just dropped one of the two because of inadequate maintenance. And had there been an insistence that alternative kernels mandate that any package which doesn't run on kFreeBSD or the Hurd be elimitated from the archive or patched until it did, Debian would look very different (worse, IMO) than it does today.

The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Dec 12, 2014 19:13 UTC (Fri) by andreasb (guest, #80258) [Link] (2 responses)

>> This is *Debian*. The distribution which has support for more than one non-Linux kernel.
>
> Not any more. It just dropped one of the two because of inadequate maintenance.

That doesn't make any sense as you wrote it. If you only count release architectures as being supported, then Debian never had support for more than one non-Linux kernel. Hurd has not made it that far.

The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Dec 12, 2014 20:36 UTC (Fri) by Zack (guest, #37335) [Link] (1 responses)

I think rodgerd was referring to GNU/kFreeBSD being dropped as a release architecture.

It was *not* dropped because of inadequate maintenance, by the way. With zero RC bugs and 90% of the archive built, it was in ship shape. The main release concern for the maintainers was in fact, that it was probably too late to ship with a FreeBSD 10 kernel.

Why it was dropped isn't 100% clear (https://release.debian.org/jessie/arch_qualify.html doesn't seem up to date), but the only reason I can surmise is that Steven Chamberlain in his role as super-human maintainer of all things kFreeBSD is a single point of failure, and as such, as a release architecture it would be prone to the malevolent whims of renegade buses.

Last thing I heard it was still going to be released, on schedule, alongside Jessie, but probably with a FreeBSD 10 kernel, since the freeze doesn't affect the architecture anymore.

The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Dec 13, 2014 1:20 UTC (Sat) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link]

> It was *not* dropped because of inadequate maintenance, by the way.

Probably a bad choice of word - the email I saw said it was because they were down to one maintainer (an inadequate *number* of mainters, not that the maintainer is inadequate).