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Devuan Progress Report Published
zdzichu writes: The group of anonymous Italians behind the recent Debian fork have published their first progress report. It covers a wide range of topics: the 4.5k€ of donations received so far, moving distro infrastructure from GitHub to GitLab, progress on LoginKit (which replaces systemd's logind), fraud accusations, logo discussions, and few more important points.
This reminds me of the early days of "web services." The "enterprise" folks were jetting around writing gobs of XML and SOAP specifications, making speeches at conferences and whatnot. Meanwhile, some thoughtful people pointed out that the combination of existing HTTP verbs and the natural namespace provided by URLs satisfied the same use cases without the mountains of esoteric specifications and staggering protocol overhead. One memory I have from that time has persisted; some SOAP standards body muckity-muck was asked about REST during some function that happened around the time of the SOAP 1.0 specification release and he said (paraphrased); "Those REST folks aren't the kind of people the get things done!"
Today, SOAP gives people nausea almost universally and REST is the first choice of green-field work, with all sorts of API's proliferating everywhere. New languages and tools target REST first and SOAP eventually. Maybe. And if not then, meh, whatever.
Now we have the Debian fork. And what is said of the people behind it by those advocating systemd bloatware? Well they're just malcontents. They don't understand the problem systemd is trying to solve. They made a crummy web site and didn't even put their names on it. They'll never accomplish anything!
I have the feeling Poettering et. al are going to lose this one. If so then at least we can credit systemd with providing the motivation to progress, and reaffirming some of those cherished (if possibly mythical) UNIX principles.
(Incidentally, if anyone knows who was responsible for that statement about REST I mentioned please chime in .... I'm 99% sure it appeared on Slashdot.)
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
The problem with Debian is that for whatever reason they ignored the power of linux, choice. At least in Debian 8, it is still trivial to make it use sysvinitrc instead of system. Why not let people choose, instead of forcing it upon new upgrades, and worse insult yet, make current systems upgrade to systemd by default?
Every choice has a cost and a consequences. In this case, supporting multiple init-systems dramatically increase the maintenance complexity. Every Debian Developer would need to run both a stable and unstable/testing version of both init systems, and some packages would have to be maintained in two different versions (talk about dependency hell).
But that isn't even the most problematic part; that is the fact that all non-systemd development have more or less collapsed the last couple of years; "ConsoleKit" bit-rotted for years, meaning DE developers couldn't justify developing against it, "SysVinit" is hopelessly understaffed (don't even have a build test) and haven't made a release for 5 years (RH/SUSE was the defacto maintainers), there is no development taking place on real alternatives to systemd's "udev" (the "eudev" is mainly a shadow fork by AFAIK, one person), "cgroups" development like "CGManager" will cease when systemd provides functionality to support LXC, and so on.
In short, there is a huge stack of development needed now and in the future in order to run a non-systemd Linux distro, and fewer and fewer developers to do the job.
When FreeBSD changes to a modern init-system (they will probably clone systemd), they won't support old legacy style init-scripts daemons permanently either. It is simply too much work with too little gain.
Thanks Peter! you are so kind!
Hey wait a minute! the scammers are also on slashdot!!
quick quick, close your wallet!
Well, I am right ain't I. You funnel the donated Devuan money into dyne org, and as CEO/Chairman of that small org with self elected people, with no public oversight of the money, you also pull money out of dyne org into your own pocket to "pay for taxes". Dress it all up as a non-profit org too.
Make Devuan a proper org that directly receive the donated money you are begging for all the time, and have a proper elected committee with public oversight over the donated money and what they are spend on, and then maybe the smell of scam will evaporate.