Devuan Releases Beta of Systemd-Free 'Debian Fork' Base System (devuan.org)

jaromil writes: Devuan beta is released today, following up the Debian fork declaration and progress made during the past two years. Devuan now provides an alternative upgrade path to Debian, and switching is easy from both Wheezy and Jessie. From The Register: "Devuan came into being after a rebellion by a self-described 'Veteran Unix Admin collective' argued that Debian had betrayed its roots and was becoming too desktop-oriented. The item to which they objected most vigorously was the inclusion of the systemd bootloader. The rebels therefore decided to fork Debian and 'preserve Init freedom.' The group renamed itself and its distribution 'Devuan' and got work, promising a fork that looked, felt, and quacked like Debian in all regards other than imposing systemd as the default Init option."

Comments

Re:SystemD = Bolsheviks

[MrKaos]

The problem was service inter-dependency in startup/shutdown was quite awkward in SysV, plus the opportunity to increase service startup/shutdown speeds by handling unrelated services in parallel.

People who have this perception aren't using inittab properly. We are yet to see a use case presented that init cannot deal with and these two are already covered. Dependancies are meant to be initialized via rc scripts and services are maintained via inittab.

People seem to be hung up on using runlevel scripts to do everything. It's this mis-use case of red hat's runlevel scripting system that is being used as an excuse to replace initd with systemd. It's pretty reasonable for people to be skeptical about these efforts to replace initd when the issue is not functionality but education.

I sometimes wonder if their is a perception issue with the use of inittab files, like the server will explode if you do something wrong in an inittab script. However it's quite simple once you get you head around three key things:

Use a combination of run level scripts and scripts executed from inittab to acheive a system configuration. Runlevels are available to inittab entries when the rc scripts complete or execute in the background. Make sure your inittab shell scripts don't exit if your service is running properly.

That's pretty much all you need to remember to create very powerful and elegant patterns to manage the activities of any *ix system.