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Longtime Debian Developer Tollef Fog Heen Resigns From Systemd Maintainer Team

Posted by timothy on from the tough-gig dept.

An anonymous reader writes Debian developer Tollef Fog Heen submitted his resignation to the Debian Systemd package maintainers team mailing list today (Sun. Nov. 16th, 2014). In his brief post, he praises the team, but claims that he cannot continue to contribute due to the "load of continued attacks...becoming just too much." Presumably, he is referring to the heated and, at times, even vitriolic criticism of Debian's adoption of Systemd as the default init system for its upcoming Jessie release from commenters inside and outside of the Debian community. Currently, it is not known if Tollef will cease contributing to Debian altogether. A message from his twitter feed indicates that he may blog about his departure in the near future.

5 of 550 comments (clear)

  1. Not resigning from Debian by tfheen · · Score: 5, Informative

    I am not resigning from Debian, just from the systemd maintainer team.

    1. Re:Not resigning from Debian by tfheen · · Score: 5, Informative

      An example here is missing devices/mount points in fstab: sysvinit will happily ignore them, systemd won't consider local-fs.target reached and you'll have to fix your system for it to boot correctly.

      And this is exactly the kind of thing that makes many of us wary of systemd. I saw a post from someone a few weeks ago complaining that systemd wouldn't let his system start up because there was a problem in /etc/fstab, and he couldn't edit /etc/fstab because systemd wouldn't let his system start up.

      Yes, this is a bug (sorry, I don't have the bug # handy) and there's work in progress on preventing you from shooting your foot off (by requiring you to fix your fstab before the installation completes). It's still possible to boot up using sysvinit by booting with init=/lib/sysvinit/init as long as you've not uninstalled the sysvinit package. I'm sorry about people hitting this, but on the other hand, there's a reason why Jessie isn't released yet, we have some bugs to fix first. :-)

  2. How systemd became Debian's default init system by tfheen · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's a pretty long story. If you want to read all of it, you probably need to read the entire debian-devel and debian-ctte archives from approximately a year and a half ago until February/March this year.

    A shorter summary is something like (from my memory, coloured by my views, etc, but I believe it's largely correct). User names are generally @debian.org, finger $user@db.debian.org for full names and such. It's a bit rambling and written in one go, but it's what you get this time:

    - I upload systemd to Debian about a month after its initial release, get it into a ok-ish shape for wheezy, but not anywhere near suitable for being the default.
    - Other distros start switching to systemd as default, various people in Debian start discussing if we should switch to systemd. Some people say yes, some no, some want to switch to upstart. Bickering and discussions in equal measure spread out across all media (IRC, blogs/planet, mailing lists, in-person discussions). Most of it reasonably civil.
    - At some point, paultag files https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bi... (_massive_ bug report, you don't want to read it all) , asking the Debian technical committee to default on what the default should be.
    - Lots of discussions happen, we use a bit of liw's and rra's Essay Debate System (https://wiki.debian.org/Debate, https://wiki.debian.org/Debate...) to structure the debate. It's Debian, it has to be A System.
    - vorlon (Steve Langasek) sets up VMs using the various init systems for the Technical Committee members to play with. They do so and write up their findings and arguments. rra's writeup is at https://lists.debian.org/debia... and is possibly the best comparison I've ever read of init systems. Lots more discussions happen. I contribute a fair bit with my systemd maintainer hat on (though we're at this point a team maintaining systemd in Debian) and is very happy this happens while I'm holidaying in Spain so I don't have to deal with a day job at the same time.
    - A lot of arguing internally to the CTTE whether to couple the question of what the default init system should be with whether it's ok for packages to require a given init system. bdale resolves the knot by calling for votes on a proposal very quickly after proposing a ballot. iwj sees this as backstabbing and is still very, very angry about this to this day.

    The vote ends with systemd being the winner, after bdale's casting vote as the CTTE chair.

    After this, there is an attempted General Resolution in March, which fails to get enough seconds, this is restarted by iwj on late October this year. The goal of this GR appears to be to forbid packages to depend on a specific init system.

    1. Re:How systemd became Debian's default init system by the_B0fh · · Score: 5, Informative

      iwj's rebuttal to rra's write up:

      https://lists.debian.org/debia...

  3. A bit of background by tfheen · · Score: 5, Informative

    Just posted on my blog with a bit more background: http://err.no/personal/blog/te...