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Joey Hess Resigns From Debian
An anonymous reader writes: Long-time Debian developer Joey Hess has posted a resignation letter to the Debian mailing list. Hess was a big part of the development of the Debian installer, debhelper, Alien, and other systems. He says, "It's become abundantly clear that this is no longer the project I originally joined in 1996. We've made some good things, and I wish everyone well, but I'm out. ... If I have one regret from my 18 years in Debian, it's that when the Debian constitution was originally proposed, despite seeing it as dubious, I neglected to speak out against it. It's clear to me now that it's a toxic document, that has slowly but surely led Debian in very unhealthy directions."
What directions is he referring to? What's seen as wrong with the constitution? Toxic?
After all of the rhetoric regarding "community" you can see how Debian has fallen short. While I still like and use Debian currently I am seriously looking at other options. When Debian pushed Gnome3 and the community didn't like it they moved forward with it as the default desktop anyway. Now there is the systemd debacle. A large number of people have voiced their disapproval, but No, Debian is going to go down that route anyway. Perhaps this could be a real gain for the BSDs?
I've never heard of Debian before - is it based on Ubuntu Linux?
This can be a warning for other groups.
The Debian constitution looks like nothing more than normal club bureaucracy. Without it, I would expect Debian wouldn't have survived as long as it has.
https://www.debian.org/devel/constitution
Without specific concerns about such a constitution, I'm inclined to not make much of this. People change, projects change, people leave, people join. It doesn't matter how vital the participant, things change.
This is the only hint of what's wrong, I don't see how it has anything to do with the existence of a constitution: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/11/msg00196.html
No offense to anyone involved... I'm more interested in learning what's wrong with the constitution so that I can avoid similar problems in my own clubs.
Thanks systemd.
What does he specifically mean?
He means that Debian, like many other FOSS projects, needs Giving Trees to drain.
Joey was one such tree, and all that is left now is a stump. Others are at various stages of being just a trunk, or perhaps having a few branches left. The Giving Trees are being chopped down faster than they are being planted.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I've spent way too much time over the past month reading threads on the developers' list related to Joey's proposed vote. Basically, he was advocating a policy which stated that no package shall be dependent upon one particular init system, the situation which has been in place all along. Unfortunately, what it's really come down to is total commitment to systemd or not, not only for Debian but essentially for the Linux community in general. There are many developers who are modifying packages to totally depend upon systemd and its ever expanding list of services, and they have made it clear that they will not consider alternatives. What's become equally clear to me is that the developers in general, and the systemd proponents in particular, are completely unconcerned about the impact upon the user community, the server segment which has almost no concern for improvements such as reduced boot time, or pretty much anything outside of the development community.
Perhaps in the long run this will all work out, but as a long-time (17 years) Debian user and longer-time (30 years) UNIX guy, I'm very skeptical. Too many things being aggregated into a single system, too many dependencies upon large packages which are almost certain to prove susceptible to security and reliability defects, and a lead developer with a poor track record, monstrous ego and an alienating personality. At this point, it seems that a fork of Debian is almost inevitable, though that effort appears to me to be more likely to simply dilute the overall effort than bring any resolution.
What's perhaps most frustrating to me is that systemd is but one of several changes to the ecosystem which are being made with little regard for the consequences. We've seen how well the Gnome3 desktop has been received by the user community, with essentially no concern from the developers. The loss of a desktop manager is an inconvenience, however there are many applications based upon GTK which are essentials, and these are being adversely affected. Another turn in the wrong direction, in my opinion, is Wayland, which breaks many highly useful (to users) capabilities provided by X11. I'd be OK if Wayland continues to be an alternative to X11, however I suspect that, like systemd, it will become an avalanche once Red Hat and any other major distribution adopts it as a default.
As I wrote above, perhaps in the long run it will all be good, and the consequences of people like Joey Hess departing will not be detrimental. We shall see.
-- MC --
I don't care what skill you may or may not have, all developers are the same: Random and often wrong.
I say this as a developer myself for 30+ years. We are esoteric, egotistical, opinionated, and often, very often, wrong when it comes to the overall picture, prediction of future trends, and proper leadership. This is why I always try to seek out leaders that can guide my skill to success. I know for a fact that I suck at understanding the high-level world.
updated to jessie and installed systemd by default, had to roll back VM and pin systemd. Fuck Debian.
You outlined your scepticism, thought processes, and the "general concern" standpoint that is so often lost in political vs. technical (or "politechnical") battles involving the "monolithic systemd" approach and I share your sentiments completely. Maybe that's because, like you, I'm an "oldish UNIX guy" (1990 and counting), and a lot of us have been around long enough to see the negative effects of "change for the sake of change" (which, in my opinion, systemd suffers greatly from); a lot of software today suffers from that driving force, so I shouldn't exclusively pick on systemd.
The author of uselessd said "many of the more technically competent people with views critical of systemd have been rather quiet in public, for some reason". The reason is that most of us in those positions do not have the time, energy, or interest to partake in long-winded uphill battles when our jobs, responsibilities, and lives tend to already be inundated with energy-depleting tasks; the last thing we need is to voluntarily enter into a near-religious debacle when we could just switch distros or flavours (e.g. Linux vs. BSD) and continue to do what we've done for a long time (and continue to do it well). Thus, our scepticism is justified -- we are not "against" change, we just don't make hasty decisions.
systemd is designed to prevent duplicated boilerplate in init scripts -- but it won't support arbitrary verbs in its init scripts so best practice is to put those functions in auxiliary scripts elsewhere. Which will mean you have to duplicate long sets of the same functionality in both places. Yay for systemd!
systemd is designed to minimize how long you spend booting. Given how often I reboot, if systemd costs me even one more minute to deal with over the course of a year, systemd has actively failed to save me time.
systemd brings binary logging to Linux, which is good because I was talking to Nobody Ever, and Mr. Ever had a lot to say about how big a help the Windows Event Viewer is in sorting out issues.
I guess Debian was a great thing to learn Unix on and I'll really miss it.
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
systemd has become de facto mandatory, practically overnight. We weren't having this debate every other day last year.
This is a clear sign of something immature being shoved down our throats. My point is simple: it has not followed the traditional path of gaining third-party acceptance before becoming enshrined as a de facto standard in one of the most major distributions around. This (and I am NOT trolling) is much like Bennet Hasselton using Slashdot's front page as his personal blog; it is an option unavailable to the rest of us, and it is unclear why he should be so specially privileged.
There is no clear and compelling reason for replacing a host of services (69 services!) with entirely new code under the aegis of "making an init system" (one service). First and foremost, the amount of unaudited code is staggering. This is a security nightmare. The NSA is busy laughing all the way to the bank, because they didn't have to lift a finger to vastly increase the amount of attack surface on the average Linux system.
More importantly, it has been allowed to work itself into a position where we are unable to avoid it without sacrificing features we use routinely (and this applies across many groups of people with varying interests and use patterns). This is a clear loss of freedom of choice. Calling it "not mandatory" is disingenuous at best and an outright lie in many cases.
Yes, it does replace 69 services
And since when is unaudited code NOT a technical gripe?
Lightweight? Bullshit. Yet another systemd fanboi who spouts rhetoric and flat out lies and ignores technical complaints. There's so many fucking things wrong with systemd that you can't even list them in a post on Slashdot. Like the fact that the journal gets corrupted and Poettering considers it not a bug. Like the fact that it was rolled out without network logging support--but the logger you're forced to use in between an external logger is known to corrupt logs. These things are technical gripes and an absolute deal-breaker for environments which need auditability.
Fucking idiot.
For me, the not-caring about corrupted logs was the kicker. Nobody with even the least bit of interest in security and stability will _ever_ tolerate something like that. The logs are critical and _must_ be complete, if technically possible.
Poettering is an incompetent hack or has a nefarious agenda. (Personally, I think he is a pansy for others with the nefarious agenda...)
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Well, if the language is deserved, nobody will be sorry to see you go. People not listening to valid concerns when they are voiced in a reasonable manner, eventually get shouted at and rightfully so.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
systemd is designed to give Linux a full featured process manager like you have on mainframes. Speeding booting is a side benefit.
___
As for your comment about arbitrary verbs systemd should be handling each process, that's its job. There shouldn't be any functionality in both places after conversion.
Let's number the responses:
1. For your complaints about lack of arbitrary verbs in init scripts I don't really see much of this as a problem. When systemd's settings do what they are supposed to there is no duplicate functionality elsewhere. This is true for the distros I've seen it used. Far LESS scripting to start the system.
2. Systemd is not about boot time, actually I saw at least one example showing it's slower than upstart. But if you think that's the reason systemd exists you have a lot of reading to do.
3. Binary logging is a useful feature IMO. But hey you can't please everyone. Oh wait you can, a single setting change will give you standard syslog compatibility. Who knew!
root can crash linux, shock horror.
Film at 11.
Watch this Heartland Institute video