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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.
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.
I'm waiting for Devuan EBCDIC personally.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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!
Bruce Perens.
... is a Poettering-Free Zone!
#DeleteChrome
Except for losing log messages and not providing a proper exit status. It's really hard to troubleshoot problems without log messages.
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.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
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
Bruce Perens.
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.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
"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."
https://ewontfix.com/14/ is a good article which goes into detail about why systemd is a bad architecture.
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.
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.
"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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
ls -lh /lib/systemd/systemd /lib/systemd/systemd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1.6M Feb 1 23:31
It's clearly not a lithe, slender little thing running as pid 1.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
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.
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.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
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.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."