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Debian Forked Over Systemd
jaromil writes: The so called "Veteran Unix Admin" collective has announced that the fork of Debian will proceed as a result of the recent systemd controversy. The reasons put forward are not just technical; included is a letter of endorsement by Debian Developer Roger Leigh mentioning that "people rely on Debian for their jobs and businesses, their research and their hobbies. It's not a playground for such radical experimentation." The fork is called "Devuan," pronounced "DevOne." The official website has more information.
But that website is atrocious suck. Top AND bottom panes which don't move and serve no purpose other than to obscure the window? What the hell is this shit?
GCC was forked successfully to egcs
XFree86 was forked successfully to xorg
FreeBSD was forked successfully to netbsd and dragondflybsd
OpenOffice was forked successfully to libreoffice
Now it's the debian's turn to be forked. Good luck to everyone.
It's worse. Pottering is paid by Microsoft to destroy the Linux community. Every. Single. Thing. he touches is crap, mostly pointless, controversial, and breaks everything. I have no idea why people don't see this.
I used to be a sys admin, but that was years ago and currently I only use Linux on the desktop. I don't suppose that someone could explain to me (or just give me a link to an explanation): what is systemd exactly, what does it change, and why do people both love and hate it so much?
Systemd is a piece of software, modular in design, monolithic in architecture. It is, on top of being a replacement for init and the init.d scripts, replaces basically everything touching kernel and whatnot. It is also a service management and monitoring framework.
It is authored by the same guy who created PulseAudio and Avahi. Think a guy with enourmous ego and the GNOME attitude ("my way, or the highway").
I've seen enough of these stories now to kind of get the feeling that it's mostly admins who hate this, and they mostly hate it because it's change and it screws up their configs. Is that right? Is there any other reason to hate it? I have no idea what the motivation is on the other side.
It takes what worked and everybody knows (mostly written in shell), and replaces it with binary blobs (binary programs, written in C).
The majority of admins (think: ex-Windows white collars) are overjoyed to have a new toy. They never knew how init worked - and now they do not have to care anymore. Because anything written in C is magically better than everything written in shell.
The minority of admins (think: *NIX guys) are royally pissed that something they were taking for granted - the total control over the system *NIX always provided - is now basically locked down and given away to some guys from interwebs about whom they never heard before. All for the sake, wait for it, that GNOME can shutdown or restart computer smoothly.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Very droll. But misses the point. Historically, Debian unstable was usually absolutely solid. Better than the stable releases of many distributions. I should know, I've run it on my desktop(s) for the last 14 years. I've had maybe two minor issues in that entire time. Its quality has plummeted in recent months as all this "modern" stuff has been jammed in without regard to proper backward compatibility.
You might this this is amusing. I'm upset that the distribution I've spent the last 16 years working on has been subverted by developers pushing software with major design and implementation issues, and no formal specifications for its many interfaces. For something which aims to become the base of all Linux systems, its current form is pretty amateur, and its lack of attention to detail in breaking existing installs on upgrade in various different ways is breathtaking. This is largely down to the difference in attitude between the older developers such as myself who spent huge amounts of time testing things worked on all sorts of different configurations, and the systemd crowd who simply tell you you're doing things the wrong way and must change, even if you've got a configuration which was supported for the last decade by Debian. The big change here is that systemd has broken compatibility with Debian's past supported configurations by not caring to support the full range of configurations the old sysv-rc/initscripts setup did; and its maintainers did not spend the necessary effort to ensure these setups were migrated and supported properly.
systemd is, first, a new init system for Linux, to replace sysv init.
Additionally, it brings a host of companion daemons: logging (journald), a session manager (logind) and a bunch of others.
systemd and it's companions offer a host of functionality and a number of software pieces are becoming to depend on it, to the point you "can't" run a fully functional Gnome3 without using systemd as init (it needs the session management functionally of logind, for example).
The major distributions have adopted systemd as default init system: Fedora, RHEL, SuSE, Debian and Arch. Ubuntu hasn't changed yet but they have announced they will follow Debian in the future.
There is a number of people who dislike it for many reasons, which are hard to summarize because many of the people dislike it for false reasons and only some actually make valid and constructive critiques.
Eg, many people claim it's monolithic. In fact, it's made of ~100 daemons and applications and the init process isn't that big. Much much smaller than the Linux kernel itself, which a big monolithic kernel.
Many peole dislike being "forced" to use because the major distributions are adopting it and major projects like Gnome are becoming dependent (with KDE talking about it too).
I use "" in "can't" and "forced" because it's not strictly true. While a lot of people whine and hate in slashdot, a small number of people have been putting their code where their mouth is and working on alternatives.
Eg, there's a systemd-shim package in Debian which actually allows you to run Gnome3 very nicely without using systemd as init, by providing the necessary systemd features.
Ubuntu also moved to systemd because everyone was moving to systemd. Before that, Ubuntu has their own init system called Upstart, and there was much debate in Debian on whether to use systemd or Upstart.
Of course, in the end, even people wanting sysvinit are obviously doing something wrong because they're not using sysvinit properly. Sysvinit has a daemon manager built into it yet it's only used for one daemon typically (getty).
Instead, we abuse it to run shell scripts that barely replicate that functionality that is already built into sysvinit. I mean, init monitors the processes it runs, restarts them as necessary, and if they fail by restarting too quickly, init waits 5 minutes before trying again. Which his what daemon management is.
Then why aren't you hearing anything from the Red Hat customer base?
I am. Were I to walk into the systems suite here at work and yell "yeah centos 7!" I would probably be bombarded with nerf darts. In a mean way.
Someone had to do it.
Debian devs are feminists and SJWs, they like change for the sake of change and to defeat "the man". They care nothing for "white male tears" even though most of them are that.
Debian excludes game due to author's views on women.
A DFSG complaint opensource casino video game was
recently posted to the debian bug tracker as a request
for packaging, as is the standard method for pursuing
such things in debian.
The bug was quickly closed, tagged as "won't fix"
The reason given by one of the debian developers
alluded to the author's opinion on women:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bi...
The piece of software in question is licensed
under the GPL and is one of the only of it's
kind for linux (ascii-art console slot machine software)
Debian packages many ascii-art / text console
video games of similar quality.
Is professing inclusive social views now a hard requirement
for being allowed to contribute to free software projects?
#gamergate #geekfeminism