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> But first, let me put some warning out here: Dear Devuan friends, while I honor your work, I also have to be very honest with you: in theory, you should not h

by wicket 9y ago

> But first, let me put some warning out here: Dear Devuan friends, while I honor your work, I also have to be very honest with you: in theory, you should not have done this. Looking at creating Devuan, which means splitting of Debian, economically, you caused approximately infinite cost. I thought the same at first but after trying to maintain a Debian installation without systemd, I was convinced otherwise. The "infinite cost" was not caused by Devuan developers but by Debian developers. I felt the Debian transition to systemd was handled very badly and was rushed in order to get Jessie out of the door. Debian still provides the sysvinit-core package as if it were a supported init system however if you use it you'll find the operating system has many quirks and many things are broken. Before Jessie was released, I commented on one bug report related to a hard dependency on systemd for NetworkManager. Instead of fixing the regression, the package maintainer gave the excuse that they don't have the resources and would need more maintainers. I sympathise with the package maintainer but this is the sort of thing that led to this mess. I remember there being a lot of hostility in that period from Debian developers towards those who did not wish to use systemd. Based on my experience, I think the right decision was made to "fork" Debian to create Devuan. It's a shame that they had to do this. I still hold hope that maybe one day all of the work put into Devuan can be reintegrated into Debian and it can return to be the "Universal Operating System" that they still claim to be.

icebraining 9y ago
I'm pretty agnostic towards systemd, but I don't understand this complaint that Debian now doesn't support other init systems. Did they support other systems besides sysv before?
- wicket 9y ago
  They also supported upstart but that was dropped in Stretch. We are left with systemd and System V init to provide /sbin/init. Debian still provides System V init which itself works fine but other packages, many of which previously worked, have come to depend systemd only. This type of regression would not be acceptable in other projects but Debian has done nothing about it. I think they should stop pretending that Debian is still usable System V init and just drop the package altogether.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Debian officially supported Upstart until Stretch? That's news to me. Do you have a link?
    - khedoros1 9y ago
      Debian at least provides documentation on using Upstart, either alone or alongside Systemd: https://wiki.debian.org/Upstart https://wiki.debian.org/Upstart I don't know whether that means it's "supported" or not.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        Being on the Debian Wiki doesn't mean much; there's a page for RPM too, but it was never a supported system on Debian.
    - wicket 9y ago
      https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/upstart https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/upstart
      - icebraining 9y ago
        The package existed, but as you pointed out regarding SysV, that doesn't mean it's actually supported. Was it?
        wicket 9y ago
        That really depends on your definition of "supported". It does not form part of the base distribution, nor was there ever any paid support for it. A Debian developer built a deb package for it and added it to the "main" repository. Everything under "main" is normally considered to be part of the distribution. As you can see from the link I provided, the package was maintained for several years and received several updates until it was dropped for Stretch. That is exactly what I would expect from a supported package in Debian.
- JdeBP 9y ago
  Yes. In Debian 7 one could switch among van Smoorenburg init+rc, systemd, upstart, and Felix von Leitner's minit. runit-init had been removed in 2010. Felix von Leitner's minit was later removed by Debian member Iain R. Learmonth in November 2015. upstart was removed as a consequence of a bug report (#789524) filed by Kyle Amon in June 2015. One of the contentious events during the Debian Hoo-Hah was one of the package maintainers leaping to remove support for an init system from one package almost as soon as the Technical Committee had made its decision favouring systemd over upstart, OpenRC, and van Smoorenburg rc. People opined then that Debian package maintainers should not blithely remove support for init systems like that. * https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=746715 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=746715 More recently, however, this has begun to happen. In August 2017, a group of Debian people got together to organize the removal of all upstart support from all packages; and that is progressing. * https://lintian.debian.org/tags/package-installs-deprecated-upstart-configuration.html https://lintian.debian.org/tags/package-installs-deprecated-...
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Right, but sysv is still around, so if "support" means having the package, then Debian still supports other init systems. The complaint here is that stuff doesn't work well with sysv, so my question is: if back in Debian 7 something didn't work well with Upstart, was that considered a blocking bug? If not, I fail to see what changed. As you pointed out, they already removed obsolete init systems before systemd came around, so removing Upstart (which has been abandoned by upstream) is not a change in regular procedure.
    - JdeBP 9y ago
      Neither runit nor minit were, or are, obsolete; and systemd was around in 2010.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        I mean obsolete as Debian packages. In any case, why do you say it was removed? runit seems to have been present in every version released since 2010. As for systemd, it wasn't as a Debian package, so it's hardly relevant for this discussion. It was only even packaged in 2012.

by wicket 9y ago

icebraining 9y ago

I'm pretty agnostic towards systemd, but I don't understand this complaint that Debian now doesn't support other init systems. Did they support other systems besides sysv before?

wicket 9y ago
They also supported upstart but that was dropped in Stretch. We are left with systemd and System V init to provide /sbin/init. Debian still provides System V init which itself works fine but other packages, many of which previously worked, have come to depend systemd only. This type of regression would not be acceptable in other projects but Debian has done nothing about it. I think they should stop pretending that Debian is still usable System V init and just drop the package altogether.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Debian officially supported Upstart until Stretch? That's news to me. Do you have a link?
  - khedoros1 9y ago
    Debian at least provides documentation on using Upstart, either alone or alongside Systemd: https://wiki.debian.org/Upstart https://wiki.debian.org/Upstart I don't know whether that means it's "supported" or not.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Being on the Debian Wiki doesn't mean much; there's a page for RPM too, but it was never a supported system on Debian.
  - wicket 9y ago
    https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/upstart https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/upstart
    - icebraining 9y ago
      The package existed, but as you pointed out regarding SysV, that doesn't mean it's actually supported. Was it?
      - wicket 9y ago
        That really depends on your definition of "supported". It does not form part of the base distribution, nor was there ever any paid support for it. A Debian developer built a deb package for it and added it to the "main" repository. Everything under "main" is normally considered to be part of the distribution. As you can see from the link I provided, the package was maintained for several years and received several updates until it was dropped for Stretch. That is exactly what I would expect from a supported package in Debian.
JdeBP 9y ago
Yes. In Debian 7 one could switch among van Smoorenburg init+rc, systemd, upstart, and Felix von Leitner's minit. runit-init had been removed in 2010. Felix von Leitner's minit was later removed by Debian member Iain R. Learmonth in November 2015. upstart was removed as a consequence of a bug report (#789524) filed by Kyle Amon in June 2015. One of the contentious events during the Debian Hoo-Hah was one of the package maintainers leaping to remove support for an init system from one package almost as soon as the Technical Committee had made its decision favouring systemd over upstart, OpenRC, and van Smoorenburg rc. People opined then that Debian package maintainers should not blithely remove support for init systems like that. * https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=746715 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=746715 More recently, however, this has begun to happen. In August 2017, a group of Debian people got together to organize the removal of all upstart support from all packages; and that is progressing. * https://lintian.debian.org/tags/package-installs-deprecated-upstart-configuration.html https://lintian.debian.org/tags/package-installs-deprecated-...
- icebraining 9y ago
  Right, but sysv is still around, so if "support" means having the package, then Debian still supports other init systems. The complaint here is that stuff doesn't work well with sysv, so my question is: if back in Debian 7 something didn't work well with Upstart, was that considered a blocking bug? If not, I fail to see what changed. As you pointed out, they already removed obsolete init systems before systemd came around, so removing Upstart (which has been abandoned by upstream) is not a change in regular procedure.
  - JdeBP 9y ago
    Neither runit nor minit were, or are, obsolete; and systemd was around in 2010.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      I mean obsolete as Debian packages. In any case, why do you say it was removed? runit seems to have been present in every version released since 2010. As for systemd, it wasn't as a Debian package, so it's hardly relevant for this discussion. It was only even packaged in 2012.