[ale] Gearing up for the future (wuz: boot speed, systemd, vi vs emacs, etc)

[Steve Litt]

On Mon, 19 Feb 2018 15:54:42 -0500
Solomon Peachy <pizza at shaftnet.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 19, 2018 at 12:50:57PM -0500, Steve Litt via Ale wrote:
> > One thought. Systemd was not the result of a meritocracy: It was
> > financed by Redhat, who, as a purveyor of training and consultants,
> > has everything to gain by a universally more complex GNU/Linux.
> > During the coup, Redhat must finance the development and
> > troubleshooting of systemd, and it doesn't come cheap.  
> 
> To paraphrase something you said to me earlier in this thread, your 
> opinions (and those of others!) don't count as facts.
> 
> So, respectfully, [citations needed].

Alright, I'll withdraw the sentence about meritocracy. It's a no-op
anyway. Every single other thing in my paragraph is a known fact easily
supportable by a quick internet search.

[snip S.Peachy meritocracy clause: If I don't talk about it, I'm not
responding to your taking about it

> those who do the actual work
> get to determine the future.  

Same exact thing can be said of dictators and clever criminals. And
that future is often short term.

> The systemd authors (including many not 
> actually paid by redhat) put the work in.  Nobody else has.

Of course not. Who would complexify an OS to add a few features, when
those features' benefits could have been added much more simply and
modularly.

> Well, except arguably for Devuan -- they at least put their money
> where their mouth was and forked Debian.  Unfortunately they haven't
> actually put in any effort where it actually matters; that is working
> with the various upstreams to maintain and support the non-systemd
> codepaths that were barely functional before systemd even came along. 

Yeah, well, they didn't have Redhat's billions behind them when they
negotiated with the upstreams. They had day jobs, many of which were
negatively impacted by systemd. But anyway, the word "codepaths" isn't
defined in dictionary.com, the Urban Dictionary, acronymfinder.com,
or a generic web search, so unless by "codepaths" you mean the sysvinit
start and stop scripts, I doubt there was anything barely functional
pre-systemd, and once again, there were and are plenty of init systems
that don't use those start and stop scripts.

> 
> Ironically, for a distro forked to "maintain init system freedom",
> they actually provide *less* choice than what they forked from.

The preceding is simply not true. You can easily run any init system
*except* systemd on Devuan. Running runit, s6, or Epoch on Debian is
crazily difficult: I know, I've done it.

> Their sole differentiating feature is the outright removal of
> libsystemd.so from filesystems; the "alternative" inits that are the
> raison d'etre for Devuan aren't supported any better there than
> upstream Debian.

Simply not true. Devuan removes the tight weldings making it insanely
difficult to lay down an alternative init, so you can install pretty
much any simple init system including runit, s6, Epoch, or BusyBox init.
Meanwhile, I wouldn't want to bet my business plan on Debian keeping
their sysvinit package and their OpenRC package functional as time goes
on.

SteveT