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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

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.
  - yepthatsreality 5y ago
    > So the reasons seem to be not particularly important. If you know something that you think everyone else missed, then you can mention it. Is the existence of Devuan not a good example of a conglomeration of reasons so that I don’t have to spend time doing research for this request you probably don’t want answered? You’re still pushing the reasoning aside and saying “those reasons weren’t good enough so we put them in the whatever catgory”. I understand it’s often easier to hand-wave away well after the fact and the damage has been done. The Debian community didn’t move on from it, it split.
    - md8z 5y ago
      Well no, it's still not entirely clear to me what Devuan does process-wise that is actually different from Debian. I understand that they have a different set of base packages but so does every other modified version of Debian, of which there are several, it's not like Devuan was the first group to split off. What makes this one special? Why are these reasons any more important than any other time somebody shipped a Debian derivative for niche purposes? I honestly don't want to hand wave it away but I've never received good answers for this from Devuan people that themselves weren't hand-wavey, and you don't seem to want to discuss it either so... I guess that answers my question? I don't know, you tell me.
      - yepthatsreality 5y ago
        > I understand that they have a different set of base packages but so does every other modified version of Debian, of which there are several, it's not like Devuan was the first group to split off. So does every other version of Linux. If this enough to dissuade that there is no difference of opinion or difference in values and process handling and isolation then I cannot help you on this topic.
        md8z 5y ago
        You are misunderstanding, I'm asking what those differences of opinion or values are. That part has not been explained to me. It doesn't appear to be about init systems anymore, because Debian also has sysvinit and openrc and all that stuff. Edit: Also, the proliferation of Linux distributions is illustrative of the same problem I think. There are a lot of distros out there that seemingly cannot really justify themselves, I've been using Linux for 20 years and for some of these distros it's still really hard for me to figure out what the difference is or why anybody would use it without spending days digging around and analyzing patchsets in random git repositories somewhere. Now just imagine how utterly incomprehensible this is to a non-technical person who doesn't have a clue what an init system is...
zozbot234 5y ago
GDM depends on logind which is normally provided by systemd, but Debian has packaged elogind since the Jessie release in order to support other init systems.
md8z 5y ago
"...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..." I'm sorry but I don't buy this, I think you and those sysadmins missed something. The situation with consolekit was so bad that something had to be done about it, if you were blindsided by it, you probably weren't paying attention to that area until it was too late. That's unfortunate but it doesn't really make sense to blame the systemd developers for "making it difficult" when they were the only ones trying to actually solve the problem at that time. IIRC the upstart developers never made progress on this.
shrubble 5y ago
I am learning about FreeBSD and its jails system precisely because of systemd. I don't intend to ever again install a systemd based OS for lightweight virtualization. So in that sense, systemd is helping retain some diversity in Unix like systems...

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.
- yepthatsreality 5y ago
  > So the reasons seem to be not particularly important. If you know something that you think everyone else missed, then you can mention it. Is the existence of Devuan not a good example of a conglomeration of reasons so that I don’t have to spend time doing research for this request you probably don’t want answered? You’re still pushing the reasoning aside and saying “those reasons weren’t good enough so we put them in the whatever catgory”. I understand it’s often easier to hand-wave away well after the fact and the damage has been done. The Debian community didn’t move on from it, it split.
  - md8z 5y ago
    Well no, it's still not entirely clear to me what Devuan does process-wise that is actually different from Debian. I understand that they have a different set of base packages but so does every other modified version of Debian, of which there are several, it's not like Devuan was the first group to split off. What makes this one special? Why are these reasons any more important than any other time somebody shipped a Debian derivative for niche purposes? I honestly don't want to hand wave it away but I've never received good answers for this from Devuan people that themselves weren't hand-wavey, and you don't seem to want to discuss it either so... I guess that answers my question? I don't know, you tell me.
    - yepthatsreality 5y ago
      > I understand that they have a different set of base packages but so does every other modified version of Debian, of which there are several, it's not like Devuan was the first group to split off. So does every other version of Linux. If this enough to dissuade that there is no difference of opinion or difference in values and process handling and isolation then I cannot help you on this topic.
      - md8z 5y ago
        You are misunderstanding, I'm asking what those differences of opinion or values are. That part has not been explained to me. It doesn't appear to be about init systems anymore, because Debian also has sysvinit and openrc and all that stuff. Edit: Also, the proliferation of Linux distributions is illustrative of the same problem I think. There are a lot of distros out there that seemingly cannot really justify themselves, I've been using Linux for 20 years and for some of these distros it's still really hard for me to figure out what the difference is or why anybody would use it without spending days digging around and analyzing patchsets in random git repositories somewhere. Now just imagine how utterly incomprehensible this is to a non-technical person who doesn't have a clue what an init system is...

zozbot234 5y ago

GDM depends on logind which is normally provided by systemd, but Debian has packaged elogind since the Jessie release in order to support other init systems.

md8z 5y ago

"...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..." I'm sorry but I don't buy this, I think you and those sysadmins missed something. The situation with consolekit was so bad that something had to be done about it, if you were blindsided by it, you probably weren't paying attention to that area until it was too late. That's unfortunate but it doesn't really make sense to blame the systemd developers for "making it difficult" when they were the only ones trying to actually solve the problem at that time. IIRC the upstart developers never made progress on this.

shrubble 5y ago

I am learning about FreeBSD and its jails system precisely because of systemd. I don't intend to ever again install a systemd based OS for lightweight virtualization. So in that sense, systemd is helping retain some diversity in Unix like systems...