11 ms·

Leaving Debian

152 points by tut-urut-utut 5y ago

adamgordonbell 5y ago
Host here. I knew of joeyh from hn and a previous hn post is how we ended up talking[1]. The episode is a lot about the experience of being in the Debian community in the early days and the experience of being a free software developer, or at least that is the part of of his story that was most interesting to me and that I tried to highlight. How communities form and how they build up a shared understanding and culture is something I'm trying to understand. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27721883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27721883
codeflo 5y ago
Debian is my preferred distribution for servers, I'm simply in awe of what the community has achieved. Most of the good features that people associate with Ubuntu are actually in Debian, with none of the proprietary weirdness that creeps into Ubuntu year over year. The project does, however, sometimes have its share of people who dogmatic/pedantic to the point where it really doesn't help the cause. This might be expected from something that's a passion project for many of its contributors, and to Debian's credit, they've always been able to resolve these conflicts eventually. The article mentions the systemd drama. The recent kerfuffle around the 'which' command might be a smaller example of this kind of thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026623 And note: As silly as that discussion was, when it got widespread attention, it was actually already resolved.
- krzyk 5y ago
  Regarding systemd, I'm not sure if majority wanted it. The fact that it heats the temperature means that it is not true, more like 50/50 are for/against.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
    https://lwn.net/Articles/585319/ https://lwn.net/Articles/585319/ I didn't follow this at all at the time and thought it was something like 90% for. Turns out, it was closer to 50/50: > The vote came down much as expected, with a 4:4 split between systemd and Upstart proponents. Anthony Towns analyzed the votes and declared a tie between systemd and Upstart, which left it up to the chairman to decide by using the casting vote. Garbee did just that, voting for systemd, which makes it the Debian Linux default init for jessie.
    - secondaryacct 5y ago
      Thank God for that !
      - rektide 5y ago
        I'm very much in the "Thank God"-ish camp (if ya'll welcome others, non denominations & non-believers), but... wouldn't it be interesting if. It's convenient that we've consolidated down, but that famous freedom of choice seems to be circumscribed now by a ellipse with systemd at one focus point, and refusenik shell-script-only minimal pid1s at the other. Having a more active & ongoing paradigmatic discourse would have been interesting. So I kind of want a synopsis for upstart. These threads might provide some of that material. I'd touched upstart a couple times back so long ago, & the words "event-based" keep flashing before me, but I don't have much recall on upstart. What was it bad at? What didn't people like? What did people like? What was novel & interesting? What had potential but didn't quite work out? What was the best operational parts of it? There's so much tech in the world that doesn't quite make it, or which did make it & fell (CORBA), & we really need more Speakers For the Dead, people who can try to tell us the story of the tech earnestly, who can help us memorialize something by drawing together as much understanding, from as many points of view as they can.
        teddyh 5y ago
        > I don't have much recall on upstart. What was it bad at? The author of systemd addresses this question in the original blog post which announced the systemd project (look under the heading “On Upstart”): http://0pointer.net/blog/projects/systemd http://0pointer.net/blog/projects/systemd
  - throwawaymanbot 5y ago
    I was for SystemD(isaster) initially. Then its "scope" turned in to a Poettering Vanity Project.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  I've been using Debian for both server and desktop work for years (wow, actually decades) now. I like that I don't have to fiddle with it. Once set up, it just works well, basically forever. No fear of running apt-get dist-upgrade and having to shave yaks for an afternoon getting everything working again. I have no need to live on the bleeding edge of every package update, and not a big fan of some of the choices made by Ubuntu and other Debian-based distributions, so Debian is perfect for me. I didn't even know Drama among the project maintainers existed, so they seem to have managed to keep personnel issues out of the actual software distribution, which is also a bonus.
  - matmatmatmat 5y ago
    10x this. Install it. Set autoupdates. Come back in 3 years when it's time to think about upgrading to the next major release. Maybe don't upgrade, because, why? Everything works. I just want to keep things working. To be honest, Desktops reached their peak for me with Gnome 2. I'm using MATE and I'm good.
    - winrid 5y ago
      You can also use gnome-flashback which looks like Gnome 2. https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeFlashback https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeFlashback
  - npsimons 5y ago
    > I've been using Debian for both server and desktop work for years (wow, actually decades) now. Same; I've yet to find anything more stable and well put together.
- app4soft 5y ago
  > The article mentions the systemd drama. Solution: switch to antiX, MX Linux or Devuan.
  - BeetleB 5y ago
    Or Gentoo.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
      Or *BSD.
      - app4soft 5y ago
        Or Haiku
- fstrthnscnd 5y ago
  > Most of the good features that people associate with Ubuntu are actually in Debian, with none of the proprietary weirdness that creeps into Ubuntu year over year. A lot of what you find in Debian also comes from what Ubuntu does. In fact, I believe that many people hired by Ubuntu in the early days were experienced maintainers for Debian. 20 years ago, the problem was all about getting Linux consumer desktop friendly. On the server side, it was mostly OK, people there were not afraid of a TTY, because it was the primary entry point to learning Linux, and Unix in general, whereas in the Windows world, people first approach was (and still is) the GUI. Debian wasn't as good as it is today in the desktop area. Ubuntu appeared on the market mainly to solve that problem (they were not the first ones to do that), and "leverage" on the acquired expertise to make money. Nowadays, the money is in servers and IoT, so they are focusing to that segment of the market. The nature of open source meant that of course, Debian benefits from their work.
- jjav 5y ago
  Personally I'm sad about debian. I've been debian-only user since ca. 2000. It was always the model for a stable, no nonsense distro where everything worked. People complained about slow change but to me that's a huge feature. I want the system to continue working for years, not constantly break with the latest API-breaking updates. The systemd drama of a few years back really soured me on debian though. On the plus side, it has made me explore OpenBSD and FreeBSD, both of which I use these days. Also I'm using Devuan where I need or want Linux. Still, I miss having the old debian which eschewed trendiness and valued stability more.
- DangitBobby 5y ago
  I wouldn't say it's "resolved" quite yet. I just saw the deprecation warning for the first time while using `which` in termux right after running an update.
throw63738 5y ago
If you ever read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"... Debian feels very far from this original vision, endless drama and politics. Similar to Gnome and Mozilla. I am very happy with OpenSuse.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  Is debian supposed to be a cathedral or a bazaar?
  - cryptonector 5y ago
    A cathedral around the bazaar.
- nextaccountic 5y ago
  I just saw that Debian might remove the "which" command (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026623), apparently with little reason? Which is bonkers
  - Taywee 5y ago
    There was a proposal, disagreement, and a vote, which ruled in keeping the "which" command where it is for at least the next major version. "which" is in no danger of disappearing at the moment. The discussion went approximately: "`which` is nonstandard and doesn't always work the same. Maybe we should remove it and have everybody use `command -v` instead, which is standard. Also, in testing, I've added a deprecation notice to prepare for it." "Let's have a vote to see. A lot of people use `which`, and that deprecation notice breaks some builds. ... Vote says no. Remove the deprecation notice and leave `which` where it is for the next release" Later, on Hacker News: "Debian might be removing "which"! Why are they doing this?" Most of the commenters, it seems, never actually read the entire story.
    - cryptonector 5y ago
      It's stupid. An immense and completely unjustified waste of time. which(1) requires maintenance no more than once per decade. In terms of the amount of maintenance that which(1) requires, the entire debate took centuries' worth of the maintainer's time to settle, and much more of everyone else's time. The entire effort to get others to switch from which(1) will take untold amounts of _their_ time. In conclusion: Debian couldn't care less about their users' time. No respect for the users. I'm trying to make my real thoughts on this palpable. Idiotic doesn't even begin to cover it.
hyper_reality 5y ago
Inspiring interview, as the interviewer says there's a zen about Joey where he's dedicated himself to producing great open source software (git-annex, debhelper, ikiwiki) instead of trying to make millions. Surely he can look back over the last few decades and feel proud of his work and the benefit it has brought to so many users. The tech treadmill can cause us to lose focus on the things that really matter or that really inspired us to begin with, so this is a refreshing perspective.
nextaccountic 5y ago
I LOVE how this has accurate transcripts. My spoken/heard English isn't great, and I'm able to follow up by reading as well.
egberts1 5y ago
Reasons why I left Debian: 1. go ahead and pull that Ethernet cable, your precious networked daemon will restart thus having to lose whatever cached or learned data. This is a major problem for designer of custom daemons. 2. Try and interface with Juniper DHCP servers at major ISP using systemd-networking and /etc/systemd/network settings. You’ll be forced to revert back to ISC DHCP server and/or NetworkManager. 3. Bootup and actually making your IP-address-senstitive daemon croak because your custom Ethernet NIC requires ‘ip addr/link up’ in /etc/rc.local 4. Bootup and get to network-online state only to find out that your netdev really hasn't gotten a dynamic IP address yet, your networked daemon that requires those IP address to be defined on the netdev will croak if not handled properly. 5. You cannot firewall against PID 1. For UNIX box that are true server or not cloistered behind an ISP-provided gateway/router, that was more than enough to ditch systemd and go Devuan distro.
- spenczar5 5y ago
  It sounds like you stopped using Debian. Were you also a contributor and had trouble fixing these issues because of the governance issues described in the article?
  - egberts1 5y ago
    precisely. and every six month, Id take a peek to see if RedHat employee or Debian maintainer fixed it. You cannot operate without systemd in Debian 11+. It’s now a REQUIRED “feature” and a veritable albatross around Debian’s neck for those serious server needs.
    - andrewshadura 5y ago
      This is untrue, Debian can still be used with sysvinit + sysv-rc or openrc.
      - egberts1 5y ago
        but the systemd library is mandatory along with systemd and many services that. various services did not used to REQUIRE them but now do so. you just cannot unplug systemd 100% thereby contaminating the disk with useless stuff.
Iolaum 5y ago
A lot of people hate systemd. However as a user who came into Linux after systemd was established. I m pretty happy with it. The more I learn about it and use it the more I appreciate it. This may be wrong but it feels like people were stuck in a local maximum and don't realize that if they move more than a little from where they were, then they'd actually be in a better place. On the other hand, solving again a problem you 've already solved, is not the most enticing part of the linux experience ;)
- alexjplant 5y ago
  I started using Linux professionally on the cusp of the change (RHEL 6 to 7). I've never had any trouble with the init system but journald isn't really my jam, nor is any of the other creeping overcomplexity brought about by systemd's component interdependencies. In other words: I'm not a fan on ideological grounds but from a practical standpoint it seems to work just fine.
- matmatmatmat 5y ago
  Just like any other complex, tightly-integrated system, systemd had its share of bugs, quirks, and new ways of doing things that forced people to change. It's not hard to imagine why it faced some resistance. Eh, it's been a while now, though, and I guess most of that has gotten worked out.
- dsr_ 5y ago
  On the contrary: most people who had an opinion were interested in something other than sysvinit. It's just that we all have different ideas about what that is. daemontools-style supervisors are what I prefer, myself. I also acknowledge that there isn't a clear winner in that space. What I object to are people enforcing systemd by making it a requirement for other projects.
  - specialist 5y ago
    > ...It's just that we all have different ideas about what that is. This in a nutshell is why all progress is always a god awful painful mess. No matter how modest. I used to be self-proclaimed advocate for change. Technological, organizational, political, all of it. Everyone marching arm-in-arm towards our glorious future. Now I'm happy when any one manages to change anything at all. I no longer even care how good or bad an idea is. Better to try and then learn from failure than never try at all.
tinus_hn 5y ago
Joey left Debian in 2014. When was this podcast posted?
- idoubtit 5y ago
  According to the microformat inside the HTML, it was published today: "datePublished": "2021-11-02 00:00:00 +0000" But the resignation email of Joey Hess was sent on 2014-11-07, seven years ago. Unfortunately, this kind of mistake on dates is usually a plain lie to fool the SEO and get more visits. It's so frequent it's not even surprising.
  - asddubs 5y ago
    I don't think it is a lie. If you click "all episodes", it's the last one listed, dated Nov 2 with a "New!" badge. The prior episode was posted october 4th https://corecursive.com/category/podcast/ https://corecursive.com/category/podcast/
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
This is the key fragment: > I was perfectly happy with systemd myself. I did empathize with people who didn’t like it for whatever reason, but it was clear to me that every Linux distribution except for one or two would be switching to systemd eventually. And I felt that I was pretty good at prognosticating, this kind of thing. So I was, if Debian can’t make the obvious decision without all this much drama, it’s too much for me. His way is thinking is basically the same as of all Systemd supporters. "I see no problem, it is obvious, everybody is doing it so we will do it sooner or later, anyway." But this is not, and never has been the point. The crux of the matter was very technical[0]: by gluing GDM to Systemd, the Systemd developers made it very difficult for distributors to support other init systems. They basically forced everybody to switch, and Systemd was not bug-free - it gave sysadmins around the world quite some work, and in some cases, also caused unforeseen problems. In hindsight, we can see it was unnecessary. Devuan should never have to exist. Debian is offering some support for System V init now. All this drama was completely redundant if someone had not made one controversial architectural decision. Yes, we would have probably transitioned anyway - but on our own terms and at the time we could choose. And Joey would probably be part of Debian still. [0] Maybe it was also political, but this is beside the point and doesn't change anything.
- yepthatsreality 5y ago
  > I did empathize with people who didn’t like it for whatever reason This is a pretty clear indicator right here that influential people weren't listening on the issue. Any time you state "for whatever reason" is a clear sign you don't care for their reasons.
  - md8z 5y ago
    I've heard quite a lot of these reasons. In my opinion, most of them either come from a place where the person is missing some key piece of information, or their use case was already better served by other tools anyway. So the reasons seem to be not particularly important. If you know something that you think everyone else missed, then you can mention it.
    - 5y ago
seanhunter 5y ago
In my experience Debian has always had it's share of community drama and static. Around 2002 I used to publish a couple of RPMs and since I used to use Debian myself for some of my own servers I decided to publish .debs as well. So some debian folks asked me to "make them official". I found becoming a Debian dev such a pita I just abandoned the attempt. Literally at one point one Debian dev who was a co-worker of mine in real life refused to sign my key because he said "how could he really sure of my identity". Dude, we work together, for a regulated financial institution that does background checks. How could I get away with having some kind of secret identity? I just decided to avoid the friction and not bother publishing my .debs.
- drsnow 5y ago
  Why didn't you just verify when co-working that yes, you are the one who is asking to have your key signed? Wouldn't that have solved it all in one go?
  - seanhunter 5y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean. He literally said that to me in a face to face conversation.
- andyonthewings 5y ago
  Usually the verification is as simple as taking a look at the key owner's ID card (Social Security card) or driver license, or any similar legal doc, just to make sure the key owner name matches the real person. I got my key signed with the same simple procedure. The only troublesome part was to find Debian devs to meet physically, because there were only 3 in where I live (Hong Kong), and only one of them had a valid key (others have expired or just lost keys). Two signatures are needed, so I needed one more. Luckily, I happened had to travel to the US for work, so I solved my problem.
cryptonector 5y ago
First thing I did: ^F which

152 points by tut-urut-utut 5y ago

Host here. I knew of joeyh from hn and a previous hn post is how we ended up talking[1]. The episode is a lot about the experience of being in the Debian community in the early days and the experience of being a free software developer, or at least that is the part of of his story that was most interesting to me and that I tried to highlight. How communities form and how they build up a shared understanding and culture is something I'm trying to understand. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27721883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27721883

codeflo 5y ago

Debian is my preferred distribution for servers, I'm simply in awe of what the community has achieved. Most of the good features that people associate with Ubuntu are actually in Debian, with none of the proprietary weirdness that creeps into Ubuntu year over year. The project does, however, sometimes have its share of people who dogmatic/pedantic to the point where it really doesn't help the cause. This might be expected from something that's a passion project for many of its contributors, and to Debian's credit, they've always been able to resolve these conflicts eventually. The article mentions the systemd drama. The recent kerfuffle around the 'which' command might be a smaller example of this kind of thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026623 And note: As silly as that discussion was, when it got widespread attention, it was actually already resolved.

krzyk 5y ago
Regarding systemd, I'm not sure if majority wanted it. The fact that it heats the temperature means that it is not true, more like 50/50 are for/against.
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
  https://lwn.net/Articles/585319/ https://lwn.net/Articles/585319/ I didn't follow this at all at the time and thought it was something like 90% for. Turns out, it was closer to 50/50: > The vote came down much as expected, with a 4:4 split between systemd and Upstart proponents. Anthony Towns analyzed the votes and declared a tie between systemd and Upstart, which left it up to the chairman to decide by using the casting vote. Garbee did just that, voting for systemd, which makes it the Debian Linux default init for jessie.
  - secondaryacct 5y ago
    Thank God for that !
    - rektide 5y ago
      I'm very much in the "Thank God"-ish camp (if ya'll welcome others, non denominations & non-believers), but... wouldn't it be interesting if. It's convenient that we've consolidated down, but that famous freedom of choice seems to be circumscribed now by a ellipse with systemd at one focus point, and refusenik shell-script-only minimal pid1s at the other. Having a more active & ongoing paradigmatic discourse would have been interesting. So I kind of want a synopsis for upstart. These threads might provide some of that material. I'd touched upstart a couple times back so long ago, & the words "event-based" keep flashing before me, but I don't have much recall on upstart. What was it bad at? What didn't people like? What did people like? What was novel & interesting? What had potential but didn't quite work out? What was the best operational parts of it? There's so much tech in the world that doesn't quite make it, or which did make it & fell (CORBA), & we really need more Speakers For the Dead, people who can try to tell us the story of the tech earnestly, who can help us memorialize something by drawing together as much understanding, from as many points of view as they can.
      - teddyh 5y ago
        > I don't have much recall on upstart. What was it bad at? The author of systemd addresses this question in the original blog post which announced the systemd project (look under the heading “On Upstart”): http://0pointer.net/blog/projects/systemd http://0pointer.net/blog/projects/systemd
- throwawaymanbot 5y ago
  I was for SystemD(isaster) initially. Then its "scope" turned in to a Poettering Vanity Project.
ryandrake 5y ago
I've been using Debian for both server and desktop work for years (wow, actually decades) now. I like that I don't have to fiddle with it. Once set up, it just works well, basically forever. No fear of running apt-get dist-upgrade and having to shave yaks for an afternoon getting everything working again. I have no need to live on the bleeding edge of every package update, and not a big fan of some of the choices made by Ubuntu and other Debian-based distributions, so Debian is perfect for me. I didn't even know Drama among the project maintainers existed, so they seem to have managed to keep personnel issues out of the actual software distribution, which is also a bonus.
- matmatmatmat 5y ago
  10x this. Install it. Set autoupdates. Come back in 3 years when it's time to think about upgrading to the next major release. Maybe don't upgrade, because, why? Everything works. I just want to keep things working. To be honest, Desktops reached their peak for me with Gnome 2. I'm using MATE and I'm good.
  - winrid 5y ago
    You can also use gnome-flashback which looks like Gnome 2. https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeFlashback https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeFlashback
- npsimons 5y ago
  > I've been using Debian for both server and desktop work for years (wow, actually decades) now. Same; I've yet to find anything more stable and well put together.
app4soft 5y ago
> The article mentions the systemd drama. Solution: switch to antiX, MX Linux or Devuan.
- BeetleB 5y ago
  Or Gentoo.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    Or *BSD.
    - app4soft 5y ago
      Or Haiku
fstrthnscnd 5y ago
> Most of the good features that people associate with Ubuntu are actually in Debian, with none of the proprietary weirdness that creeps into Ubuntu year over year. A lot of what you find in Debian also comes from what Ubuntu does. In fact, I believe that many people hired by Ubuntu in the early days were experienced maintainers for Debian. 20 years ago, the problem was all about getting Linux consumer desktop friendly. On the server side, it was mostly OK, people there were not afraid of a TTY, because it was the primary entry point to learning Linux, and Unix in general, whereas in the Windows world, people first approach was (and still is) the GUI. Debian wasn't as good as it is today in the desktop area. Ubuntu appeared on the market mainly to solve that problem (they were not the first ones to do that), and "leverage" on the acquired expertise to make money. Nowadays, the money is in servers and IoT, so they are focusing to that segment of the market. The nature of open source meant that of course, Debian benefits from their work.
jjav 5y ago
Personally I'm sad about debian. I've been debian-only user since ca. 2000. It was always the model for a stable, no nonsense distro where everything worked. People complained about slow change but to me that's a huge feature. I want the system to continue working for years, not constantly break with the latest API-breaking updates. The systemd drama of a few years back really soured me on debian though. On the plus side, it has made me explore OpenBSD and FreeBSD, both of which I use these days. Also I'm using Devuan where I need or want Linux. Still, I miss having the old debian which eschewed trendiness and valued stability more.
DangitBobby 5y ago
I wouldn't say it's "resolved" quite yet. I just saw the deprecation warning for the first time while using `which` in termux right after running an update.

throw63738 5y ago

If you ever read "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"... Debian feels very far from this original vision, endless drama and politics. Similar to Gnome and Mozilla. I am very happy with OpenSuse.

aidenn0 5y ago
Is debian supposed to be a cathedral or a bazaar?
- cryptonector 5y ago
  A cathedral around the bazaar.
nextaccountic 5y ago
I just saw that Debian might remove the "which" command (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29026623), apparently with little reason? Which is bonkers
- Taywee 5y ago
  There was a proposal, disagreement, and a vote, which ruled in keeping the "which" command where it is for at least the next major version. "which" is in no danger of disappearing at the moment. The discussion went approximately: "`which` is nonstandard and doesn't always work the same. Maybe we should remove it and have everybody use `command -v` instead, which is standard. Also, in testing, I've added a deprecation notice to prepare for it." "Let's have a vote to see. A lot of people use `which`, and that deprecation notice breaks some builds. ... Vote says no. Remove the deprecation notice and leave `which` where it is for the next release" Later, on Hacker News: "Debian might be removing "which"! Why are they doing this?" Most of the commenters, it seems, never actually read the entire story.
  - cryptonector 5y ago
    It's stupid. An immense and completely unjustified waste of time. which(1) requires maintenance no more than once per decade. In terms of the amount of maintenance that which(1) requires, the entire debate took centuries' worth of the maintainer's time to settle, and much more of everyone else's time. The entire effort to get others to switch from which(1) will take untold amounts of _their_ time. In conclusion: Debian couldn't care less about their users' time. No respect for the users. I'm trying to make my real thoughts on this palpable. Idiotic doesn't even begin to cover it.

hyper_reality 5y ago

Inspiring interview, as the interviewer says there's a zen about Joey where he's dedicated himself to producing great open source software (git-annex, debhelper, ikiwiki) instead of trying to make millions. Surely he can look back over the last few decades and feel proud of his work and the benefit it has brought to so many users. The tech treadmill can cause us to lose focus on the things that really matter or that really inspired us to begin with, so this is a refreshing perspective.

nextaccountic 5y ago

I LOVE how this has accurate transcripts. My spoken/heard English isn't great, and I'm able to follow up by reading as well.

egberts1 5y ago

Reasons why I left Debian: 1. go ahead and pull that Ethernet cable, your precious networked daemon will restart thus having to lose whatever cached or learned data. This is a major problem for designer of custom daemons. 2. Try and interface with Juniper DHCP servers at major ISP using systemd-networking and /etc/systemd/network settings. You’ll be forced to revert back to ISC DHCP server and/or NetworkManager. 3. Bootup and actually making your IP-address-senstitive daemon croak because your custom Ethernet NIC requires ‘ip addr/link up’ in /etc/rc.local 4. Bootup and get to network-online state only to find out that your netdev really hasn't gotten a dynamic IP address yet, your networked daemon that requires those IP address to be defined on the netdev will croak if not handled properly. 5. You cannot firewall against PID 1. For UNIX box that are true server or not cloistered behind an ISP-provided gateway/router, that was more than enough to ditch systemd and go Devuan distro.

spenczar5 5y ago
It sounds like you stopped using Debian. Were you also a contributor and had trouble fixing these issues because of the governance issues described in the article?
- egberts1 5y ago
  precisely. and every six month, Id take a peek to see if RedHat employee or Debian maintainer fixed it. You cannot operate without systemd in Debian 11+. It’s now a REQUIRED “feature” and a veritable albatross around Debian’s neck for those serious server needs.
  - andrewshadura 5y ago
    This is untrue, Debian can still be used with sysvinit + sysv-rc or openrc.
    - egberts1 5y ago
      but the systemd library is mandatory along with systemd and many services that. various services did not used to REQUIRE them but now do so. you just cannot unplug systemd 100% thereby contaminating the disk with useless stuff.

Iolaum 5y ago

A lot of people hate systemd. However as a user who came into Linux after systemd was established. I m pretty happy with it. The more I learn about it and use it the more I appreciate it. This may be wrong but it feels like people were stuck in a local maximum and don't realize that if they move more than a little from where they were, then they'd actually be in a better place. On the other hand, solving again a problem you 've already solved, is not the most enticing part of the linux experience ;)

alexjplant 5y ago
I started using Linux professionally on the cusp of the change (RHEL 6 to 7). I've never had any trouble with the init system but journald isn't really my jam, nor is any of the other creeping overcomplexity brought about by systemd's component interdependencies. In other words: I'm not a fan on ideological grounds but from a practical standpoint it seems to work just fine.
matmatmatmat 5y ago
Just like any other complex, tightly-integrated system, systemd had its share of bugs, quirks, and new ways of doing things that forced people to change. It's not hard to imagine why it faced some resistance. Eh, it's been a while now, though, and I guess most of that has gotten worked out.
dsr_ 5y ago
On the contrary: most people who had an opinion were interested in something other than sysvinit. It's just that we all have different ideas about what that is. daemontools-style supervisors are what I prefer, myself. I also acknowledge that there isn't a clear winner in that space. What I object to are people enforcing systemd by making it a requirement for other projects.
- specialist 5y ago
  > ...It's just that we all have different ideas about what that is. This in a nutshell is why all progress is always a god awful painful mess. No matter how modest. I used to be self-proclaimed advocate for change. Technological, organizational, political, all of it. Everyone marching arm-in-arm towards our glorious future. Now I'm happy when any one manages to change anything at all. I no longer even care how good or bad an idea is. Better to try and then learn from failure than never try at all.

tinus_hn 5y ago

Joey left Debian in 2014. When was this podcast posted?

idoubtit 5y ago
According to the microformat inside the HTML, it was published today: "datePublished": "2021-11-02 00:00:00 +0000" But the resignation email of Joey Hess was sent on 2014-11-07, seven years ago. Unfortunately, this kind of mistake on dates is usually a plain lie to fool the SEO and get more visits. It's so frequent it's not even surprising.
- asddubs 5y ago
  I don't think it is a lie. If you click "all episodes", it's the last one listed, dated Nov 2 with a "New!" badge. The prior episode was posted october 4th https://corecursive.com/category/podcast/ https://corecursive.com/category/podcast/

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago

This is the key fragment: > I was perfectly happy with systemd myself. I did empathize with people who didn’t like it for whatever reason, but it was clear to me that every Linux distribution except for one or two would be switching to systemd eventually. And I felt that I was pretty good at prognosticating, this kind of thing. So I was, if Debian can’t make the obvious decision without all this much drama, it’s too much for me. His way is thinking is basically the same as of all Systemd supporters. "I see no problem, it is obvious, everybody is doing it so we will do it sooner or later, anyway." But this is not, and never has been the point. The crux of the matter was very technical[0]: by gluing GDM to Systemd, the Systemd developers made it very difficult for distributors to support other init systems. They basically forced everybody to switch, and Systemd was not bug-free - it gave sysadmins around the world quite some work, and in some cases, also caused unforeseen problems. In hindsight, we can see it was unnecessary. Devuan should never have to exist. Debian is offering some support for System V init now. All this drama was completely redundant if someone had not made one controversial architectural decision. Yes, we would have probably transitioned anyway - but on our own terms and at the time we could choose. And Joey would probably be part of Debian still. [0] Maybe it was also political, but this is beside the point and doesn't change anything.

yepthatsreality 5y ago
> I did empathize with people who didn’t like it for whatever reason This is a pretty clear indicator right here that influential people weren't listening on the issue. Any time you state "for whatever reason" is a clear sign you don't care for their reasons.
- md8z 5y ago
  I've heard quite a lot of these reasons. In my opinion, most of them either come from a place where the person is missing some key piece of information, or their use case was already better served by other tools anyway. So the reasons seem to be not particularly important. If you know something that you think everyone else missed, then you can mention it.
  - 5y ago

seanhunter 5y ago

In my experience Debian has always had it's share of community drama and static. Around 2002 I used to publish a couple of RPMs and since I used to use Debian myself for some of my own servers I decided to publish .debs as well. So some debian folks asked me to "make them official". I found becoming a Debian dev such a pita I just abandoned the attempt. Literally at one point one Debian dev who was a co-worker of mine in real life refused to sign my key because he said "how could he really sure of my identity". Dude, we work together, for a regulated financial institution that does background checks. How could I get away with having some kind of secret identity? I just decided to avoid the friction and not bother publishing my .debs.

drsnow 5y ago
Why didn't you just verify when co-working that yes, you are the one who is asking to have your key signed? Wouldn't that have solved it all in one go?
- seanhunter 5y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean. He literally said that to me in a face to face conversation.
andyonthewings 5y ago
Usually the verification is as simple as taking a look at the key owner's ID card (Social Security card) or driver license, or any similar legal doc, just to make sure the key owner name matches the real person. I got my key signed with the same simple procedure. The only troublesome part was to find Debian devs to meet physically, because there were only 3 in where I live (Hong Kong), and only one of them had a valid key (others have expired or just lost keys). Two signatures are needed, so I needed one more. Luckily, I happened had to travel to the US for work, so I solved my problem.

cryptonector 5y ago

First thing I did: ^F which