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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."
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?
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 --
The longest lived linux distribution has no constitution. It's based on the idea of making sure it works well for the leader of the project. Surprisingly, Slackware is gaining, not losing, users due to this.
Of course, it doesn't hurt that Patrick Volkerding seems to prefer something other than systemd.
Based on what I've read....
His departure has to do with the interruptions to the release cycle by introducing arguments about technical minutia in sub-projects as requiring a GR vote to decide. Technical arguments being decided by the ignorant masses, versus the specific groups (which anyone from the GR can join) who have the specific job of making those decisions. At least that's one way to look at it.
This is not the first time and probably will not be the last that Debian technical decisions will be handed up to the popular vote, completely subverting the whole specialized delineation of teams within Debian. GR votes are being taken (again) for the specific purpose of avoiding losing a technical argument by appealing to a larger group, which also impacts the Debian release cycle. Normally, such votes would be delayed in the interest of the distro, but this is allowed by the Debian constitution. I would believe, such an act (appealing to the GR) was supposed to be limited to hotly debated and controversial topics (like systemd) but not implementation details (which is what is happening)...much less so close to the release date.
He is stating that he expects it to continue. He's not interesting in taking up this fight as a call to amend the constitution. He obviously feels alone in calling out that it's counterproductive to argue over details so close to a release. He's just done with a community that cares about who wins arguments or following strict process procedures rather than respectfully, making deadlines that users and commercial interests depend on (or at least use as an indicator of a stable project).
https://lists.debian.org/debia...
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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.
Of course, you don't know Joey Hess. Being one of the most equanimous, quiet hard-working, involved-everywhere guys I have had the privilege to work with (I am a DD since 2003, and Joey has been one of my role models in the project... Of course, even if our skillsets are quite different) He is not quitting because of "not getting his way".
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.
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