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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.
Totally beyond my previously (already good) expectations :)
They will have a future much more promising than those who are afraid of choice would say.
OTOH logind is -- according to the #debianfork channel on IRC -- useless and it is better and more secure to run x.org as root than to have systemd running.
Which seems reasonable. Look how many recent security bugs are related to systemd vs x.org. :).
It's very prudent to defer systemd deployment until it gets mature (in case it has the possibility to get mature
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!
Nice propaganda, except they do not hate Debian :) :) of choices.
What they might hate is the people flooding Debian that are afraid (look, I do not use "hate"
Devuan is embracing the original spirits of Debian, so no wonder it reuses elements from the Debian logo.
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.
Was someone trying to sneak that one through in the middle of a dull-news sandwich?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The larger question is: what Devuan is really forking?
Do they fork a distro?
Or do they fork an organization?
With some work, one can fork a distro. But to fork the organization, one need to win over the people. I doubt that they will win over many (Debian) people without actually changing something in the forked organization.
Though many see the "systemd vs world" as the dividing force, in reality there is IMO problem with Debian organization. I have followed the debate for some time, and IMO, the problem is that there is too much democracy in the Debian. Public debate is a good thing. But too much of it simply prevents the organization from doing its work. That is IMO what has happened during the Debian's init system selection process.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Linux worked better - or rather it really worked - before systemd. Why to develop anything? Just keep the old proven and _working_ daemons.
That is the reason why systemd becomes entrenched: Developers like it and start to depend on it since it makes their live easier.
Which is very debatable, if not just laughable.
That is the reason why systemd becomes entrenched: Developers like it and start to depend on it since it makes their live easier.
Which is very debatable, if not just laughable.
Systemd is Microsoft Event Viewer and data store for GNU/Linux. We do not want binary logs. If an operating system requires more than a text editor to view log files, there is a problem with the operating system and/or the log files. As an GNU/Linux since 1992 when SLS was "the distribution of choice" the current trend with the Debian GNU/Linux Project baffles my mind. What happened to the vision Deborah and Ian conceived so many year ago?
The absense of CVEs can mean the absense of people looking, and with the x11 being a quagmire of protocols, often contradicting each other as new stuff gets added over the decades, there are very few people that can even understand the code. One guy started to look last a while back and he is finding appalling bugs, check the recent CVEs and his presentation at last years chaos communication congress (30C3).
Making this swamp a bit dryer by not having it have root priviledgea is something that was work in progress ever since xfree started to run on Linux.
Now you come here and tell me that this sour spot for the last thirty years is better to keep around than having a much smaller, much cleaner codebase where almost all parts run in their own security context -- usually with privileges way lower than those you have as a user. Right.
Regards, Tobias
That consultation mongering in that link is indeed laughable.
Regards, Tobias
Thing is, I've been using it to build sheds and I'd like to keep using it to build sheds. Don't insist I use bridge-building techniques to build a shed.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I wish they would had put their efforts into Debian's kFreeBSD. It can't move to systemd and they downgraded it from an 'official' Jessie release.
Personally it's a bit of the best of FreeBSD and the best of Debian (apt-get) in a nice package. There's no problem with ZFS being 'in' the kernel. The latest versions of FreeNAS and FreeBSD both have ZFS booting.
Plus it still has all the debian server admin tools.
Even you own numbers show that xorg-sever is way bigger than systemd. Not that compressed archive sizes are a meaningful metric, nor is the contents of the archives remotely comparable.
I was able to follow the systemd codebase rather easily, it is not to horrible in my opinion. I won't comment on xorg for lack of first hand experience.
Check http://www.x.org/wiki/Development/Security/ yourself: The last batch from Dec. alone was 12 CVEs. Compared to those the issues you listed in systemd are rather tame. And yes, there will be more issues discovered in systemd (as there will be more in x11).
But all that is completely besides the point: We have a way to run xorg non-root now, and you do not like that way. Please suggest an alternative then, that gets the same results but which is more robust. So far I hear "running xorg as root is secure" and the argument for that is "we always did it that way".
I am hoping the devuan people will come up with ideas to solve long-standing problems, but do far I have not seen much interest:-(
That person is bitching that everybody and their dog start to depends on systemd. That is your evidence right there.
Of course you have to do the dating assumption that devs do whatever they like... It kind of crumples if you assume that there are systemd hitmen traveling the world, forcing developers to depend on systemd.
Regards, Tobias
What got vdev/udev to do with running xorg as non-root? Yes, that does initial setup of device nodes, but all the rest is handled by systemd-logind.
You are brandishing the wing stick:-)
Regards, Tobias
There is no way to refute conspiration theorists. It is a self-contained believe system, that functions outside of the real world. I won't bother to argue with that.
Regards, Tobias
It was not possible with consolekit, great that there was progress with consolekit2.
Regards, Tobias
Its good to see a few of them are actually putting their money where their mouth is. The beauty of open source is that it gives the loudmouth enough rope to hang himself. He doesn't get to bitch that anything was forced on him, or he had no choices.
But you see how this ends, if they were any bit good a system design, or even system administrator, they wouldn't be bitching about systemd or poettering in the first place, because if they were any good, they'd understand there are other options, and installing something else isn't hard. If you're a decent sysadmin that is. But if they had the skills to run a diffrent init system, they wouldn't be bitching.
No one is forcing anything on these people, its simply the more technically competant people who work for distros are more technically competant. So, after years of bitching they finally did something, and do you know what is going to happen to Devuan? Nothing. Its going to fizzle because maintaining a distro isn't as hard as making death threats and bitching, and if they actually had the skill and dedication to learn something new, most likely they'd be systemd fanbois
Hooray! The anti-systemd paedophiles have turned up again! Now the gang's all here.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
The rest is fully achievable using ConsoleKit2. You realize you don't understand it, which is good ;-)
Link please. AFAIK, it isn't possible to run Xorg as non-root in a safe manner using either CK or ConsoleKit2.
And BTW, the difficulty in running xorg as non-root in a safe manner is caused by the way the Linux kernel handles devices, not Xorg. That is why you need user session management from systemd-logind in order to secure that attached devices can't be abused to compromise security.
then i will see how much i like Devuan
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
and appreciate systemd's implicit mandate for backup suffixes that won't fill your hd undetected as an exercise.
So implicit that it wasn't explicit.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I see another good project starting, Modular Debian, that aims to integrate the pid 1 freedom in the main distribution, without forking https://www.freelists.org/arch...
its not superfluous, its more comprehensive than rsyslog, it starts logging earlier than rsyslog can, it logs after rsyslog has stopped. but if you don't want the binary log info, you can discard it. If that alternative was elegant, why wasn't it adopted across all distros?
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Forcing is probably too strong.
But you'd be surprised how much shit a charismatic person in the wrong place at the wrong time can cause.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Its up to you to define and explain your version of "bloatware", just throwing words around with nothing to back them up is pretty damning for your argument.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)