Systemd-Free Devuan 2.0 'ASCII' Officially Released (devuan.org)

"Dear Init Freedom Lovers..." begins the announcement at Devuan.org: We are happy to announce that Devuan GNU+Linux 2.0 ASCII Stable is finally available. Devuan is a GNU+Linux distribution committed to providing a universal, stable, dependable, free software operating system that uses and promotes alternatives to systemd and its components.

Devuan 2.0 ASCII runs on several architectures. Installer CD and DVD ISOs, as well as desktop-live and minimal-live ISOs, are available for i386 and amd64. Ready-to-use images can be downloaded for a number of ARM platforms and SOCs, including Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, OrangePi, BananaPi, OLinuXino, Cubieboard, Nokia and Motorola mobile phones, and several Chromebooks, as well as for Virtualbox/QEMU/Vagrant. The Devuan 2.0 ASCII installer ISOs offer a variety of Desktop Environments including Xfce, KDE, MATE, Cinnamon, LXQt, with others available post-install. The expert install mode now offers a choice of either SysVinit or OpenRC as init system...

We would like to thank the entire Devuan community for the continued support, feedback, and collaboration....
The release notes include information on Devuan's new network of package repository mirrors, and they're also touting their "direct and easy upgrade paths" from Devuan Jessie, Debian Jessie and Debian Stretch.

Comments

No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

systemd works fine. stop grousing about it. kthxbye.

Re:No one cares

[greenwow]

Except for losing log messages and not providing a proper exit status. It's really hard to troubleshoot problems without log messages.

Re: No one cares

[Brockmire]

I saw a similar title earlier today and gave 1 fuck, "what a dumb name". Fuck, why are OS names so shitty?

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of creating fragmentation in the Linux community, perhaps you should stop whining and help improve systemd. You're not paying for systemd, so you have no place to make demands of someone who is giving you a product for free. Plus, systemd is open source, meaning you are free to add any functionality that you desire.

Re: No one cares

[phantomfive]

Log message problems can be fixed (maybe by a different team, though), if that were the worst thing, it wouldn't be a problem. The problem is systemd is crappy architecture, and you don't want to build stuff on top of crappy architecture to get it embedded deeply within the system, you want to keep it flexible and replaceable. That's why this project is good even if you never use it, because it will improve the quality of the software you do use. And those people who do like systemd can use it.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how so many people claim systemd is a lousy architecture to build upon, yet never provide any evidence to support those claims. It sure makes those claims highly suspect.

Re: No one cares

[sjames]

Funny how people who support systemd are either blind or run a full memory purge after reading any story about systemd on /.. Good examples are all over the comments on /.. If you didn't see them, you're either new here or you pointedly missed them.

Re: No one cares

[phantomfive]

Funny how so many people claim systemd is a lousy architecture to build upon, yet never provide any evidence to support those claims

Nah, I did a fairly long analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of systemd in my journal. If you disagree, go ahead and tell me: it will increase my knowledge.

Re:No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

?? When did it not give you proper exit status? Can you give a bit of context?

I do a lot of work systemd based systems (RHEL 7.x) and I see exit statuses logged to the system log rather often by system log if there's an abnormal exit code:

Jun 07 18:32:04 testserver-124772 systemd[1]: testservice.service failed.
Jun 07 18:32:04 testserver-124772 systemd[1]: Unit testservice.service entered failed state.
Jun 07 18:32:04 testserver-124772 systemd[1]: testservice.service: main process exited, code=killed, status=9/KILL

If it's an auto restart service then it should automatically log that in the system log. One shots or non auto restarting services I'm not sure about atm.

Re: No one cares

[Bing Tsher E]

"You're not paying for this racoon we are setting loose in your kitchen, so you have no place to make demands of someone who is giving you a raccoon for free."

Re: No one cares

[haruchai]

I saw a similar title earlier today and gave 1 fuck, "what a dumb name". Fuck, why are OS names so shitty?

What difference does that make?
I think Windows is a lame name and Solaris is cool but that didn't stop the former from becoming more successful than the latter.
I also think most rappers have exceedingly stupid names but many of them are multi-millionaires and I'm not.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to bed Pottering, shit is dribbling from your mouth again and there is no where for it to go because your who takes up all the space

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of creating fragmentation in the Linux community

It's creative destruction. Read your Marx.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Their product is crap of no value to me. I will ignore your whiny suggestion that I help improve it.

Re: No one cares

[sjames]

MOD UP

It may be just as well I don't have mod points, I can't decide between 'Funny' or 'Insightful'

Re: No one cares

[lkcl]

https://ewontfix.com/14/ is a good article which goes into detail about why systemd is a bad architecture.

Re:No one cares

[Narcocide]

That "nobody cares" comment really hurt you, didn't it? You should seek therapy.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, no.

SystemD is controlled primarily by Redhat employees -- and, they are very, very, very hostile to commits that aren't 100% behind their 'everything is a VM' goalposts. Even normal, sane bugs results in an almost instant screaming response, and closed bugs.

And fork? Pffft. That's what you're against, right? So, one can either fork systemd and 'do it right', or... not use it.

Re:No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny that I've been running BSD based servers for damn near 20 years and I have yet to see any daemon just go off and die without a reason.

Re:No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

...says the guy with imaginary persecutors on a tech website.

Re:No one cares

[Lisandro]

Seriously. For my life, i cannot understand why the Linux community is so worked up over it.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

systemd is the fragmentation. Using sysvinit is the original way of things on Linux that should never have been replaced by systemd and its ilk. Go tell Lennart Poettering not to fork shit with systemd and pulseaudio, rather than confusing the issue with your nonsense.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

While there are a handful of informative posts, they get drowned out by other up modded posts like this that don't add anything. Depending on the story, sometimes there are almost no informative posts and just a lot of "No, it just sucks", even to polite requests for more information or for someone to back up a specific claim.

Re: No one cares

[Brulath]

As that article is 4 years old now, I'd be interested to read an updated view on how systemd has changed since then (the single PID-1 thing appears to be at least partially outdated, if it's comprised of ~60 programs now). It may not have changed much, but 4 years is a fairly long time.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

[1] systemd created the fragmentation, so you don't get to lay that off.

[2] I don't rally around people with ugly ideologies either, in the name of unity.

Re:No one cares

[Barsteward]

you won't get any context on here, the myths and rants have been ongoing since version 0.1. seems everyone else and his dog seem to get on with systemd fine bar a few on here.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

But considering the bugs where it exits with a 0 even on failure and they just can't seem to not drop most log messages on daemon start, has much really changed?

Re: No one cares

[szabo.m.peter]

It is more like: there is now a racoon in the free park that you also frequent, and other visitors seemed to like it.

Re:No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Graphical stuff is the big one that I see a lot of (mostly segfaults), but no shortage of daemons that get murdered by the OOM kernel killer because the main service on that VM has a memory leak.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

No one likes it.

Re: No one cares

[Zontar The Mindless]

We'd rather salute the folks who worked so hard behind the scenes to slip systemd into distros before the users had time to realise what was going on—much less protest—with a hearty "Fuck you, assholes".

Re:No one cares

[Zontar The Mindless]

I'm pretty sure that Narcocide != APK.

Re: No one cares

[F.Ultra]

Neither claim which is true. No logs have ever been dropped by systemd and the exit on failure is because the daemon fails after systemd did it's thing and people not fully understanding how asynchronous starting works.

Re: No one cares

[F.Ultra]

systemd was not the first init replacement so your #1 claim does not hold water. And btw none of the BSDs use SYSV Init either.

Re:No one cares

[F.Ultra]

Except of course that none of this is true. If "systemctl start XXX" returns 0 when the XXX fails then that is because XXX failed after systemd did it's thing, often this can be traced back to the old start script performing pre-launch checks that the new unit file does not have (i.e the people who wrote the unit file didn't do a proper job).

Re: No one cares

[F.Ultra]

But there is no evidence, just anonymous anecdotes from people who claim to have switched to BSD for ages ago but still seam to comment on every Linux article they find.

Re:No one cares

[F.Ultra]

They are talking about "systemctl start XXX" returning 0 when XXX fails to start. This is always due to XXX failing after it forks so systemctl does not see the failure before it has already done it's thing.

Lot's of the older sysv init scripts contains lots of pre-flight tests on daemons where the script writes knew that the daemon would fork first and look for configuration files etc later and then when the unit files where created these pre-flight checks where removed (but there is nothing that prevents a unit file from having pre-flight checks) by maintainers that didn't fully understand why these checks where there.

Re: No one cares

[sjames]

I have posted much more detailed critiques myself. Don't lie./

Re:No one cares

[F.Ultra]

And which secret sauce in BSD protects a third party daemon like say apache or sendmail from bugs as compare with when they execute on another OS?

Re: No one cares

[AmiMoJo]

I find it interesting that everyone can see the flaws in systemd (and particularly in Poettering's attitude), but no-one has come up with a better alternative.

How do I know there is nothing better? All the major distros have adopted systemd. If there was a better alternative I'm sure they would adopt it.

Perhaps you have an alternative explanation, if so I would like to hear it.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

I like it.

Instead of the zillion different gaffertaped together scripts used in different distros we now have a standard (I can use ubuntu or Debian at home and if they have centos at work its one less difference).

Not having scripts it can be faster.

The service files are much easier to grok than digging through scripts was.

Is it perfect?

No

Is there still gaffa tape?

Yes

While it comes with some problems of its own it, does solve real problems and is an improvement.

Re: No one cares

[F.Ultra]

You mean like dropping logs and not providing a proper exit status? Both of which are false btw.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

False equivalence: systemd is unlikely to harm you or your property or spread disease. Nor can one bugfix a raccoon, but one *can* bugfix systemd with a little more elbow grease and a little less complaining.

Re: No one cares

[sjames]

No, that's not me.

Search for COME FROM, btrfs, RAID1.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

If you interpret a text response as "screaming" then this may say more about you and your mental state than it does Red Hat.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

the single PID-1 thing appears to be at least partially outdated, if it's comprised of ~60 programs now

It was already wrong when the article appeared years ago, but that didn't stop people...

Re: No one cares

[slashdot_commentator]

You like it so much, you won't publicly associate your pseudonym to liking systemd.

> While it comes with some problems of its own it, does solve real problems and is an improvement.

Really? "Real" problems in a systems event reporter that has worked near flawlessly since its inception, over twenty years ago? What might those have been?

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

So, are you saying that none of the distros had a discussion about whether systemd would be a suitable init replacement? That none of them voted on the matter?

Are you, in fact, saying that somebody:

• * covertly accessed the various distro repos
• * uploaded the systemd packages and irrecoverably purged the original initd packages
• * replaced all of the various daemon packages with new versions that contain systemd unit files
• * modified the various installers to use systemd instead of initd
• * covertly configured all of the distro base systems to use systemd.

... and yet nobody noticed? If so, you are delusional and I have several bridges to sell you.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

There are always the BSDs, if the Linux corporations become too nasty.

Don't whine, switch.

Re: No one cares

[drinkypoo]

"How do I know there is nothing better? All the major distros have adopted systemd. If there was a better alternative I'm sure they would adopt it."

Bollocks. They adopted it because it became a dependency of other software, because the devs of that software were lazy and/or incompetent, like gnome. All except redhat of course which did it deliberately to the rest of us.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

There are plenty of alternatives ("Better" I'll leave for others to decide) . The daemontools-based inits (s6, nosh), continuation of the init system but with dependencies added (OpenRC), and some programs in their own class (launchd been ported a billion times).

The reason for the distros standardising on systemd have more to do with network effects than a conscientious decision - init was long in the tooth, and once RedHat wenr systemd, everyone else could piggy on their work.

Re:No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly one of us is wrong about this assertion. How does that feel?

Re: No one cares

[AmiMoJo]

I've heard that claim made before too... Are we really in a situation where a combination of laziness and conspiracy has forced most distros on to systemd, yet there is apparently enough support to build a fork of Debian without it?

Wouldn't it make more sense to, say, fix Gnome and a few other key bits of software to work without systemd, thus freeing all these distros that were forced to adopt it? Or just move to other window managers?

Re:No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

You're lying. A quick search through bugzilla will prove you're lying.

hxxps :// bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?component=Individual%20Port%28s%29&product=Ports%20%26%20Packages&query_format=advanced&short_desc=crash&short_desc_type=allwordssubstr

Re: No one cares

[wonkey_monkey]

You're not paying for this racoon we are setting loose in your kitchen

I don't remember anyone forcing me to use a systemd distro.

Re:No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Some parts of the "community" need a bad guy to be outraged over. It used to be Microsoft but less so nowadays, although the recent GitHub news caused a slight resurgence. They're a certain demographic (usually male, over 35) and tend not to have anything of substance in their complaints.

It appears to be outrage for the sake of being outraged.

Re:No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

... by maintainers that didn't fully understand why these checks where there.

This is the crux of vast majority of complains about systemd. Maintainers who don't understand systemd and write bad configuration. Just look at Debian for example. The nginx service file is using start-stop-daemon !!!

Re: No one cares

[phantomfive]

ls -lh /lib/systemd/systemd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1.6M Feb 1 23:31 /lib/systemd/systemd

It's clearly not a lithe, slender little thing running as pid 1.

Re: No one cares

[phantomfive]

Perhaps you have an alternative explanation, if so I would like to hear it.

Yeah, I do, I discussed it at length in my journal, with this particular entry being the core. Lennart Poettering spent a lot of time working with distro builders and figuring out what would make things easier for them. So that one use case it does well, and I commend it for that.

And I would say there are other use cases it does well, but that is the most important one. Why am I against it? Again I discussed it at length, but the short answer I will restate from above: when pieces of the system become too entwined, that's bad architecture.

Re:No one cares

[F.Ultra]

Wait, they used start-stop-daemon in a unit file, WTF?

Re: No one cares

[F.Ultra]

Sorry, but Slashdot gave me " No matches found. Try a different search or head back to the main stories. ". However I use BTRFS in a RAID1 configuration with Ubuntu+systemd on several of our servers without any issue so it seams to work for me, which of course is not the same thing that it works for you. Should I also write down every single time sysv init failed me on various configurations?

Re: No one cares

[jmccue]

I don't remember anyone forcing me to use a systemd distro.

Then I guess you do not work where I work

But with that said, to me systemd has been a big meh. Had no issues with it nor does it excite me. At home I run Slackware and I find a bit faster and easier to deal with than what I use at work and personally, prefer it over other distros.

BTW my work hardware is more beefed-up than I have at home, but none of the performance has to do with systemd but with background tasks I need to have running at work.

Re:No one cares

[emacs_abuser]

Agree completely.

I've been using a systemd system for years now. Not one problem related to systemd. Unless you call fast start up and shut down a problem. The old init scripts were a mess, each one slightly different with no easy way to tell what commands each one would accept, and no way to get something simple, like the human readable purpose of the script. Systemd is a big improvement, for some reason rejected by people that somehow feel empowered because they can hack startup/shutdown scripts.

Re: No one cares

[jaromil]

We hope the inclusion of OpenRC in ASCII's installer (expert mode) can be a concrete answer to your question. OpenRC is also what good BSD folks are adopting.

Re: No one cares

[drinkypoo]

I've heard that claim made before too... Are we really in a situation where a combination of laziness and conspiracy has forced most distros on to systemd, yet there is apparently enough support to build a fork of Debian without it?

All the available evidence says yes on all counts.

Wouldn't it make more sense to, say, fix Gnome and a few other key bits of software to work without systemd, thus freeing all these distros that were forced to adopt it? Or just move to other window managers?

Yes, yes it would. But that's not the course that was taken. Debian went to systemd with a slim majority vote, but people act like it was a unanimous decision and foregone conclusion. Well, it was neither.

Re: No one cares

[AmiMoJo]

Thanks, that explains a lot. So there needs to be an alternative that suits distro devs as well as users in order to replace systemd.

Re: No one cares

[drinkypoo]

Neither claim which is true. No logs have ever been dropped by systemd

Many people who have tried to troubleshoot early boot issues (mostly with RAID) disagree with you, including myself.

and the exit on failure is because the daemon fails after systemd did it's thing

*its

and people not fully understanding how asynchronous starting works.

Too bad they had to make it so complicated to understand. It just worked before.

Re: No one cares

[drinkypoo]

Sorry, but Slashdot gave me " No matches found. Try a different search or head back to the main stories. ".

You used slashdot's search function? You must be noob here.

Re: No one cares

[Ol Olsoc]

You're not paying for this racoon we are setting loose in your kitchen

I don't remember anyone forcing me to use a systemd distro.

Exactly. Systemd is mainly something that allows the ford versus chevy crew to get outraged about.

I guess they got tired of the text editor wars.

It isn't like there are no options if a person doesn't like systemd. In fact, for the most discriminating Linux cognoscenti, they can roll their own, with not a thing to disturb their delicate sensibilities : http://www.linuxfromscratch.or...

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should I do that when non systemd distributions already solve the problems systemd brings? I'd rather put my efforts into improving those.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it interesting that everyone can see the flaws in systemd (and particularly in Poettering's attitude), but no-one has come up with a better alternative.

How do I know there is nothing better? All the major distros have adopted systemd. If there was a better alternative I'm sure they would adopt it.

Perhaps you have an alternative explanation, if so I would like to hear it.

Hans Reiser did...

Re: No one cares

[phantomfive]

I'm glad :)

Re: No one cares

[geoskd]

Too bad they had to make it so complicated to understand. It just worked before.

As someone who had to wring bootup performance out of server spinup instances, I can tell you that nothing about SysVInit or upstart "just worked". Getting them to spinup fast was an ugly mess. For many cases, this only had to be done once, but it was still a headache that nobody wanted or needed. Since the switch to systemd, startup times have been as fast or faster than before, and it requires zero maintenance on our part.

It should also be noted that hot swapping was a royal pain under the old architecture, and the code involved held many bugs related to the fact that the daemons that handled the hot swapping could not run as PID 1. This is the single biggest reason that systemd runs as PID 1, and hot swapping works a damn sight more reliably now, especially on more obscure hardware.

Early boot issues have always been a problem, and always will be. until you have enough OS in place to properly handle persistent media, there is no way to log anything, other than to keep the information in memory and hope there will be an opportunity to dump the data later. systemd has had little impact on this either way, and for the vast majority of users, early boot problems simply dont exist, or are a symptom of faulty/flaky hardware. If you are developing drivers for hardware that needs to spin up during early boot, then I will fully agree that you don't want systemd, but you should probably also have some specialty hardware (like a serial monitor) that gives you someplace to dump early boot diagnostics anyways.

For what it is worth, my experience with RAID devices has been that the controllers are mostly shit unless you are willing to drop 10k to get top of the line. Everything else tends to be under-tested junk that works with windows and nothing else. My last raid card from Dell fried all four hard drives attached to it when it failed.

Re: No one cares

[geoskd]

when pieces of the system become too entwined, that's bad architecture.

That depends on how coupled the underlying principles are. If your word processor and your audio sub-system are tightly coupled, then that is bad architecture because audio and word processing have nothing to do with each other.

However, when init and hot swapping are tightly coupled, that makes sense, and is good architecture because both interactions have code that has to do the exact same thing, and both need to handle the same conditions and requirements.

The UNIX philosophy has its own set of limitations, and directly led to many of the interoperability problems that Linux suffered in the late 90's and early aughts. Just like programming languages, one size does not fit all when it comes to system architectures, and using the right design for the job is critical.

Those who argue against anything that does not fit the "do one thing only" program model remind me of the purist Object Oriented programmers. They single mindedly believe their way is always the best, even when it isn't, and anyone not doing things their way is an idiot.

Re:No one cares

[geoskd]

Wait, they used start-stop-daemon in a unit file, WTF?

I have seen a lot of this. Developers who have an existing package under upstart, and saw the switch to systemd, wanted to be ready, so they "wrapped" their upstart script in a systemd unit file, and pretended it was all good. The practical result is that the package works fine under normal conditions, but any failure turns into a complete undiagnosable mess because the developer didn't take the time to understand what systemd is or how it works.

systemd does have one fundamental flaw, and it is the only truly real one it ever had: The documentation sucks ass. The one thing it really needs is a how-to instruction on porting from an upstart service to a systemd service, written by someone who actually knows how to do it properly instead of the droves of rank amateurs out there who "got something working" and are just documenting their own screwed up attempt. RedHat has a few examples, but they are geared to RedHat, and most were written in the last year or so, which did absolutely no good for the people who needed this 2+ years ago.

Re: No one cares

[phantomfive]

The Unix philosophy is not "each piece does one thing." It's complex and you should understand it.

If I were designing it, the init system and the hot swapping system would completely separate, but the init system would call into the hot swapping system through a minimal interface when needed. That would give you maximal flexibility.

Re: No one cares

[geoskd]

It isn't like there are no options if a person doesn't like systemd. In fact, for the most discriminating Linux cognoscenti, they can roll their own, with not a thing to disturb their delicate sensibilities :

I saw an init system written by a young person without any formal CS education, using Boost as a style guide and dbus as the only requirement. Wow was that thing messed up.

Re: No one cares

[geoskd]

SystemD is controlled primarily by Redhat employees -- and, they are very, very, very hostile to commits that aren't 100% behind their 'everything is a VM' goalposts. Even normal, sane bugs results in an almost instant screaming response, and closed bugs.

I'm not saying bullshit, but I think links are appropriate given the accusation you just made.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

False equivalence: systemd is unlikely to harm you or your property or spread disease. Nor can one bugfix a raccoon, but one *can* bugfix systemd with a little more elbow grease and a little less complaining.

Or I can avoid the disease infesting systemd altogether and save myself some elbow grease!

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

So we are finally past the whole tabs vs spaces thing?

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

If I were designing it, the init system and the hot swapping system would completely separate, but the init system would call into the hot swapping system through a minimal interface when needed

Would you do that? please?

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Your reading comprehension requires work. Perhaps use some of the elbow grease that you saved by not helping to fix the alleged problems.

Re:No one cares

[Billly Gates]

Let me ask you this?

Do you use Linux professionally as a programmer/user or as a system administrator?

It seems the later who switched to FreeBSD and Duvuan for good reason have a complex environment with hundreds of racks and virtual machines where a reboot means things like your array or SAN don't get mounted and daemons randomly get shut down with no logs on why seem common. I could be wrong but systemD is great on a laptop for faster boots but professionally sounds like a nightmare when the CIO is breathing down your neck for uptime and your servers are being stupid

Re: No one cares

[nuckfuts]

keep it flexible and replaceable.

Exactly! I've been using Unix since before Linux existed. The original philosophy was that it worked as a bunch of simple, self-contained components. Commands are terse and to-the-point. If you want something more complex, pipe them together. Even the shell was replaceable.

Oh, and everything could be treated like a file, including devices. This concept seems to have gone a step farther in Linux, where even processes can be accessed through /proc.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Before pulseaudio Linux audio was rubbish if you were a desktop user.

Re: No one cares

[Kernel Kurtz]

I like it.

Instead of the zillion different gaffertaped together scripts used in different distros we now have a standard

Why don't you just use Windows?

Re: No one cares

[q_e_t]

Yes, it used to be pretty horrible. I am not sure to what puslseaudio specifically may have fixed, but it is a bit better now, although still a bit of a mess. But it might have got better without pulseaudio, so it's hard to know if this was correlation or causation. Some things (MIDI) still seems to be better supported via ALSA. And then jack is required for some things to work properly, integrating with ALSA or pulseaudio. So yes, still a mess, but at least my audio mostly works now.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

LOLOLOLOL.

Re: No one cares

[q_e_t]

Playing devil's advocate, plate tectonics used to be the fragmentation. Just because it may lead to short, or even long term, fragmentation, doesn't mean it's not the appropriate course of action.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

You are explaining Unix philosophy when you have no idea what you are talking about. Google unix philosophy please and learn it before discussing how much better systemd is. Thanks.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

He owns 1 Linux box with systemd on it. It's never crashed. Flawless systemd configuration. You should see it. It made Jesus weep.

Re: No one cares

[greenwow]

> Log message problems can be fixed...

I'm beginning to think the logging problems with systemd can't be fixed since they've been broken for so many years. Just sucks that there's so often nothing in the journal except the exit status and that output, especially to stdout or stderr, is just swallowed. It's ridiculous that you can start something by hand, see the error message, and fix the problem in a few seconds while systemd can't do the same.

Re:No one cares

[walterbyrd]

In other words, you have no real argument.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you do that? please?

No, he's busy telling people that they are doing it wrong and that he would do it right, if only he had time.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Racoons are dangerous! Great comparison with systemd, IMO.

Re:No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems the later who switched to FreeBSD and Duvuan for good reason

Wow, it seems you live in a parallel reality. Devuan is really unpopular, they barely have found a few unexperienced people working on it (there is a reason it takes more than a year after Debian was released to update the 70 packages Devuan has).

Re: No one cares

[sjames]

My test case (in a VM) was configured to allow mounting degraded. Then I failed one of the drives in the VM and booted. Systemd wouldn't even attempt to mount the volume, just the cylon followed by the emergency shell. After digging around in the twisty mess of configuration filed, I found there is no way to make systemd just try the mount command as an imperitive. It decided the volume couldn't come up and so it wasn't going to try.

Of course, since degraded mode was configured, issuing the mount command manually in the emergency shell mounted it up with no issue at all.

Meanwhile, remember the Apr fools joke COMEFROM command? Systemd actually implements it.

In general, systemd isn't all that flexible. If you have an unusual situation, you'll have to use something other than systemd to bring it up. Unfortunately, systemd doesn't play nice with others so that means replacing systemd. Unfortunately, systemd has it's tenticles embedded into everything, so that's going to be a much harder task than it should be, involving a lot of recompiling. Hope you didn't want to use Gnome in that configuration.

The systemd project would have developers write daemons with dependencies on systemd. ("come into my parlor" said the spider to the fly). DON'T DO IT! Your project, like Gnome will end up as part of a vendor lock-in that way.

In the long term, that's bad for Linux. There's no reason that everything systemd does couldn't have been done the Unix way with smaller interchangeable tools that could inter-operate.

Re: No one cares

[TuxThePenguin2205]

Is this the OS equivalent of Godwins law?

Re: No one cares

[F.Ultra]

But mounting root at that stage is not the work of any init so if I have to guess the problem that you experienced with the degraded btrfs has to do with the initramfs image on your distribution and not with systemd, but having not seen this myself I will of course not say that systemd had nothing to do with it but it sounds odd since / is mounted before init is called by the booting kernel. And I've read many storied about default initramfs:s having trouble with degraded raid1 btrfs so I think you blamed systemd too early there.

Gnome are not vendor locked-in, their dependency upon logind is #1 something that can be disabled with a compile-flag and #2 the dependency is on the logind DBUS namespace and thus anyone can implement something that speaks that namespace (which is how the BSDs implemented it on their end). And the logind thing solves a problem for Gnome which is why they choose to go with it.

In the long term, that's bad for Linux. There's no reason that everything systemd does couldn't have been done the Unix way with smaller interchangeable tools that could inter-operate.

Which accidentally is just how the various systemd are implemented, it's a bunch of smaller interchangeable applications that inter-operate via DBUS. The only dependecy each tool have is the DBUS namespace so as long as you implement that you can change each and every systemd tool.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

otoh, ls -lh /sbin/init
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 37K May 29 2015 /sbin/init
(devuan jessie, haven't upgraded yet)

Re: No one cares

[F.Ultra]

If you don't see logs from early boot on RAID issues then check the unit files for the tools that set up your raid, there is a chance that they are set up in a stupid way that disables logging from these tools. Because anything that comes out of a tool when run under systemd regardless of if it's from stdout, stderr or syslog is captured and sent to the journal.

But unfortunately some maintainers create faulty unit files here. I have seen some where the daemon is invoked with arguments like "--quiet" which of course makes the daemon create no log output at all. Another example is mediatomb where the unit-file from debian makes it log to "/var/log/mediatomb" instead of just letting it log to stdout which means that "journalctl -u mediatom.service" only yields the logs from systemd when it starts and stops the deamon which looks like logs are dropped but instead they are stored differently.

Re:No one cares

[F.Ultra]

But using start-stop-daemon on upstart would be a complete waste of time as well... Personally I found "man systemd.unit" to be quite good but then if people are using start-stop-daemon under upstart then I don't know if any documentation would save them.

Re: No one cares

[sjames]

But you can only change the systemd tool for a clone of that tool.

As for the systemd test, NOW it has been moved to the initramfs NOT running systemd. That is a kludge to make it work. You could say that systemd accidentally developed a dependency on the old SysV init. But it was definitely systemd, that's why the cylon followed by the emergency shell. But systemd won't do any better for a non-root volume and NOW, the plan was always to use something else in the initramfs. And we have always been at war with Eastasia.

Re:No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are running hundreds of servers with shitty hardware that suffers race conditions at boot, then you got what you paid for.

Get a real god damn server with a raid controller that isn't fucking garbage. Or use NAS and real NICs that aren't garbage.

Re: No one cares

[Bengie]

The problems with systemd are technically features, not bugs, because they're working as intended.

Re: No one cares

[Brockmire]

Agreed about the rappers names. Fucking dumb.

Re:No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny I do not have these problems with SysInit. It is a SystemD problem. Not a hardware/driver problem. SystemD is not consistent at all.

Re:No one cares

[geekymachoman]

http://big-elephants.com/2013-...

How is this a mess ? This can only be a mess if you have no idea what you're doing, in which case you shouldn't be commenting, worrying or thinking about Systemd or "old init scripts".

Unfortunately "they" decided to impose this massive pile of crap that does everything now ( opposite of what UNIX should be - and because of what UNIX is is why we use it... otherwise everybody would be running Windows on their servers ).

But it's politics. Redhat is doing it because of Political reasons. Sneaky and crappy... it's something Microsoft would do.

Re: No one cares

[phantomfive]

tbh I'd really like to spend some time getting Enlightenment Desktop working nicely, because I think it has a lot of potential. Next year, maybe.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading comprehension seems not to be your strength, but go on claiming everything runs in PID 1.

Re:No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

professionally sounds like a nightmare when the CIO is breathing down your neck for uptime and your servers are being stupid

I am not the parent but match his and your description. Lots of systems with lots of uptime required. Complex but not stupid crazy (a few iscsi and serious storage DB hosts with lots of adapters but most virtual machines in large clusters running various apps).

I've (we've since no tickets on it either) never had systemd get in the way. Ok maybe that was true 3 or 4 years ago but since then I've actually bothered to learn how systemd works so that your above quote doesn't actually happen. Its called learning new techniques for your job.

At home I don't have any sort of complex startup requirements so who gives a shit. At work I have a few hard requirements about 'this before this' and systemd works fine for that since all my requirements come as distro defaults anyway.

Bravo to devuan, cheers to the enthusiasts, but everyone else has moved on, and this should help the stupid 'systemd sucks' war finally cool down a bit I hope, just so the ubuntu refugees can finally have a home.

Re: No one cares

[Eunuchswear]

Why don't you just use Windows?

Because Windows doesn't come with systemd, obviously.

Re: No one cares

[Eunuchswear]

Log message problems can be fixed

They could be fixed if anyone made an actual bug report about them.

Re: No one cares

[Eunuchswear]

Oh, and everything could be treated like a file, including devices. This concept seems to have gone a step farther in Linux, where even processes can be accessed through /proc.

For values of "Linux" that are equal to SVR4.

(Which goes further than Linux, replacing the ugly ptrace(2) by I/O ops on /proc).

Of course, neither of them goes as far as Plan9.

Re: No one cares

[Eunuchswear]

They could be fixed if anyone could demonstrate that they exist.

Re:No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

for me it's very simple

TL;DR --> systemd changes kept breaking parts of my linux system

Long story:
I used Debian for over a decade before systemd and only once did I have an update causing serious breakage in that time
Then suddenly systemd dependencies starting showing up everywhere.
Which WOULD be fine except that, sudden
is fine came systemd and suddenly I had problems every couple of months, all of which turned out to be 'software function X that has worked ok since forever, now uses systemd and the upgrade broke things'. And ily I'm having a major breakage every couple of weeks/months, and all of them turned out to be 'subsystem now uses something provided by systemd no no longer works'
In all cases the easier fix was 'switch to something without the systemd dependenc' (cause systemd is an opaque spaghetti system with bad documentation.)
I got tired of it, and have been running devuan without problems, since shortly after it became available

Re:No one cares

[thegarbz]

It is incredibly common to see people who don't read the manual or refuse to to end up with issues around logging, daemons shutting down etc.

Systemd does a lot of things poorly but it's behaviour on starting / stopping daemons and logging is well documented and unfortunately also highly configurable. There are some definite bugs with mounting network filesystems during boot and the like, but whenever I hear about someone missing logs or having a daemon randomly disappear, that is entirely user / distribution maintainer error.

Re: No one cares

[thegarbz]

In other news the Linux kernel doesn't fit on a floppy disk. I fail to get upset about 1.6MB of something doing something more intelligent than relying on 100s of customised scripts and dumping PID files somewhere.

Re: No one cares

[thegarbz]

It just worked before.

Someone put a fuckton of effort into making sure what little the system was capable of worked in your case. This was not a glowing review of sysvinit.

Re: No one cares

[thegarbz]

Bollocks. They adopted it because it became a dependency of other software

You know when you look back at the history of something you need to start at the beginning and go forward, not start at today and go backwards. There was precisely zero software that depended on systemd when major distros adopted it.

Even now the amount of software that has a dependency on systemd can be counted on one finger, and some prominent systemd distributions actually didn't even feature said software.

I get it though, understanding the motivations behind people is hard when they hold their technical discussions on open mailing lists. When it's all done behind closed doors we can start conspiracy theories, but now... reading... uah!

Re: No one cares

[phantomfive]

In terms of memory or disk space it's trivial. In terms of 1.6MB of compiled code, that's a lot of code, a lot of room for bugs.

Re: No one cares

[thegarbz]

Tell me about it. How can we trust this Linux kernel thing! The amount of access it has to the system is incredible and just look at its size!

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Many of us dont want systemd because systemd tries to fix something that isnt broke and is trying to be something nothing should ever be.

It is just another spyware telemetry attempt to fuck with people. Stop defending it you retard.

Re: No one cares

[F.Ultra]

No, the only thing that you have to clone is the D-BUS namespace, which of course is the exact same for any other situation where you can replace tools in the Unix-way. It's not like you could replace e.g sed with a tool that no longer listens to stdin and cannot understand space separated strings.

Re: No one cares

[sjames]

It's one thing to depend on a fundamental API of Unix, quite another to kitchen sink an entire API and support subsystem in as a dependency.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, that's pretty-much what happened for all existing Ubuntu and Debian users. There was no freedom to stay with sysv. Just a "take it or leave it". And the cost of leaving it was having to learn another package manager and another init system (OpenRC) but at least the learning curve was way gentler and there were logs to tell me what I did wrong. And I still got parallel start and a faster boot time on the same machine with the same devices than I did with systemd.

Re: No one cares

[phantomfive]

Yeah, actually, you shouldn't call the Linux kernel secure, and no one (not even Linus) would call it small.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it does, in a similar form: srvman - runs everything
Anton

Re: No one cares

[drinkypoo]

Someone put a fuckton of effort into making sure what little the system was capable of worked in your case. This was not a glowing review of sysvinit.

Yeah, they did that and made it reliable. Now it doesn't work reliably, what an improvement

Re: No one cares

[drinkypoo]

You know when you look back at the history of something you need to start at the beginning and go forward, not start at today and go backwards. There was precisely zero software that depended on systemd when major distros adopted it.

Uh, no. GNOME was the primary reason Debian adopted systemd.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

when i first came across it i investigated the reasons why it was needed. Parallelism was one of the main gists i got. Seems odd to redesign a system init, take away pid 0 all for that. Coming from RH was even stranger or do they constantly reboot their servers? But the real laughing point was logging. Binary logs that apparently stop hacking, lol, and unauthorised access, false syslog entries but then allow u to use syslog anyway... then there's core dump handling which is an abomination. now they do dns and have their tentacles in window managers. Shees, if this is the future of linux i will soon be using apple products.
Anton

Re: No one cares

[drinkypoo]

But mounting root at that stage is not the work of any init so if I have to guess the problem that you experienced with the degraded btrfs has to do with the initramfs image on your distribution and not with systemd,

It does not matter even slightly whether systemd caused the problem if it exacerbates the problem.

but having not seen this myself I will

...ramble anyway, about things you don't know about.

Re: No one cares

[thegarbz]

Like I said, when you willfully ignore the technical discussions you can justify ANYTHING. Personally I think it was leprechauns. They are the reason Debian adopted systemd. Makes as much sense as a package that didn't depend on systemd being the cause. Makes as much sense as anything you want to make up despite the fact that their discussion on the topic is public.

Now go educate yourself ignorantpoo.

Re: No one cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Pulseaudio had some issues when I first used it (Ubuntu 8.04 IIRC) but since 10.04 I've never had a single problem with it, including hotplugging audio devices etc.

Systemd? Had to learn the new journal command, took a few minutes. Otherwise it's been fine.

Good for Devuan providing an alternative, choice is good. Now I wish the whingers would just use Devuan (or *BSD or whatever) and stop whinging, particularly on threads that are *nothing to do with systemd*.

But I expect they'll still be at it in 5,10 years.

Re: No one cares

[F.Ultra]

So throw out all software that depends on a API designed after 1970? No need for SQL-servers because SQL is not a fundamental Unix API, no need for REST/SOAP services because neither is a fundamental Unix API. Seriously now you are just being obtuse, I get that you don't like systemd and I'm fine with that but please don't go completely overboard now.

Re: No one cares

[F.Ultra]

How can it exacerbate the problem if it's not even involved with the mound process of root to begin with? It's not like sysv init would magically mount it either, you would end up in a busybox or kernel hang either way (and I've been there many many many times with sysv init, e.g right now I have a remote server running sysv init that sometimes can survive a remote reboot and sometimes ends up in busybox).

Re: No one cares

[sjames]

Note, the OS is able to boot just fine without any of the involved system programs understanding REST or SQL. I would absolutely object to a system that won't even boot far enough to log in and debug without REST or SQL. Applications and non-system services are free to use SQL and REST as needed.

Overly complex dependencies result in brittle systems. There's a lot of good to be said for a system where if the kernel can manage to execute /bin/bash, the admin can do something useful.

Re: No one cares

[sjames]

Actually, SysV init can and did mount it, following my instructions to allow degraded mode. For the simple reason that SysV doesn't treat admin configuration as a suggestion.

nah

[phantomfive]

I'm waiting for Devuan EBCDIC personally.

Re: nah

[Brockmire]

Is that from The League TV show?

Re: nah

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't get the joke, this site isn't for you.

Re:nah

[93 Escort Wagon]

The minimal install of Devuan should be referred to as Half-ASCII.

Re:nah

[Required Snark]

Baudot

Wait, is that right or is it the thing that goes in the bathroom right next to the toilet?

Re: nah

[Anonymous Coward]

If you ASCII a stupid question you get a stupid ANSII

Re:nah

[russotto]

Live a little, use Devuan BAUDOT.

By the time it gets to UNICODE (if it does), it'll have grown into the bloated monstrosity that will be its namesake, so it's all good.

Re: nah

[Brockmire]

Nor is The League for you.

Re:nah

[tigersha]

Yes, it's use to wash your EBCDIC after you fsckd the filesystem.

Re:nah

[Anonymous Coward]

It will support UTF-9
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4042

Trump is a traitor

[Anonymous Coward]

We stand with America's allies against Trump the retarded traitor.

Re: Trump is a traitor

[Anonymous Coward]

And what about the decades of democrats' Russian apology during the cold war?

The Coveted Bruce Perens endosement :-)

[Bruce Perens]

I was the second Debian project leader. These days, I prefer to run Devuan, a true Debian derivative engineered the way I would probably have decided to make it. It's efficient and trouble-free. Thanks to the Devuan developers for all of the work!

Re:The Coveted Bruce Perens endosement :-)

[Wolfrider]

--Bruce, in all seriousness I'd like to donate an old dual-core PC that I made into a ZFS server to the Devuan project. Any way you could help? It's 64-bit but doesn't support hardware virtualization, has 4GB of RAM and runs Linux perfectly well. TIA

Re:The Coveted Bruce Perens endosement :-)

[Bruce Perens]

I don't represent the Devuan developers. They have a web site :-) Please communicate with them directly. Thanks!

Re: The Coveted Bruce Perens endosement :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

I own four pieces of antique farm equipment that I no longer need to help pick cotton. I've used them for working the fields here in Mississippi, but I'm moving to Jackson and have no use for them. I suspect they would be useful to the Devuan developers and I would like to donate them. Can you offer any suggestions as to which developer to contact about donating my antique farm equipment?

Re: The Coveted Bruce Perens endosement :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

"In many cases [systemd] allows us to throw away large amounts of roads, including the roads from Mississippi, whilst at the same time providing a better user experience. Adding it [systemd] as an optional extra defeats the main benefit" (https://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/11/25/1728238/will-you-be-able-to-run-a-modern-desktop-environment-in-2016-without-systemd)

Re: The Coveted Bruce Perens endosement :-)

[Bruce Perens]

I own four pieces of antique farm equipment that I no longer need to help pick cotton.

If no Devuan developer can use an old PC, some school can use it, and a volunteer who keeps it going. Since Microsoft is being much nicer to Open Source these days but once in a while still shows that they don't get it, I'd suggest you use Linux.

Re: The Coveted Bruce Perens endosement :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Do they eat much?

Re:The Coveted Bruce Perens endosement :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

--Bruce, in all seriousness I'd like to donate an old dual-core PC that I made into a ZFS server to the Devuan project

Terrifying that you'd consider ZFS on Devuan, considering this. Why I know about that ticket: when considering non-systemd-based Linux distros that could run ZFS, I looked into Devuan and wondered "how good" its ZFS support was, found that, shook my head. In case you're wondering what's contained there: ZFS pools aren't imported (i.e. auto-mounted) by the OS on boot.

I'm equally perplexed by the fact that the Devuan ZFS maintainer appears to be a single person who hasn't worked on tickets in a year and a half.

So yeah, for ZFS, better stick to a distro that's maintained, ex. Ubuntu. I say that as someone who agrees deeply that systemd is awful; sometimes you have to be pragmatic and make compromises.

P.S. This comment comes to you from someone running FreeBSD, which is systemd-free but has been turning into a junk pile over the past several releases. Too bad DragonflyBSD doesn't have ZFS support (not interested in HAMMER, sorry).

Re:The Coveted Bruce Perens endosement :-)

[Tsolias]

Bruce, I think it's time for a coup d'etat.

Re:The Coveted Bruce Perens endosement :-)

[jaromil]

Many thanks Bruce. Your endorsement means a lot to me and other Devuan developers.

Re:The Coveted Bruce Perens endosement :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Was.

There is a reason for this.

Re: The Coveted Bruce Perens endosement :-)

[denis.goddard]

Many thanks to YOU, jaromil, for helping create Devuan. Your work means a lot to me and other seasoned *nix fans.

Re: The Coveted Bruce Perens endosement :-)

[jaromil]

For the *nix seasoning Big Up to Museum.Freaknet.org ... and the ipv7 retro decnet community and the suckless tribes :^)

Re:The Coveted Bruce Perens endosement :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

contact wikileaks. we can help you.

Re:The Coveted Bruce Perens endosement :-)

[Raenex]

So yeah, for ZFS, better stick to a distro that's maintained, ex. Ubuntu.

You can find absent maintainers for particular projects on any distro.

Re:The Coveted Bruce Perens endosement :-)

[noahm]

And this is why it's good that the DPL is an elected position with a short term and not a BDFL. :)

Re:The Coveted Bruce Perens endosement :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

So yeah, for ZFS, better stick to a distro that's maintained, ex. Ubuntu.

You can find absent maintainers for particular projects on any distro.

Absolutely, but would you knowingly use those pieces (on that distro) when you've evidence of it being neglected?

Re:The Coveted Bruce Perens endosement :-)

[Bruce Perens]

Bruce, I think it's time for a coup d'etat.

That would be very funny. Bruce and his select cohort of ninjas parachute into Debian Headquarters and hold a gun to the head of the DPL until he signs over project leadership. We hold him hostage to assure cooperation of the developers.

OK, before some noob calls the police, there is no Debian headquarters, it's a virtual organization.

Re: The Coveted Bruce Perens endosement :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

I own four pieces of antique farm equipment that I no longer need to help pick cotton. I've used them for working the fields here in Mississippi, but I'm moving to Jackson and have no use for them. I suspect they would be useful to the Devuan developers and I would like to donate them. Can you offer any suggestions as to which developer to contact about donating my antique farm equipment?

I thought slavery went away in the USA in the 1860s?

Re: The Coveted Bruce Perens endosement :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Fake news!

Triggered?

[Anonymous Coward]

Grabs popcorn,

waits for systemMD guys to be triggered & the non-obligatory rants.

#munchmunch

Great job Devuan! :-)

Greekgeek

Re: Triggered?

[danomac]

Wait, we need to have a doctorate to bitch about systemd now?

Re:Triggered?

[mvdwege]

Fuck off to your safe space, snowflake. So far it's the rabid anti-systemd folks that keep invading other discussions (like the iproute2 one a while back), all shouting 'it sucks! eleventy!!' without arguments.

Re: Triggered?

[Anonymous Coward]

Education is just the excuse for their dictating and mandating systemd. They know better than us... If it really mattered the 3000 degreed architects and engineers at ae911truth dot org would be big news.

Re: Triggered?

[Anonymous Coward]

We've submitted bugs, we've stated what we don't like about it. Yet we just get ignored, followed by "you're wrong".

This distro

[93 Escort Wagon]

... is a Poettering-Free Zone!

Re: This distro

[Anonymous Coward]

we still need his Network Manager but it conforms to the Unix philosophy and can easily be replaced with Wicd. Systemd isn't small or modular.

Re: This distro

[Anonymous Coward]

systemd is modular. All components can be separately built and packaged. Some parts may depend on parts of the systemd core to run, but that's no different to a window manager depending on X or a binary requiring a run-time to execute.

Meanwhile, the Unix Philosophy is somewhat vague and hasn't been adhered to for a long time. Just a few examples...

• 
  * The X server: displays local windows; displays remote windows; handles fonts. More than one thing. A little modular.
  * The cp command: does far more than merely copy files and directories. E.g. it can archive files, it can create symlinks instead of copying files. More than one thing. Not modular.
  * The Unix shells: handles user commands to execute binaries; parse their own entire scripting languages. More than one thing. Not modular.
  * The Linux kernel: It's a monolithic kernel by design. It does more than one thing. It's a little modular but not very.
  * BusyBox: all of the Unix commands in one binary. Does more than one thing. Not modular.

And so on. You live in a fantasy world if you think that the Unix philosophy is something adhered to.

Re:This distro

[Anonymous Coward]

No, Devuan includes systemd-logind, libsystemd and pulseaudio among other things.

Re: This distro

[Anonymous Coward]

systemd is modular. All components can be separately built and packaged. Some parts may depend on parts of the systemd core to run, but that's no different to a window manager depending on X or a binary requiring a run-time to execute.

You mention a very key operative part of the SystemD(eath) design that almost every OS seems to ignore when it packages SystemD(eath):

systemd is modular. All components can be separately built and packaged.

Show me an OS that actually breaks out all of these modular parts of SystemD(eath) into separately loadable packages and I might be interested.

For example, I might want to keep the ancient "systemv-init" package as my "PID 0" process on my Debian system but I want to run a graphical desktop that requires SystemD(eath). As far as I can tell that combination is VERBOTEN in a SystemD(eath) world.

Re: This distro

[Anonymous Coward]

systemd is modular.

Simply repeating a filthy lie does not make it true. SystemD aka SystemDisaster is NOT MODULAR. Anybody who claims it is modular is either stupid or gargling Lennart's balls.

all my servers are swiched over

[Anonymous Coward]

i run all the computers for a fortune 500 IT company and all our servers have been switched to devuan from the red hat and we are seeing MASSIVE improvements in everything from uptime to performance and reliability. as the originator of the plan to switch and the lead in doing it i saved our company MILLIONS of dollars and now i'm in line for a 6 figure bonus this year. if you are still using the systemD and gnome/pulseaudio then you are just a plain stupid loser.

Re: all my servers are swiched over

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems legit

Re:all my servers are swiched over

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope that's actually true.

The "stupid loser" dilutes your message. Even though it's probably an understatement, it's poorly worded.

Re:all my servers are swiched over

[Anonymous Coward]

We have a few hundred servers. The only ones that with downtime attributable to the OS have been because of systemd.
At this point i'd rather spin up another windows 2012.

Re: all my servers are swiched over

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to mention that it cured cancer, achieved world peace, and solved the hunger and homeless problem worldwide.

Re:all my servers are swiched over

[Eunuchswear]

But you know it isn't.

Re: all my servers are swiched over

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe that's what the servers are used for?

Its a hot one today

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, its so hot outside. The only thing worse than the heat is my hemorrhoids. If only I had the cool, comfortable relief of Preparation-H then my hemorrhoids wouldn't be so bad.

Not universal until it includes systemd

[lkcl]

caveat: systemd has done an insane amount of damage to the GNU/Linux eco-system. people are not really sure why, because it's not about the technical aspects per se, it's that the mindset of the developers *behind* systemd is psychologically damaged, and that mental instability is, by virtue of systemd being PID 1, subsequently spreading like a cancer throughout every single GNU/Linux distro that supports it. the cancer analogy is an appropriate one because it's not really visible until it's far too late.

so the fact that devuan takes a well-known stable distro and provides and maintains an "incremental" system to remove systemd is extremely good, and a huge relief. they've done an extremely competent job of modifying a few base packages then letting the repository "fall through" like an HTTP Transparent Proxy onto *standard* debian packages, such that the (small) team only has to maintain and host relatively few packages, NOT forty thousand, requiring over 100 gigabytes of space.

where devuan goes wrong is - and i really hesitate to say this - the hypocrisy of the claim that they are UNIVERSAL. if they were truly universal, they would have included systemd DESPITE ALL THE PROBLEMS IT CAUSES.

if they had done this, the simplest way to have done it would have been to include build profiles in the various packages xorg, pulesaudio, udev, samba and many more (in a constantly-increasing list) that instead of *REMOVING* systemd allowed building of PARALLEL packages with AND WITHOUT systemd, from the same debian source package.

if they had done that, then interestingly, debian could have considered picking up those modifications and including them *in* debian, thus making devuan's life easier rather than harder.

but they haven't done that, and the hypocrisy and lack of integrity towards the claim that they are "universal" is why i cannot use devuan: instead i use angband.pl on top of debian (and occasionally have to download the source of those packages, modify the build-deps and recompile them).

devuan is a backlash *against* something, and that never goes as people intend. mother theresa was the first person i learned this lesson from, after she famously was invited to an "anti-war" rally, she refused... and said "but if you ever have a peace rally, i'll be delighted to attend".

Re: Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the bit on mother Theresa. You seem to have your brains together so can you explain what the problems with ststemd are?

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Bruce Perens]

I've had my own ideas about how to "better" engineer Devuan, but there are so many things to do and so little Bruce. :-)

With respect, I think your argument is mooted by the fact that Debian itself exists and is a viable alternative if you want to load SystemD. However, it is entirely possible for you to create what you believe is missing in Devuan, and provide it. You can ignore the fact that such a thing would be more for a ritual definition of universality than for anyone to practically use it - since you have stated your own belief that fulfilling that definition is important.

Thanks

Bruce

Re: Not universal until it includes systemd

[lkcl]

Thanks for the bit on mother Theresa. You seem to have your brains together so can you explain what the problems with ststemd are?

caveat: my brain is known to be made of mush, sometimes. as in, some form of dyslexia / delay means i get basic boolean logic wrong, ok? :)

* the first clue is this: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/... which contains 27 separate and distinct entries, three of them for this year alone. by contrast try searching for "sysvinit" and you get *ONE* entry dating back to 1999. you'd need to start searching for "bash" and start doing a bit more investigation (a bash search refers to several variants) to get a proper comparison.

* the systemd team have been known to ignore bugreports, closing them arbitrarily. not just once but repeatedly. i've seen posts made by people on here which gave references. basically they don't listen to constructive feedback.

* the scope creep on systemd is very insidious and dangerous. there's no consultation about the impact of the changes being made: they're just blithely "handed out" and if you don't like it go fuck yourself is the general attitude. management of firewall rules, fstab, networking, process control: all these things are completely insane to be managed exclusively by PID 1. one mistake and your entire system is compromised (or falls over).

so basically it's down to abdication of responsibility of developers and users to a team that has repeatedly demonstrated a total lack of willingness to recognise and take seriously the responsibility of their role... or more to the point that the distro maintainers *CHOSE WITHOUT CONSULTATION* to forcibly abdicate responsibility on BEHALF of users, the maintenance and running of their system to systemd's developers. if you are not familiar with what happened with the debian "vote": systemd was the absolute worst and least-favoured choice by far and above... and absolutely no explanation as to why that vote was completely and utterly ignored has ever been given.

there are many many articles and examples of why systemd is an extremely dangerous *technical* choice, but mainly it's down to the fact that the users haven't been given any choice - right across the board - due to all major GNU/Linux distros swapping over all at the same time like a flock of birds / shoal of fish. try doing "apt-get --purge remove libsystemd1" and see what happens (or equivalent on fedora, or archlinux). that there *is* no choice is in itself a dangerous precedent (a monoculture).

basically it's really hard to describe.

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[sjames]

Devuan isn't Gentoo. It's supposed to be a collection of binary packages with good dependency management. Systemd is by design a poor fit for any such collection that offers an option other than systemd. That's why if you decide to install a Debian Jessie system with SysV init, you have no choice but to install some pieces of systemd as well.

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[lkcl]

I've had my own ideas about how to "better" engineer Devuan, but there are so many things to do and so little Bruce. :-)

With respect, I think your argument is mooted by the fact that Debian itself exists and is a viable alternative if you want to load SystemD. However, it is entirely possible for you to create what you believe is missing in Devuan, and provide it. You can ignore the fact that such a thing would be more for a ritual definition of universality than for anyone to practically use it - since you have stated your own belief that fulfilling that definition is important.

Thanks

Bruce

appreciated the response, bruce. there is however a caveat in the approach that you recommend (create what i believe is missing and provide it), so let's go through it, to illustrate.

question: what would happen if i did that? created an alternative which included systemd *in* devuan? would the devuan developers accept it? no they would not... because i have spoken to them and they are ABSOLUTELY adamant that systemd be excluded from devuan.

question: so what would be needed instead? an entire fork of devuan would be needed, wouldn't it? so that's something that i would need to maintain, on my own, wouldn't it? bear in mind that it would be a fork of a fork of debian.

question: where would i get the money from to support my family, pay for their food and accommodation and upkeep, whilst doing this work AND paying for the hosting of hundreds of modified packages of a fork of a fork of debian?

what i am saying is that it is a total myth that individuals may achieve "big" things on their own. a project needs a reason: it needs a story. it needs mind-share. it needs FINANCIAL support (based on offers supporting the story) it needs RESOURCES (based on offers supporting the story). it needs people to "buy in" to the story: technical contributions, coding, website maintenance that makes the story real.

the *story* is far more important than anything else, as without the story (the "why") there *is* no motivation. this is codified in simon sinek's ted talk "why great leaders inspire action".

i think, ultimately, you recognise this yourself, as you said: "there are so many things and so little Bruce" :) yes, all of us are only "one". to galvanise us and achieve things bigger than ourselves, we need motivation, we need a "why" that's big enough to sell not just to ourselves but to other people, and backers.

devuan succeeded in selling the story, "let's do debian by removing systemd and adding alternatives in its place", which is itself an incredible feat. but that story was sold on the basis of being AGAINST systemd. it's hurt devuan to do that, as they've effectively lied in their mission statement "devuan is universal and inclusive": it's *not* (because systemd is deliberately excluded).

the next step will be to very carefully heal the damage caused by that decision, and that means putting systemd *back* into devuan (as just another init option). how do you (plural, collectively) sell that story? i don't know. do i have time and funds and resources to even focus on *selling* that story, beyond the occasional slashdot comment? no, not really: i'm focussing on RISC-V and other things full-time, now.

do i have the funds and resources to "do the work myself"? absolutely not! i've been down that road many times and people have fucked me over enough times, spongeing off of my efforts for me to know that i'm not going to be doing it again. but more than that, even if i did it would be a dis-service to everyone in the devuan project, as it would deprive them of the opportunity to heal themselves of the psychological harm caused by being "against" systemd.

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[lkcl]

I've had my own ideas about how to "better" engineer Devuan, but there are so many things to do and so little Bruce. :-)

With respect, I think your argument is mooted by the fact that Debian itself exists and is a viable alternative if you want to load SystemD.

apologies i missed this the first time, however it's probably best done as a separate response anyway. so it goes like this:

1. i have used debian since 1996, since phil hands donated me a 486SX25 laptop so that i could work on samba 1.9.16 and beyond, on the move. its flexibility and reach means i will not use anything else.

2. systemd is so bad - the developers so psychologically damaged - that i will not use it. i will not even tolerate libsystemd1 being on systems that i manage, so it has to go (entirely).

3. devuan *would* be ok... but the same analysis-mind-set that says "libsystemd1 has to go" *also* has me looking at the conflict in devuan's mission statement, and i won't use it because they are *AGAINST* systemd... it's the other side of exactly the same coin.

4. with the sheer overwhelming volume of packages, files and so on from debian that i have (dating back nearly 10 years) "upgrading" to devuan, or dropping debian and going with FreeBSD, or anything basically *other* than "sticking with debian" is simply not possible. period. some of my systems are still "apparently" on debian 7.0 except they're not: they've just been on debian/testing all that time and continuously upgraded as necessary... and i do NOT mean "apt-get dist-upgrade"d.

5. so i am stuck between a rock and a hard place.... and THANK GOD... angband.pl exists. it contains recompiled MODERN (maintained) debian packages, modifying them to have "--without-systemd" in the necessary xorg, pulseaudio, samba, udev, cups and dozens of other packages... and also *REINTRODUCES* console-kit, polkit, udisks2 and many many other packages that were REMOVED (foolishly) from debian as "no longer necessary".

the situation is so stark that i even at one point actually removed libsystemd0 (and udev) from a live-running debian system. i had to use /sbin/MAKEDEV from /etc/rc.local to do it. it was... awful. but, i got what i wanted. then, thank god, i heard about angband.pl. https://news.slashdot.org/stor...

bottom line is: debian is fine (as long as you want debian *and* systemd). devuan is fine (as long as you want debian-like and *don't* want systemd). however that leaves absolutely no room for people who do not want debian with systemd, who cannot (for whatever reason) install or convert to devuan.

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh fuck you. Every other distro adopts systemd and then loses its ability to run without it. Only by drawing a line in the sand will we have a Linux distro for someone who wants to avoid systemd.

Re: Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

>* the scope creep on systemd is very insidious and dangerous. there's no consultation about the impact of the changes being made: they're just blithely "handed out" and if you don't like it go fuck yourself is the general attitude. management of firewall rules, fstab, networking, process control: all these things are completely insane to be managed exclusively by PID 1. one mistake and your entire system is compromised (or falls over).

Uuuuuhhhh... Kinda need pick this one apart. They aren't managed by PID1:

[root@1526619835 ~]# ps auxf | grep firewalld
root 725 0.0 0.2 338300 33048 ? Ssl Jun08 0:01 /usr/bin/python -Es /usr/sbin/firewalld --nofork --nopid

[root@1526619835 ~]# ps auxf | grep NetworkManager
root 757 0.0 0.0 545624 8924 ? Ssl Jun08 0:02 /usr/sbin/NetworkManager --no-daemon

Dunno about debian but RHEL 7 I believed moved all of the fstab stuff over to udevd which is a separate daemon (I could be wrong about that so don't quote me on it).

Other complaints I won't comment on because I haven't been involved in that side of things.

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

mindset of the developers *behind* systemd is psychologically damaged, and that mental instability

I know that your envy of other people's success often leads you to insulting more successful people. But can't you just try to grow up and behave a tiny bit ethically?

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to have to disagree with you very very strongly.

Systemd is a parasitic entity. Only by creating a parallel version of the Linux ecosystem without it can it finally die. It's literally use systemd or not. There is no middle ground.

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

and i won't use it because they are *AGAINST* systemd... it's the other side of exactly the same coin.

No, it's not. Devuan is *AGAINST* systemd, but Debian supports multiple init systems and has no problem with that.

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

But isn't devuan just debian without systemd? Like, you just make the choice and then select the appropriate distro.

You're suggesting that if they make systemd an option, MAYBE debian will pick that up too, but if debian was going to give an option they would have just done that fr the beginning in the spirit of the Linux/unix way.

So just go ahead and use devuan and spare yourself the mental and moral burden you've chosen

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

U mad, bro?

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hypocrisy to argue that they should do something when you can't be bothered to do it either.

At a more practical level, Debian already provides Debian with systemd and it would be a waste of anybody's time to add that, not just yours.

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Bruce Perens]

question: what would happen if i did that? created an alternative which included systemd *in* devuan? would the devuan developers accept it? no they would not... because i have spoken to them and they are ABSOLUTELY adamant that systemd be excluded from devuan.

Well, logically you should give that piece to Debian. It would fulfill Debian's (ill-considered, IMO) decision to include SystemD, and would make life easier for Devuan, and it's nice for Debian to make life easier for its derivatives. Now, I guess Debian could be a stick-in-the-mud about that. Have you asked them?

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[mvdwege]

Smart people would conclude that that might mean that systemd is actually solving essential problems.

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Hognoxious]

Considering that I've had one problem with init scripts ever, and it was so long ago I found the solution in an actual paper book, I'd conclude that you're talking out of Lennart's arse.

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if they don't understand how to deal with a bad actor who uses unnecessary coupling as a weapon to wedge their useless crap into a commons where people assume collaboration and honesty are in play.

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[mvdwege]

One anecdote, versus just about all distribution maintainers. I know how I believe.

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

systemd as it is currently implemented and packaged is excluded from devuan. If you fixed systemd so say

1. you could install it and then, you know, take it off again,
2. it didn't abuse pid1
3. it's replacements for existing functions were split out and independent

and delt with the projects bad practices listed elsewhere not only would you be able to have systemd in devuan.

universal but wth standards.

Re: Not universal until it includes systemd

[mvdwege]

management of firewall rules, fstab, networking, process control: all these things are completely insane to be managed exclusively by PID 1.

Sorry, but if you don't understand why a service manager should know about which file systems are mounted and whether or not the network is up before starting services, you have absolutely no authority to talk about these things.

As for process control: that's been a badly implemented part of init since its very beginning, as the ultimate ancestor process on a *nix machine. That systemd in its role as init and cgroup manager allows more fine-grained process control is a good thing.

And firewalling isn't even handled by systemd. The closest thing is the IPAddressAllow directive in unit files, which is a direct re-implementation of tcpwrappers, not firewalling.

Re: Not universal until it includes systemd

[Barsteward]

"Uuuuuhhhh... Kinda need pick this one apart. They aren't managed by PID1:" - you are onto a loser there, the anti-systemd mob thinks everything in the systemd project is mandatory and runs PID1 - no amount of explanation will cure them of that.

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Barsteward]

unfortunately thats the battle, a few anti's think they know better even though its working fine out in the field for everyone else.

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

The same is true in devuan.

Devuan ASCII even rolled back on the removal of the libsystemd dependency that it started to removed in Jessie. Now the packages that were only changed to not depend on libsystemd are again taken straight from debian and include that again.

Devuan ASCII also ships with elogind, which provides the same APIs that systemd-logind provides on debian and undid all the changes that were in devuan jessie that removed the dependency on those APIs. They even celebrate that "archivement" in the devuan release notes!

Devuan ASCII is much closer to debian than devuan jessie was. The only non-trivial diff at this point is the branding and that they block the systemd deb (but none of the rest build from the same sources) from their distribution.

I do not understand why devuan is even hailed as systemd-free at this point. With jessie they at least tried to remove systemd tentacles, but they have given up on that entirely in ASCII.

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

It's almost as if people have preferences and differences in principles...

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

I would *love* to see a parallel version of the Linux ecosystem without systemd.

So far I only see half-asses attempts to conserve the status quo like devuan:-/

For example look at how they handle the running of the X server: Either you need to run the entire X server as root (none of the systemd-based distros goes down that rabbit hole anymore, thank god!) or you install elogind -- which provides an exact copy of the system-logind APIs.

Devuan basically requires you to miss out on one of the biggest security improvement on Linux in recent years or it makes you rely on the APIs championed by systemd. I would love to see them provide that security benefit with a different and independent approach more in line with the Unix principle, but so far no luck. There is just not a single competent developer anywhere in the devuan community:-/

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

I've had my own ideas about how to "better" engineer Devuan, but there are so many things to do and so little Bruce. :-)

I've said for years that Bruce Perens is an insufferable narcissist with an ego the size of mount Everest. If that sentence doesn't convince you, I don't know what does...

Re: Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

* the first clue is this: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/... which contains 27 separate and distinct entries, three of them for this year alone. by contrast try searching for "sysvinit" and you get *ONE* entry dating back to 1999.

Most of them are not related to systemd. For example:

NOTE: this does not affect systems, such as default Debian stretch installations, on which Tor startup relies on a systemd unit file (instead of this tor.init script)

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[szabo.m.peter]

I do not see anything bad with that sentence. Time is a finite resource, and doing things requires time. Also: he put "better" in quotes. To me that seems like an acknowledgement that better is not an absolute term.

Re: Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

This comment is completely disingenuous. The bugs on that list are just for things that mention systemd. Like CVE-2018-1196, the second on the list, which is simply launched by an init service. Better yet, check out CVE-2017-11565. You think that's a "bug" in systemd? (Hint: it's more like -1 bugs for systemd---starting with a systemd unit makes the system resistant to the attack).

Also---due to the scope creep of systemd---systemd is obviously going to pick up bugs that would just have been in other programs. That doesn't mean they're bugs in PID1.

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[F.Ultra]

So if we find another guy who have had just a single problem with systemd then that will immediately change your mind and you will switch to systemd?

Re: Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

and absolutely no explanation as to why that vote was completely and utterly ignored has ever been given.

After it became quite obvious that the NSA's selinux project was a little too obvious a vector for backdoors, an alternative method for introducing opaque, complex, unneeded, and bug riddled code as close to the kernel as possible was needed. Systemd is not so much a technical product as it is a social engineering one.

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

or that it's just getting harder to remove systemd. That the 'default' desktop hard depends on an init, but so much more' leads to hard deps on session crap as well. Solving problems or no choice at all.

ps. are were talking smart scotsmen here?

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[tramp]

What are you referring to? I am running Devuan ASCII from a default install and it has only libsystemd0 installed (a systemd stub).

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[drinkypoo]

what would happen if i did that? created an alternative which included systemd *in* devuan? would the devuan developers accept it? no they would not... because i have spoken to them and they are ABSOLUTELY adamant that systemd be excluded from devuan.
question: so what would be needed instead? an entire fork of devuan would be needed, wouldn't it? so that's something that i would need to maintain, on my own, wouldn't it? bear in mind that it would be a fork of a fork of debian.

Point the first, not getting your packages included in a distribution does not prevent them from being used. You can even create your own metadistribution which includes them into another distribution if users adopt your repository.

Point the second, you're asking about putting seeds back into seedless watermelon. You don't do that. You just go get a watermelon with seeds in. We still have them. And we still have Debian.

Re: Not universal until it includes systemd

[Antique Geekmeister]

Fine grained control is useful. I'm afraid that the grasping intrusion into other systems, reliant on deep integration with the Linux kernel, is non-portable and intrusive to many other stable parts of the system. So was the non-necessary binary system logging, which could have been left as plain ASCII, the intrusion into network configuration with the DHCP components, the intrusions into auto-mounting, the unnecessary and undesirable intrusion into user process monitoring and hardcoded killing of background user processes without notification. So was the intrusion also includes an extremely confusing and destructive rewraping of SysV init scripts into systemd which silently and unnecessarily _discards_ the ordered startup formerly inherent in systemd init scripts. It's been confusing, unnecessary, and optimized based on what can be _added_ to systemd to expand its approach, rather than what can safely be left out.

I'm afraid the result has cost Linux market share and hindered major Linux OS releases.

Re: Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

the systemd team have been known to ignore bugreports, closing them arbitrarily. not just once but repeatedly. i've seen posts made by people on here which gave references. basically they don't listen to constructive feedback.

Or perhaps they're closing bugs which are are not bugs at all but complaints that the product isn't going the way they want it to go.

the scope creep on systemd is very insidious and dangerous.

Nonsense.

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[LaughingRadish]

So, if all we need to run X without being root is to use a relatively small daemon, then use that daemon. There's no need to assimilate it into an ever-growing behemoth of incomprehensibility.

Re: Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether it's systemd or Microsoft, the problem is not the software but with the politics of the organization behind it.

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Console kit ? Policy kit? Udsiks2? What makes you think it's useful? It's something that creep into many essential package dependencies just like libsystemd0 and friends

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Bruce Perens]

Ego? Nah. If I really had that kind of ego, I'd be telling you about my huge... oh, never mind.

Re: Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

... and absolutely no explanation as to why that vote was completely and utterly ignored has ever been given.

It should be obvious: hostile takeover of an open source secure operating system. By who? We can only speculate. Cui bono? Expect back doors and "bugs" galore.

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

I smell, .. astro turfers. Why do they always smell like bacon?

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

and so little Bruce

Re: Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

The system logging can easily be set to have plain ascii logs. I set that up so long ago I'd forgotten that systemd defaults to not having those. Arguably the fault is with the package maintainers not making plain ascii logs enabled by default.

That said, my own issue with systemd is that it's a lot more complex to debug when something goes wrong. I used to actually understand what my system was doing on startup.

Re: Not universal until it includes systemd

[Brockmire]

So, she was pro war? Wtf was your point? Many of us already know what a phony piece of shit mother Theresa actually was. You don't want to be taking any lessons from that bitch.

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Eunuchswear]

At a more practical level, Debian already provides Debian with systemd and it would be a waste of anybody's time to add that, not just yours.

Hell. Debian also provides Debian without systemd.

What, exactly is the point of Devuan?

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Eunuchswear]

Hey, you're talking to LKCL, a well known loony. Don't expect logic.

Re: Not universal until it includes systemd

[Eunuchswear]

No, she wasn't pro war.

She was pro death and suffering, however.

Re: Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

"Uuuuuhhhh... Kinda need pick this one apart. They aren't managed by PID1:" - you are onto a loser there, the anti-systemd mob thinks everything in the systemd project is mandatory and runs PID1 - no amount of explanation will cure them of that.

Show us how to run systemd-logind on a without systemd as PID1 then.

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

So, if all we need to run X without being root is to use a relatively small daemon, then use that daemon. There's no need to assimilate it into an ever-growing behemoth of incomprehensibility.

But that does not help the ego of someone who looks at Windows as says they have some good ideas, Windows just implemented them into a system that is too simplistic and transparent.

Re: Not universal until it includes systemd

[Barsteward]

you show me a system where systemd_logind runs as PID1 then. Mine's currently running as PID 796

Re:Not universal until it includes systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

reminder1: remember to read all punctuation.
reminder2: you too are allowed to have your own ideas and if you have the time and inclination, implement them. It has little to do with ego and everything to do with ability and application. As the second debian maintainer I'd think that Mr Perens has demonstrated both in the past.

An OS for the rest of us

[AHuxley]

Listing of grievances about systemd.
Feats of speed.
OS miracles.

Imagine this

[Anonymous Coward]

A company that makes it money by selling Linux support introduces this monolith of untested and unproven code upon paying customers...

Re:Imagine this

[F.Ultra]

Except of course that you pay a fixed price for the Red Hat support so the more calls you have to make to them the less Red Hats profits from said subscription.

Re: Imagine this

[F.Ultra]

Since you pay a fixed price for the Red Hat support (with their subscription model). Wouldn't it be in RH:s best interest to keep the number of calls down in order to keep the profits up? Now if they would have charged per case then it would have been a completely different situation but they don't.

Re: Imagine this

[Anonymous Coward]

if they would have charged per case

If they had charged by case.

Where does this odd 'would have' formation come from? I see it a lot.

Re: Imagine this

[DCFusor]

Their customers largely spin up a ton of identical instances that aren't doing the kinds of things systemd breaks, and anyway, once you fix one, you've fixed them all - until the next rev of systemd anyway (so simple it's taking what, well over 200 revs and still doesn't work right).
On the other hand, most of the rest of us are home-gamers or small busineeses, not RH's customers (most of us use Debian...) and almost any customization of services you want started at boot gets broken by a new rev of systemd. And the workarounds on the 'net - are usually for earlier systemd revs and no longer work. Just taking a raspberry pi upgrade kills half your stuff and days are wasted finding out why mounting a share doesn't work, nginx won't start, mysql can't find its database, custom message passing fails due to wrong startup order, and few of us have hours per WEEK to screw around learning yet another, more complex way of doing what used to work fine and are tired of seeing arrogant responses like "then don't do that - WONTFIX".
It's at least as "exciting" if you have half a dozen PCs you want to have doing customized work and talking to one another depending on which is on at the time.
TL;DR

Red Hat has no reason to give a shit. They sell support contracts they'd sell anyway due to MBAs, and for a jillion instances in a cloud, one fix does all.
For my case, you'd need several per machine, and RH doesn't support debian/Mint/etc even if I wanted to pay them.
This is based on actual events on my homestead, I'm not gassing about imaginaries.

Re: Imagine this

[Anonymous Coward]

It is perfectly cromulent when used to describe a hypothetical situation.

Re: Imagine this

[F.Ultra]

Ok I take your word for it, but actually this sounds more to be a problem with the raspberry upgrade system. I manage hundreds of servers and desktops in the financial industry and have not had a single systemd related problem when upgrading any of them. And if the startup-order is wrong then that sounds like the unit file dependencies have an error somewhere, I guess that you use a network drive to store the nginx and mysql databases considering the problems that you see? And that could be one difference since I do not use any networked drives for such things.

Re: Imagine this

[Anonymous Coward]

Gamers are screeching retards who think they know something about computers; one of the lowest forms of life on the planet. If you haven't figured out that your time is better spent avoiding hand-customization of servers, and you haven't figured out what CI is, or why people bother with immutable server images, then you're doing it wrong. I'm also not sure how you screw up writing a unit file, but you should probably get a handle on that.

There's a lot of people who learned how to use Bash to administer Unix in the 1980s, and haven't bothered to learn anything since — but the other guys, they're the arrogant ones who won't listen.

Re: Imagine this

[not flu]

If you don't need to make those calls in the first place, why pay the subscription?

Re: Imagine this

[F.Ultra]

Because when you operate an Enterprise it's required from above that you must have support contracts on all pieces of software. This is why companies like Oracle can sell licenses per CPU core and so on.

Has anyone got SystemD usable?

[Billly Gates]

It's great that those of you have the power to choose to run Duuvan or FreeBSD at work. I don't! I use what they use or get fired and replaced by someone else who can get the job done.

I maybe up for a promotion using Redhat/CentOS in a few months and will be judged on uptime and ability to recover from reboots. I am nervous after reading all the hate here.

If everyone is using system D it can't be that bad right? Amazon uses it and so does every fortune 1,000 company. Is there a tutorial on how to use it reliably or is using FreeBSD or Duuvan the only non Windows option?

Re: Has anyone got SystemD usable?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can tune it to be stable, frankly. It still is a Linux environment so you can hack around as needed. I've used systemd for five years and I don't like it but I can still make it do my bidding.

The main problems with systemd are that when you get into edge case failures, you can really have a hell of a mess on your hands especially with multiple systems. And the huge problem that caused systemd being a debacle is the systemd devs often closed bugs basically saying "it's your problem," even with very legitimate and duplicable issues.

Re: Has anyone got SystemD usable?

[jaromil]

I maybe up for a promotion using Redhat/CentOS in a few months and will be judged on uptime and ability to recover from reboots. I am nervous after reading all the hate here.

RH/COS is serving a lot of farms with OpenStack.
but then...
Google is pressing kubernetes at huge trade fairs. M$ is catching up with open source culture.
Ubuntu is enforcing snap and the other everywhere...

who knows what will happen???

I'm sorry it makes you feel nervous. I mostly feel excited :^) and compelled to study where it all goes.

Re:Has anyone got SystemD usable?

[Anonymous Coward]

> If everyone is using system D it can't be that bad right?

Popularity never meant 'good'. Remember when people smoked a lot, or when people owned other people? That was *super* popular.

Systemd is stable .. ish. it's not the stability that annoys so much; it's just everything else around it, from design to coding egos involved, to the fact that after 5 upgrades in as many years, RHEL7 still is squeezing in barely-released shaky versions of some internal product interfacing at a very low level, with bugs -- against the policy that's brought them such success at the cost of explaining why this week's PHP/etc isn't in the stock product.

Go ahead: reload DBUS. See how logins don't work? The response last month is "yeah, you can upgrade the KERNEL without a reboot on some distros, but if you need to reload DBUS after RHEL72 it's best just to reboot." As the OS gets better, Redhat is making it worse.

It's an embarrassment propped up by a cult, really.

So, go ahead and run RHEL/CentOS and be okay with it. The vastly more stable distribution for everything OTHER THAN systemd (et al) on that box will be fine, and you can sleep at night. Just, be aware that regular sys5init stuff will be barely emulated, and every now and then you'll clench fists and teeth and mutter 'Poettering' like a curse.

Who's carrying the post-systemd RPM-based distro? PCLinuxOS? Anyone else? We're migrating OFF RHEL/ to alpine where it works, but I'd like to have something more RHELish where I can.

Re:Has anyone got SystemD usable?

[Anonymous Coward]

If "use case" is to turn your shiny new computer into a boat anchor, then yes.

Excellent

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate systemd. But the open source movement is about choice. People who like systemd should be able to keep it. But those of us who dislike systemd should not be forced to use it (or else to give up Linux). Currently, I am running Gentoo with sysvinit. It's simple, straightforward, and does what I want. There are valid reasons for people to use systemd; they just aren't worth the trouble in my case.

I'm glad for Devuan. I hope other distros will also provide choices without systemd for those of us who don't want to use systemd.

Re:Excellent

[Anonymous Coward]

But the open source movement is about choice.

No it isn't. I see this statement often and it's fundamentally incorrect. One has a choice insofar as to use F/OSS or not, but there's no movement to provide you with a plethora of alternatives to software that one doesn't like. In fact, the F/OSS movement is entirely about software development.

Example 1: The Open Source Initiative's mission statement

Mission

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is a non-profit corporation with global scope formed to educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source and to build bridges among different constituencies in the open source community.

Open source enables a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is higher quality, better reliability, greater flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.

One of our most important activities is as a standards body, maintaining the Open Source Definition for the good of the community. The Open Source Initiative Approved License trademark and program creates a nexus of trust around which developers, users, corporations and governments can organize open source cooperation.

Nothing about enabling choice, here.

Example 2: The GNU Project philosophy page

Free software means that the software's users have freedom. (The issue is not about price.) We developed the GNU operating system so that users can have freedom in their computing.

Specifically, free software means users have the four essential freedoms: (0) to run the program, (1) to study and change the program in source code form, (2) to redistribute exact copies, and (3) to distribute modified versions.

GNU doesn't have a mission page, but the site talks about the Free Software philosophy and goes on to describe the 4 user freedoms that we all know and love. Nothing about providing users with choice.

So, please, stop perpetuating this myth. The whole F/OSS ethos is about software development, distribution and user rights. Nothing more.

Re: Excellent

[Anonymous Coward]

For all practical purposes, FOSS gives you a lot more choices than msft or aapl or goog.

Re: Excellent

[Anonymous Coward]

Nevertheless, that doesn't make F/OSS "all about choice".

By the same rationale, one could say that the Linux kernel is "all about filesystems" because, for all practical purposes, it has more filesystems to choose from than Windows or Mac OS.

All I want

[petes_PoV]

... is a Linux that doesn't have updates every few days.

Just write the dam' code. Do it properly, with skilled authors and designers so it doesn't contain (so many) bugs and then TEST IT. Not just for function - and that only seems to be that the expected input produces the expected output, but for integration, backwards-compatibility, security and reliability.

That would actually have added value worth paying for. Then every year or two, do it again with a new release.

Re:All I want

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a shortage of monkeys for fuzz testing software. Thankfully most companies have found that Negroes make an excellent substitute. But then again, unfortunately, there is no shortage of Negroes, and that is sort of a thorny problem akin to Russell's Paradox.

Re:All I want

[Misagon]

Testing is what the rolling releases are for. Their users are our testers. ;)

Re:All I want

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to live in a dream world too!

Re:All I want

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want a tested distro with less bugs, then wait for other people to test and bugfix a release first, before using it.
For example, RHEL and SUSE have very old versions, so they've had years of testing by a huge testing team (the userbase), and are still supported.
Or if by "Linux" you actually mean "Linux", then Linux 3.16 had 4 years of testing and is still supported.

The majority of a Linux distro's bugs are in code written by the community, which is an enormous codebase.
"Just writing the damn code properly" would involve somehow finding a huge crack team of super developers and auditing/rewriting all of it.
And somehow raising a shitload of money to fund these developers, which I'm sure would prefer to do something more interesting with their skills.

If it doesn't have to be Linux, try OpenBSD, they use (relatively) high quality code.

Re:All I want

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll want something with a lot less code than Linux.

Perhaps MS-DOS 3.3 would fit your requirements? Thoroughly tested by now, and guaranteed to not get any updates.

Re:All I want

[Anonymous Coward]

How about Minix...

Most of the frequent changes in Linux are in drivers, filesystem etc. and not core kernel code.

Minix pushes that stuff into user space, so the kernel very rarely needs to be revised.

GNU?

[Daemonik]

Didn't we have this talk already? If you're going to be pedantic enough to insist on using GNU then go all the way and make it GNU+BSD+Assorted non-associated contributed packages+Linux then.

Re:GNU?

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is to refer to a foundation of technologies that represent a complete system. A userland and a kernel achieve this. You can have GNU+Linux, GNU+Hurd, GNU+BSD kernel, and other combinations. It's not pedantry to give credit to those who built major parts of the foundational system. If you're a developer, you'll care about your dev environment, too, and may list something like "Clang on GNU+Linux" as your system.

But hey, don't let logic and reason get in the way of bitching about words.

Could be fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Could be fun for the type of person who enjoys this sort of thing.

This makes me very pleased

[wierd_w]

I have a repurposed consumer grade NAS. It lacks any special bells or whistles. It has no sound hardware. It has only a small list of services that I want it to run. It has no god-damned-need for systemD.

Finally, I can use something reasonably mature (like debian), without SystemD's clusterfuckery.

(Because frankly, I fail to see why I need to carry all that shit around just to boot a minimalistic embedded linux, M'kay?)

Re:This makes me very pleased

[OolimPhon]

Then you need this:

http://without-systemd.org/wik...

Though you can't apparently do this with anything that needs X, because of udev2 issues, it works fine for plain headless servers. I have a number of these running. Just install a standard BASE system and then do the referenced items above, before installing anything on top of the base OS. Job done!

Re:This makes me very pleased

[LaughingRadish]

It's funny that when you google for "udev2", the first hit talks about disabling it.

Re:This makes me very pleased

[Wolfrider]

MX17 and Antix do just fine with X...?

Re:This makes me very pleased

[Anonymous Coward]

And even LMDE (Mint Debian)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Dual

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent, smelly basement dwellers at 10 paces, keyboards fully loaded.
Grabs popcorn.

Fsck off systemd!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a single good thing comes from systemd. we hand a simple robust init system, with other tools to monitor and restart services if needed. Now we have this systemd cancerous abomination that has invaded everything due to redhat's agenda and product map despite systemd being BAD FOR LINUX.

systemd is actually the worst thing that has happened, technically and otherwise, for Linux and the community, for as long as I can remember (in, what, over 25 years?)

Re:Fsck off systemd!

[Anonymous Coward]

It has been 8 years since systemd was initially released. That's the better part of a decade and the sky has yet to fall down.

Where is the catastrophe that you envision? Is 8 years not long enough for it to come about? Perhaps this disaster playing the long, looooong game?

Or, and I'm just putting this out there, you might be wrong.

Dumb name

[hackertourist]

They've made it difficult to search for text encoding issues in this release of Devuan.

kill -HUP 0

[Anonymous Coward]

There are several things still broken with SystemD, but what riles me most is that proper signaling the process group doesn't work. And that fixing such a fundamental *nix basic feature does't seem to interest those implementing at all.

sysvinit

[Tenebrousedge]

You should probably be aware of the reasons for the introduction of cgroups, the limitations of pidfiles with respect to process tracking, and the difficulties involved in setting resource limits for processes without kernel-level support. There may or may not be anything too badly wrong with systemd (hopefully not, as OpenRC is pretty similar), but people who are still clinging to sysvinit are fools.

Re: sysvinit

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenRC is "pretty similar" to systemd much like how bubblegum is "pretty similar" to plastic explosive. But I know which one I won't be chewing on. Hint: it's the one which doesn't blow up my face.

I specifically left Debian and derivatives because I was tired of esoteric errors with PulseAudio and systemd, two brainfarts from the same cranium. Is Gentoo more work (in that I need to have a deeper understanding of my system)? Sure. But I don't get the sound randomly dying or including wads of latency and I don't get random 5-minute waits at shutdown/reboot. Yes, I know that's a bad service somewhere. No, I couldn't figure out which one because systemd. And I could forget adding my own services - instead of simple scripts, I had to learn an entire system - when all I wanted was "start this command-line at boot and sigterm it at run level change".

Re: sysvinit

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think Bash is simple and unit files are hard you have brain damage.

I do welcome this.

[Anonymous Coward]

I had some issues with some modern distros but this worked fine, maybe I will learn how to manage they system with the new service manager, bit now I have too much work to do.

How about Debian just offers a non-systemd option?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to be able to cleanly install a regular Debian/Redhat/Suse system and choose at install time what sort of init I want the machine to use. Kludges like those at http://without-systemd.org/ are nice, but let's have something that doesn't require such tinkering. Is that too hard to do? If so, why?

Why does Poettering still have a job pushing systemd and pulseaudio all the discord he's sown?

Thank you for saving the Linux distro world.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't think the Devuan developers enough. I'm not a distribution developer nor a sysadmin (except for my family's PCs...). I'm not even averse to using systemd-based distributions. But - I know the wrong choice has been made, and I know this needs to be rectified. I plan on switching my home PC from GNU/Linux Mint to Devuan GNU/Linux 2 next time I need to install a distribution.

I encourage everyone to try using Devuan, to support the project with hardware, with money and with QA/bug reporting. Even if you think SystemD is not as bad as it's made out to be - you should consider supporting the project, or at least not bashing it - if only in the name of diversity. Monoculture and single point of failure are problematic.

Re:Thank you for saving the Linux distro world.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not a distribution developer nor a sysadmin [..] But - I know the wrong choice has been made

Is is like you "know" the world is a flat disc and these people claiming to have landed on the moon must have lied?

More power to them!

[sombragris]

It's great to see a systemd-free distro making progress. Hope they keep releasing.

And remember, Slackware is the oldest GNU/Linux distro in active maintenance, and is also free of systemd. Even the development version (Slackware-current) has no systemd.

Re:More power to them!

[walterbyrd]

IMO: Slackware package management leaves a lot to be desired.

I know there are many package management add-ons for Slackware, but there is nothing official, nothing standard. Frankly, it's a mess.

Re:More power to them!

[sombragris]

Maybe. But slackpkg is standard from several versions ago and it works beautifully. Really, right now package management works very well and the biggest difference with other distributions is the lack of dependency resolution. This is by design; the whole thing is predicated on the basis that you do a full install.

Every review I see about Devaun is positive

[walterbyrd]

Fast, stable, flexible, and systemd free.

Like old (real) Debian, it has excellent package management.

Other distros get more bloated, less flexible, and more authoritarian; Devaun embraces the true ideals of Linux, and UNIX.

Re:How about Debian just offers a non-systemd opti

[walterbyrd]

> Why does Poettering still have a job pushing systemd and pulseaudio all the discord he's sown?

Because Red Hat, and it's business partner Microsoft, want to effectively control the Linux universe.

Can't blame them, they are public corporations, and their first duty is to their shareholders, not the Linux community.

The real problem with systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

The cunt who designed and wrote it had a history of writing buggy ill conceived shit.

He is far from the best person for the job.

Also he isnâ(TM)t a huge Linux User. Heâ(TM)s part of the laptop brigade, and while thatâ(TM)s important, itâ(TM)s not essential.

Quite frankly, Linux on a laptop or desktop is a fundamentally different beast to Linux on a server or virtual machine.

I bet that cunt pottering uses a Mac, has a hard on for it, and gave us a half arsed implementation of launchd.

Gentoo and Funtoo have an OpenRC option

[ArghBlarg]

There are still systemd-free distros out there, support them if you care. I'm happy with the above.

Re:Gentoo and Funtoo have an OpenRC option

[Anonymous Coward]

Distrowatch has a "Init" menu option for the advanced search. Pick your Init and be happy. Or you can pick "Non-SystemD"
No other Init is hated enough to have it's own "Non-" option.
Thanks Distrowatch!

Yes I'm using systemd right now. Just to lazy to change it and maybe a little to stupid to know if it's causing any of my problems.

Re:How about Debian just offers a non-systemd opti

[Anonymous Coward]

This. Everything was fine with Linux until systemd and pulse-audio. A good example of Microsoft EEE.

I Care

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is too important to risk being tied down. Without the Linux wildcard I suspect Microsoft and Apple wouldn't be able to avoid even more draconian demands from Hollywood and Governments. Once someone corrals Linux the whole landscape changes.
Don't let anyone put a saddle on Linux much less a bit in it's teeth!

Thanks jaromil

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for Devuan jaromil. There is still hope for the internet as long as people like you are around.

Quick test in VMware didn't work

[Anonymous Coward]

I just made a quick test of the live DVD in WMware 12 workstation. Doesn't work... It boots, but X-windows malfunctions.

Re:How about Debian just offers a non-systemd opti

[Eunuchswear]

Everything was fine with Linux until pulse-audio.

Well, except that sound didn't work.

diamond init

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, init has to do some things hot swapping has to do, but hot swapping doesn't need to do other things init needs to do.

It seems that init needs to be very light, only starting and managing two high level hierarchy deamons: hardware (devices) manager, and software (processes) manager, and the two should optionally synchronize if system dependencies require it. Then, when the two managers are ready, a high level, secondary init proces PID 4 should be started to bring up the system as scripted.

libsystemd0?

[Phil Hands]

Hi Bruce,

Nice to see that you're still taking an interest in Debian ;-)

Perhaps you can explain why you favour Devuan over simply running Debian with the init of your choice installed.

The reason that I ask is that (prompted by a comment down the thread) I just tried out the live version of Devuan ASCII, and I see that is is true that Devuan now includes libsystemd0.

While I personally see nothing wrong with that, I've gained the strong impression that the fundamental reason for setting up Devuan in the first place was to avoid including that library.

If one is motivated to avoid every scrap of systemd, then I don't see how Devuan can now be considered satisfactory.

If on the other hand one is willing to accept having libsystemd0 (so that programs can sensibly accommodate running on systems with and without systemd) then I'm wondering what is supposed to be better about using Devuan than simply using Debian having selected one of the several alternative inits.

Is this about bugs that are being left unjustifiably unfixed in Debian?

If that's the case, and there are reasonable bugs that are being ignored, then I'm confident that the Technical Committee would give such cases a sympathetic hearing (and I say that as a current member of the committee).

Cheers, Phil.

Re:libsystemd0?

[Bruce Perens]

Hi Phil, Unfortunately a lot of packages are built with a dependency on libsystemd0. Satisfying this dependency, obviously, does not mean that your init system has to be SystemD. You may also stub out the library as necessary, or re-implement it to work with multiple init systems.

The breaking point for me was a filesystem problem on my root disk. Using another init, I would not have needed a rescue disk. Using SystemD, I could not boot without being able to write the journal. Devuan repairs that issue.

So, it's solving a problem vs. ritual purity. The purpose is not to eradicate every last work by Mr. Pottering, but to allow choice of init systems.

Re:libsystemd0?

[Phil Hands]

Hi Bruce,

Are you under the impression that Debian does not offer a choice of inits?

If so, you are mistaken.

If you think that you'd have been better off with some other init, why did you not just install another init?

I think it's a bit of a shame that so many people interpret the existence of Devuan as an assertion that Debian has somehow forced systemd upon our users, whereas in fact a lot of effort has been spent on making sure that systemd is just a default that can be easily overridden by installing an alternative init. This is particularly unjust because most of the effort required was provided by the maintainers of the systemd package, so they did the work to allow people to use other inits, which was pretty selfless of them, and meanwhile they get all the grief from people complaining (wrongly) about being forced to use systemd.

Cheers, Phil.

Re:libsystemd0?

[Bruce Perens]

Phil, I think the problem is that SystemD isn't just an init. And some of the things it took over were no longer maintained outside of SystemD until the Devuan people came along. So, I think you should look at Devuan as not just Debian with a different init, but Debian with all of the problems of running without SystemD solved.

Re:libsystemd0?

[Phil Hands]

Bruce,

OK, so that's fair enough, but is there any real reason for Devuan to behave as anything other than a normal Debian derivative?

When they were trying to "eradicate every last work by Mr. Pottering", including libsystemd0, that wasn't going to work, since Debian doesn't really have a workable way to have two versions of the same package, differently linked (well, not without an explosion of foo-without-libsystemd packages, which wasn't going to get past the ftpmasters).

Now that they seem to have rowed back a little from that position, it seems like the main thing is the maintenance of alternative packages, and the testing of the coherent whole, both of which could be pushed upstream to some extent.

If all the packages could be pushed upstream, then Devuan might even be able to be a Debian Blend, or perhaps even a Debian Pure Blend, which would then allow them to release in a timely manner. Even without that, I'm sure that there are Debian users that would appreciate the option of using the main components like eudev.

Looking for evidence of attempts to package eudev for Debian, this is about it as far as I can see:

    https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bi...
and
    https://lists.debian.org/debia...

neither of which have gone anywhere since.

Given that the packages now exist, it ought to be pretty trivial to upload them to Debian. That is likely to attract more people to use them, resulting in more effort being available to keep them maintained in future, so everyone wins.

If there's some reason that they cannot be uploaded to Debian in their current state, then it would be helpful to have the ITP ( https://wiki.debian.org/ITP ) in the BTS ( https://wiki.debian.org/BTS ), with blockers being described, providing somewhere to discuss how to address that situation.

Cheers, Phil.

Re:libsystemd0?

[Bruce Perens]

I think the Devuan developers also wanted to be in a community of people with different values. One that they felt would be more attuned to the Unix philosophy. One where something like SystemD would never have been considered as the default. You might have noticed that their announcements are signed "Vetran Unix Admins". Now, I know some people still with Debian have been around for a long time. But maybe they haven't held the same values.

And much as I love Debian, there is a lot wrong with it and has been for a long time. The inward-facing nature of it that holds it back: "we make Debian for ourselves". So much anal-retentive process that I wouldn't dream of attempting to re-qualify as a DD and going through all of it today. Way too much willingness to allow commercial distributions, often built on Debian, to run away with their user base.

So, I'm happy to see a non-profit fork with different goals, and maybe to help them a little.

Re:libsystemd0?

[Anonymous Coward]

You DID force SystemDud on your users!

The shenanigans the TC pulled to force it through despite well-reasoned objections is well-documented. Your attempts at revisionist history are filled with fail. But not as must as SystemD.

Linux desktop user since 1995

[Anonymous Coward]

Before pulseaudio Linux audio was rubbish if you were a desktop user.

What? How so? OSS worked fine. You could play games or watch movies and it all worked great. The main limitation is that with OSS you couldn't have sounds playback from multiple apps at once. But honestly playing multiple sounds at once is such bullshit anyways because it's usually a browser pop-under playing an ad.

ALSA was a great improvement over OSS. And if your app was not written by an idiot you could share the audio between them. For me, as a musician, ALSA really improved MIDI in Linux over OSS.