[ale] Origins of Linux, do we care?

[Solomon Peachy]

On Sun, Sep 20, 2015 at 12:12:56AM -0400, James Sumners wrote:
> Devuan is taking too long. It's understandable, but I'm building stuff now
> so I can't wait.

The short version of why it's taking so long is that they seriously 
underestimated not only the level of effort it would take to spin up 
what amounts to a new distro, but also the number of folks interested 
enough in the outcome to actually help make it happen.

Far more folks would be interested in the outcome if the entire Devuan 
effort didn't reek of a juvenile "I'm going to proudly cut off my nose 
to spite my face" attitude.  They are so anti-systemd that they seek to 
eliminate *any* reference to it -- Not just at runtime, but also on-disk 
and at build time of any upstream packages.

This goes far, far beyond the more pragmatic (and quite reasonable IMO) 
"I don't want to be forced to use systemd at runtime" attitude that many 
folks (even on this mailing list) have expressed -- and even as I write 
this, those pragmatic folks actually have a choice -- they can use 
Debian as it exists today.  systemd is still entirely optional in 
Debian, except when $random_upstream_package requires its use.  (I'm not 
sure if any of those actually exist any more now that logind has been 
independently reimplemented)

If the Devuan folks succeed in their goal of a stable, supportable 
distro, more power to them, but they're learning that it's quite an 
effort to build the infrastructure necessary for a full cross-platform 
distro, that maintaining said distro (whose only goal is to tilt against 
upstream windmills) costs a considerable amount of time and effort on an 
ongoing basis, and that you don't attract or retain the help you need by 
acting like a bunch of juvenile asshats.  (IMNSHO, of course)

Far be it for me to begrudge what other people spend their free time 
doing, but I can't help but think that, given their stated goals, their 
energy would have been far better spent contributing upstream.

 - Solomon
-- 
Solomon Peachy        		       pizza at shaftnet dot org
Delray Beach, FL                          ^^ (email/xmpp) ^^
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
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