Devuan rebels hope to deliver Debian fork in 2015

Devuan, the Debian spin-off that will not include systemd has posted its first progress report. The missive says things are going well, as the project now has a GitLab repository and has built the first devuan-baseconf package. The team behind Devuan has also started “following and supporting any cutting-edge research on …

[Anonymous Coward]

>makes the effort look a little rickety:

Not sure why really.. they have ~3k euro in the bank and they haven't spent all of it. That's a good sign I would think.

>there's a footnoote explaining just why it was necessary to by one

>of the project's members a €541 laptop!

And it says they need someone to work on consolekit and loginkit and the guy that came forward to do it needs a machine to work on so they bought him one.

[Ole Juul]

I'm looking forward to the first edition

Linux isn't my main OS, but I thought the philosophy behind this sounded so hopeful that I sent them a couple of bucks. Also hoping they'll banish NetworkManager.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I'm looking forward to the first edition

Yes, me too. In particular I have a stack of Wheezy servers that will amost certainly take advantage of their promise of upgrading directly to Devaun 1 rather than Jessie.

While the headlong rush to the non-init parts of systemd are of concern, the main reason I wish Devuan well is to retain diversity among linux distros, and the further systemd creeps into aspects beyond init, the less this appears likely.

[John Sanders]

Re: I'm looking forward to the first edition

You do realize that you can remove Networkmanager and all its good in the world don't you?

Let me add that I can also understand that when it was new and causing issues one would want to do that, but in this day and age when it runs fine "almost" in all situations, it seems silly to me.

This comes from someone who's sole OS is Linux and has all computers (x5) at home except the server running network manager. (The server does not need a gui config tool obviously)

Just for the VPN management alone (Supports cisco IPSEC/OpenVPN/Anyconnect out of the box and well) its well worth it.

[Destroy All Monsters]

by one of the project's members a €541 laptop!

BUY, not BY.

And this is a frankly good price.

[Ben Tasker]

Kind of my first thought too, 541EUR for a laptop isn't exactly extravagant and likely well worth paying for someone who is a prolific contributor

[Trevor_Pott]

Perfectly okay with my donation money going towards a laptop for someone who is working on delivering a systemd free Linux distro. That's why the money was sent in. Let's get 'er done.

[John Sanders]

Trevor...

I respect their efforts, wish them good luck and such, but seriously they are wasting their time and money.

I wonder what's everybody going to think/do when Debian Stretch (Jessie+1) comes out with systemd as an optional dependency.

Because that was the plan well before this debacle caught the eye of the good old "el Reg" commentards.

Due to schedule constrains Jessie was meant to come with systemd as a default, optional later on in 8.1/8.2 and definetively optional from the beginning in 9.0

But, who cares, where's the drama on that. Its like Networkmanager, once something has a bad rep who cares about the facts or like in the case of Pulseaudio, who cares if it ever improves.

And once again I'm no systemd devotee or anything, I think it is too ambitious and should be leaner, but I have spend quite a substantial amount of time with it and I can not see where are those terrible problems people is having with it, and much less those logs you can not made use syslog if you desire.

[Trevor_Pott]

@ John Sanders

Marcus Hamilton: Why do you keep fighting? You just signed away your role in the Shanshu. There's nothing in it for you anymore.

Angel: People like you, who don't care about anyone or anything, will never understand the people who do.

Marcus Hamilton: Yeah... but we won't care!

[SImon Hobson]

Re: Trevor...

> I wonder what's everybody going to think/do when Debian Stretch (Jessie+1) comes out with systemd as an optional dependency.

Well, that is assuming that Stretch does come out with systemd as an option. If Jessie goes systemd then that gives systemd a fairly free run to get even more entrenched and it'll be even more work to get package maintainers to remove it. Given that Debian aren't tackling it now because "it's too hard" - can you be sure that they will tackle it later when it's even harder ?

And it will be harder.

If systemd "isn't there' then the choice is "do I support this distro" on the part of the package maintainer. Later, it'll be a case of "why should I be ar**d to change my package because this distro have changed their side". That's a somewhat different question !

I've been in IT for "some time". I've seen plenty of vapourware fail to condense into reality. At the moment, a future systemd free Debian is just vapourware.

[Trevor_Pott]

Re: Trevor...

Everyone, Simon Hobson believes that it is unlikely bordering on impossible to make a Debian fork that is systemd free, so nobody hsould bother trying. He hath spoken.

/me donates another $25.

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: Trevor...

Simon Hobson believes that it is unlikely bordering on impossible to make a Debian fork that is systemd free

Does he? I interpreted his post as "it's unlikely Debian will make systemd an option in Stretch" - or, more broadly, that it's unlikely a future Debian release will be systemd-free. That doesn't mean a fork of Debian won't be; just Debian itself.

Seems to me he was replying to the earlier contention that Stretch would make systemd optional, so a systemd-free fork was unnecessary.

Personally, I don't think a systemd-optional Stretch would help anyway. The problem is all the other packages that have decided to depend on systemd. The solution there would appear to be shims like loginkitd, and someone needs to create those and make them readily available to a systemd-free distribution. So that alone makes Devuan worthwhile.

[SImon Hobson]

Re: Trevor...

> I interpreted his post as "it's unlikely Debian will make systemd an option in Stretch" - or, more broadly, that it's unlikely a future Debian release will be systemd-free. That doesn't mean a fork of Debian won't be; just Debian itself.

You interpreted correctly.

By the time Jessie+1 is being worked on, systemd will have woven it's tentacles deeper into ${stuff} and it will be even harder to extract it. If the Debian team are saying it's "too hard" now, well it's not hard to imagine what will happen later.

> The problem is all the other packages that have decided to depend on systemd

Indeed. But the answer to that is for us sysadmins to turn round to the developers/packagers and tell them in no uncertain terms that we want systemd-free versions. Only by package devs supporting the "Unix philosophy" (do one thing and do it well, use other tools rather than reinventing and including stuff in your own code) will we keep some sanity.

[keithpeter]

Will try it out...

...when there is an ISO or recommended install method.

Currently on Debian Sid on a newly aquired recycled Thinkpad X200 for messing about and wasting time on. Sid actually works very well. If Devuan can underpin the applications and desktop with their own subsystem, that would be ace.

May flog the X61s and donate proceeds in new year. The OpenBSD crew have asked for donations of specific kit in the past. Don't see any issues with purchase of new kit myself.

[ElReg!comments!Pierre]

Lookin' good so far

Let's hope Devuan won't run out of steam. In the long run it would probably be beneficial to have separate desktop and server branches anyway, less pollution of the server branch by bulky dependancies only needed for GUI niceties. I initially thought that Ubuntu et al. were going to be the desktop branches with Debian staying focussed on clean, lean server-ready code; obviously I was wrong. Long live Devuan!

[Graham 24]

Logo Plagiarism

Is it just me, or does the D from the logo look suspiciously like the tail of OpenSUSE's Geeko chameleon?

[ElReg!comments!Pierre]

Re: Logo Plagiarism

... while being completely unrelated to the Debian logo, Shirley?

Inspired or not by the Debian logo (and most definitely not by Suse's), "plagiarism" is not quite the right term. Perhaps "slight inspiration" or "discreet reference"?

[nematoad]

And now for something completely different

For those of us allergic to sudo there is always PCLinuxOS.: PCLOS

They have just released their latest edition and have stated that they see no reason to incorporate systemd in their distro.

Good luck to the Devuan devs. but there is a fall-back if it all goes pear-shaped.

[saif]

Duplicated effort...

There is already a reasonably intelligent fork of systemd that addresses much of the concerns while remaining largely compatible...uselessd. The difficulty is that for many tools systemd is becoming a dependency. This means that maintaining a fork of debian may also need to have forks of these tools too. What devuan lacks, and what systemd has is inertia.