[ale] Origins of Linux, do we care?

[James Sumners]

On Sunday, September 20, 2015, Solomon Peachy <pizza at shaftnet.org> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>
Yep. That's why I'm happy I found Void. This is the first time I have ever
seriously considered putting together my own "distro" so that I don't ever
have to see systemd in it. But that wasn't really going to happen because
of everything you just wrote. I don't have time for LFS.

As for running Debian without systemd, good luck with that. The support for
alternative inits won't last long for the same reasons Devuan is in limbo.
And then'll come stuff like hostnamectl and machinectl and whatever else
systemd decides to gobble up next for no discernible reason.


-- 
James Sumners
http://james.sumners.info/ (technical profile)
http://jrfom.com/ (personal site)
http://haplo.bandcamp.com/ (band page)
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