17 ms·

Shall we fork Debian?

214 points by kissgyorgy 12y ago

jermo 12y ago
The main reason for forking seems to be opposition to SystemD. Initially I was unconvinced but then I remembered the recent story of Lennart Poettering (one of the authors of SystemD) on The State Of Open Source Communities where he describes the hostility towards him personally https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859 In light of that, forking is a more civilised approach than bullying and threatening the author.
- _ak 12y ago
  Lennart Poettering is a bully himself, with a well-documented instance where he continuously interruped a talk at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress, even going as far as taking over the stage while insulting the presenter. Lennart Poettering is a toxic person, toxic to the OSS community, and he's the last person that can complain about bullying.
  - the_why_of_y 12y ago
    You mean that famous talk when the very poorly prepared presenter ("Datenwolf") took the stage to trash-talk and spread misinformation about large parts of the Linux Desktop, evidently oblivious to important requirements like accessibility that modern desktops such as Gnome and KDE are designed to meet, which LP had to correct by comments?
  - dnlrn 12y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0 This is the talk you mean right? Have you actually seen the talk? Yes, Lennart interrupts the talk but everything he says is correct, while the presenter just spreads random FUD. The presenter clearly shows that he doesn’t understand most of the stuff he talks about, talks about 3 year old bugs that already got fixed, etc. Yes, it’s not the nicest way to interrupt a talk, but the presenter should have expected some kind of reaction, given the controversial headline. People like Lennart put their heart into their software. If you shit all over it and spread random FUD, you can expect some response. What would you have done? Also he doesn’t “take over the stage”. He comes up after the talk has ended, because people on IRC asked him to.
    - enneff 12y ago
      The way Lennart interacted with the speaker during that talk was extremely inappropriate. If he had corrections to make he could have arranged a short talk afterwards or a written blog post. It is very poor form to be so disruptive to a speaker, no matter how much you disagree with them.
      - tinco 12y ago
        No it isn't.. being on a soap box doesn't give you some special permission to just spread false information without being interrupted. I heard this argument before, there was an article about book reviews, and that authors who interacted with reviewers (by writing on their own blogs about them or on twitter) would be labeled Bad Behaving Author and be shunned by the review community. What's up with that? If someone talks shit, he should be challenged as soon as possible, preferably in front of the same crowd they are talking shit in front of. If you take the opportunity to talk in front of a lot of people, you should also take the responsibility to be properly prepared, and be ready to face the consequence of not performing adequately.
        enneff 12y ago
        > being on a soap box Let's get this straight: he's not on a soap box (a term that refers to people who shout at passers by on the street), but rather at a conference at which he was invited to speak. The audience came into the room to hear him give his talk. Lennart rudely interrupted this. > I heard this argument before, there was an article about book reviews, and that authors who interacted with reviewers (by writing on their own blogs about them or on twitter) would be labeled Bad Behaving Author and be shunned by the review community. That's not my argument at all. I specifically suggested he _should_ respond with a blog post. Don't put me in the same group as those people. I encourage anyone to share their views on their own blogs, in comment sections, and on Twitter. > If someone talks shit, he should be challenged as soon as possible, preferably in front of the same crowd they are talking shit in front of. I disagree that it is appropriate to interrupt and shout someone down just because you think they are "talking shit". The definition of "talking shit" is subjective. If someone is interrupted before they can make their point, then the observer does not have the ability to judge whether they are right or wrong. It instead becomes a matter of whoever has the best rhetorical tactics. (Or who can shout the loudest.) My job involves giving a lot of talks, and if someone were to engage with me like this I _would_ be prepared: I'd be prepared to tell them to wait until I have finished my talk and address their comments afterward. This has happened many times, and it worked out fine for all involved. It's called civility.
- seba_dos1 12y ago
  Yeah, especially if everything what he wrote there was like that bitcoin hitman stuff, which turned out to be just a line like "maybe we should start btc fund?" from IRC written after someone else complained about issue with systemd by guy known from his funny trolling there - and absolutely nothing more than that. While at first I felt a bit sorry for him when I read that post, after I learned about what exactly was that "hitman threat" I lost any remaining respect to Poettering. That's just grabbing attention and playing victim. He deserves negative response for that.
  - adekok 12y ago
    > I'd really welcome the anti-systemd ranters to just do some work that makes them feel happy, such as making a new distribution that has the exact init system they want. Most people are already working on things that make them happy. The frustration here is that the tools they depend on are changing... in a way that they don't like. They also have limited time for projects. Any time spent fixing other peoples projects is time they don't spend on their own projects. I left the Linux desktop world nearly 10 years ago, for these kind of reasons. I use a Mac as my desktop, because I don't have to fight with it. 99% of everything works, and the other 1% breakages are ones I can live with.
    - XorNot 12y ago
      You know, provided Apple continue to agree with you...it seems more like you're just zenning over the fact that even if you did disagree, you couldn't change anything. Choice is widely regarded as actually making people more unhappy. EDIT: It's also an ironic comment, since a frequent criticism of systemd is that it's trying to be too much like Apple's launchd.
      - adekok 12y ago
        I'm not "zenning over" anything. I need a computer to get work done. I don't need to be mucking with the computer to keep it working. My choice is to use a (mostly) closed system, because it meets my needs. Other people don't like systemd because they feel it removes their choices. There is no contradiction in the two approaches. There's also no irony. If Unix had started out with something like systemd, fewer people would be complaining about it now. It's the change that people don't like. And the apparent removal of choice.
- cbsmith 12y ago
  > In light of that, forking is a more civilised approach than bullying and threatening the author. Yes, but it is sad that the more straightforward approach of contributing back to the community isn't taking hold. If you are worried about mission creep... you help stamp out a very clear mission. If you are worried about bloat, you contribute patches. If you are worried about a nasty hairball... you contribute code reviews. If you consider C code less readable than Unix shell... please don't reference the Unix Philosophy as the principle behind that thinking.
- grifferz 12y ago
  forking is a more civilised approach than bullying and threatening the author. Absolutely, in that almost anything is. :) But specifically, at this point I'd really welcome the anti-systemd ranters to just do some work that makes them feel happy, such as making a new distribution that has the exact init system they want. I suspect that Debian would love for them to do that as well. Debian is in general welcoming of downstream distros since the downstream distros—if given proper care and feeding—often feed back useful improvements to Debian. The problem here is that no one is actually doing a fork (yet). Some of the same loud, uninformed minority have just created a ranty web page that presents a skewed view of history and makes threats. It's just more of the same interminable mailing list snarks but in web page format. Trying to put out and support an entire distribution may serve to broaden their minds as to the delicate position the distribution is in with regard to integrating upstream work into a coherent whole. Sadly I'm not convinced that any enlightenment is going to be achieved because the people behind this web site admit that they haven't even got the time to become involved enough in Debian to have a vote, so I don't know where they're going to find the time to launch a non-toy distribution.
iptel 12y ago
Yes
martin_ 12y ago
From the article: We are excluded from voting on the issue: only few of us have the time and patience to interact with Debian on a voluntary basis. Using the same argument, forking would seem like a horrible idea if there isn't active maintainers.
- linuxydave 12y ago
  I think their idea is to try get the ball rolling so that others will pick it up. Still a lazy idea if they don't have the time to maintain :(
- vacri 12y ago
  I saw that as a giant red warning flag as well. Why would I expect them to maintain a fork and ensure it has full sysv init support, if they don't even have the time to engage in the current process? It's all a bit overdramatic anyway - there are heaps of Debian forks; they're called 'downstream distros'. Ubuntu is one.
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  - progman 12y ago
    > Why would I expect them to maintain a fork and ensure it has full sysv init support, if they don't even have the time to engage in the current process? Probably because they (experienced Unix veterans) realized that it makes much more sense to test the demand of a fork (that's what they made the website for) than to continue any useless discussion about systemd. Some systemd proponents obviously have serious problems to make a sober discussion anyway (interestingly also in a prominent German forum). Notice: "If SystemD will be substituting SystemV in Debian, we will fork the project and create a new distro: Pure Debian by Veteran Unix Admins. We hope this won't be necessary, but we are well prepared for it." They are not eager to make a fork but I think they will actually do it if necesary.
- 12y ago
qznc 12y ago
How does forking Debian solve anything? The issue is that Gnome, KDE, and other software requires systemd. You need to fix/maintain their compatibility with other init systems. Then it is easy for Debian user to switch init systems.
- stonith 12y ago
  You listed two desktop environments, neither of which are of interest to sysadmins. Eg. I run an Openstack cluster and do not care if there are gnome or kde packages available. I don't particularly like systemd and would be happier not having to deal with the compatibility and/or conversion issues for what I perceive as minimal benefit.
  - justincormack 12y ago
    The idea of a server based fork of Debian is kind of appealing in some ways, like the Fedora server and cloud projects[1][2] which are quite interesting work, aimed at a (sub)distribution with focus on particular use cases, not the kitchen sink approach. [1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Server/Product_Requirements_Document http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Server/Product_Requirements_Do... [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Cloud/Cloud_PRD?rd=Cloud_PRD https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Cloud/Cloud_PRD?rd=Cloud_PRD
    - VLM 12y ago
      "The idea of a server based fork of Debian" I'd be running it on my desktops. All I need is a way to spawn chromium and emacs and consoles (I like konsole, but if it drags in too many dependencies I'll put something else on). If/When chromium depends on systemd (WTF, a web browser / page renderer logically SHOULD depend on your init system, of course) then I'll use another browser... somehow.
  - grifferz 12y ago
    I'm in a similar position with regard to those (or any) desktop features not being relevant for most of the systems I administer. I'm kind of irritated about having to learn a whole set of new things. I do recognise that there are some benefits for my use case in systemd. The desktop stuff aren't the only things that systemd brings. More than that though, is the fact that it's going to be the new default everywhere. So while you say I don't particularly like systemd and would be happier not having to deal with the compatibility and/or conversion issues for what I perceive as minimal benefit. I think you (and I) will actually face more work in trying to avoid systemd than convert to it. You'll be fighting against your distribution's default and the default of every bit of third party software targeted at your distro. From what I have seen most conversions are fairly painless. So from my position that sits somewhere between "ambivalent" and "that's kind of nice", going with the flow seems the easier path.
23david 12y ago
Yes we shall...
LukaD 12y ago
Go ahead and fork. Just leave me alone while I enjoy using systemd. I think some people are taking this way too personal and overreact. Forking is probably the best way to stop all the whining.
- keithpeter 12y ago
  A fork would also mean that Debian (systemd edition) would not have to keep legacy init script support. You could have a 'clean' systemd in around Jessie+1 I imagine.
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
    Debian already supports non-Linux kernels on which systemd won't function. So the legacy init support (or a compatible alternative) will still be required.
    - mseepgood 12y ago
      The fork could maintain these.
    - asdfaoeu 12y ago
      It remains to be seen if the kFreeBSD ports will part of the official release https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2014/09/msg00002.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2014/09/msg00... .
awalton 12y ago
Yes, please. But I won't be surprised to see them come slinking back in four months with their tails tucked when nobody's actually maintaining any software for the fork. Fork off and die. p.s.: it's systemd, not SystemD.
AdrianRossouw 12y ago
man. reading up on the systemd mess again, I sure as hell have no desire to let it anywhere near my servers.
fapjacks 12y ago
Yes. My spidey sense has been tingling about a Debian fork, given the facts mentioned on the link, consistent problems with at least one of Lennart Poettering's previous projects (pulseaudio), and the strong likelihood that politics played a bigger part in the "adoption" of systemd versus technical merit. If the answer from systemd people is that we have no choice but to use systemd, then I hope that a fork happens, and I will contribute a lot to that project, despite the trite downvotes these affirmative comments get.
- cliffbean 12y ago
  One thing I struggle with: how does one calibrate one's spidey sense? Reading comments in online forums is likely to bias one towards the people talking the most, which is not a good bet as a representative sample. It's not just systemd; it's any topic of heated discussion. All we hear from on many topics are the people with the strongest emotions. How can we compensate?
lovelearning 12y ago
While I agree with the concept of supporting multiple init systems, I don't quite understand why they'd want to fork it out into an entirely different distro. Isn't it possible to do this with patches, similar to how the linux kernel has RT patches?
lifeisstillgood 12y ago
No. Even the pro-fork advocates (even the above article) see the Jackson / Vernon proposal as a much better idea (choice of init systems with a systemd default) No. IMHO Debian is less a distro than a democratic experiment - and systemd shows it is working. If you don't like systemd (and I vastly prefer my FreeBSD world) get on board with the democratic process - it is always messy, frustrating, driving you insane slow. That's how you can tell it is working Don't fork. Edit: Matthew Vaughn is an actor not a Dev.
- justincormack 12y ago
  But isnt that proposal kind of too late, the process has already chosen systemd?
  - icebraining 12y ago
    systemd has been chosen as the default, but there's a proposal to keep Debian open to other init systems: https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2014/10/msg00001.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2014/10/msg00001.html
lubomir 12y ago
Why is it that so many opponents of systemd can not spell its name properly?
DoubleMalt 12y ago
Just use coreOS and docker on the server and leave the init system discussion to the desktop people. There are some fundamentally different and sometimes conflicting requirements regarding the startup process on a server and on a desktop machine and I think systemd which is obviously desktop driven will be the catalyst for a split between server and desktop distros. I don't think classical desktop environments have much future personally, but that's just my gut feeling. Server will definitely move further into modularization of services, and that will make init systems there less and less interesting.
- justincormack 12y ago
  CoreOS is entirely based on systemd. Fleet is a distributed systemd. It is far more systemd oriented than any other distro, having built it in as a core feature form day one.
  - TheSwordsman 12y ago
    Which makes using any useful features of the project impossible.
    - cbsmith 12y ago
      That's a rather bold thing to say considering people are using both the useful and useless features of the project without difficulty.
    - voltagex_ 12y ago
      How? CoreOS has very defined goals of what it does and doesn't do. What have you been prevented from using?
- EmanueleAina 12y ago
  Sorry, are you being sarcastic or you really don't know that systemd is the other central piece of CoreOS, together with Docker?
atmosx 12y ago
If Ritchie and Thompson knew the damage fork-ing would cause to the open source community, they would have never implemented the idea, as a system call in UNIX[1] in 1971. [1] http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/man21.pdf http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/man21.pdf
- mseepgood 12y ago
  I don't think that they care(d) much about "the open source community". And why do you think forking causes damage to the open source community? It helps resolve conflicts of interest.
  - atmosx 12y ago
    I know they didnt care (there wasnt any significant OS community at the time) and even if they did its not reason to remove a core feature of like fork, because someone might abuse the idea. It was a kind of pun to state my disaproval to level of fragmentation the linux community has gotten into. Okay this SystemD saga might or might be AS important as some people tend to think. But fragmenting the community so much and having people working to 10 different, unstable solutions instead of 3 stable ones, its a waste of resources IMHO.
    - EmanueleAina 12y ago
      Indeed. Reducing fragmentation is one of the reasons many distribution maintainers liked systemd, since it replaces tons of special snowflake tooling that every distro reimplemented differently with one common upstream (eg. set the hostname, configure binary formats, where to store the OS release name, etc.)
brute 12y ago
The website could be replaced by a much shorter version simply stating "I dont like SystemD. -anonymous". The author is essentially making a threat, that there will be a fork of Debian if the project does not give in to his demands. Then he states that he is totally not just speaking for himself, but for a much larger group, and in fact claims to have the majority on his side. I have a hard time evaluating the seriousness of these claims, as there is no intend to back up any of this. As far as the arguments go, there is nothing new here. The concerns have been stated before, and have been heard, too.
buster 12y ago
Or just shut up and put your efforts into maintaining https://packages.debian.org/jessie/systemd-shim https://packages.debian.org/jessie/systemd-shim Also, critique starts with "We like controlling the startup of the system with shell scripts that are readable".. How on earth is a systemd service file less readable then a hundreds of lines bash script? Also relevant: http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/65684-debian-leader-says-users-can-continue-with-sysvinit http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/65684-deb...
- fapjacks 12y ago
  Your attitude is exactly the problem. "Shut up and do what I say" is exactly what systemd is about.
  - keithpeter 12y ago
    I read the 'shut up' line in the post above yours as more along the lines of 'do something useful, post bugs, show some commitment' rather than 'shut up systemd is the Only Way'. Perhaps the sponsors of the linked site are doing bug reports on packages like systemd-shim and others. Perhaps the upstream project members involved are ensuring that they have init scripts for systemv available. They could add a question with links along those lines easily.
  - buster 12y ago
    This sentence (if it's not obvious) is a hint to invest energies into making debian work fine without systemd instead of countless whining and crying but in the end doing nothing. There may be some people opposed to systemd, but there have been votes that saw systemd as the clear winner for the default init system. Why should the majority of users who are FOR systemd bending to some users who don't like systemd out of some philosophical view? Instead of behaving like a little child, people can work on letting Debian run fine without systemd (which IS the fact today, i can simply switch between sysvinit and systemd just by installing a package). And in the end, you should remind yourself that this is only about the default for one linux distribution. You will still be able to use sysvinit if you like. There is choice. The majority wants systemd. The minority wants sysvinit. Only because the opposers are loud and make a lot of noise about this doesn't change the fact that they are a relatively small number. Changing the default is the only sane thing to do.
deleted 12y ago
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mappu 12y ago
>SystemD betrays the UNIX Philosophy Not so convinced by this. "Those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl." -- Rob Pike Systemd in debian would have an easier time making friends if it didn't usurp PID1 for roles that are currently outside PID1, and if it didn't encourage software which is currently init-system agnostic to grow a dependency on a specific init-system implementation.
- the_mitsuhiko 12y ago
  > Systemd in debian would have an easier time making friends if it didn't usurp PID1 for roles that are currently outside PID1 Like what exactly? This is a non issue. systemd has very little actually running in PID1.
  - jude- 12y ago
    All of systemd's other components require systemd-PID-1. So yes, systemd does usurp PID 1.
n0body 12y ago
Do people not have better things to do with their time? It doesn't make sense.
keithpeter 12y ago
Looks like the Squeeze LTS project[1] could use some help[2] and the team proposing a fork are server type folk reading between the lines. Good fit of skill sets and a way of generating positive outcomes quickly to build confidence? So fork from squeeze forward updating strategic packages? PS: I love the 'how long are your beards?' line. Obviously, I'd rather Debian didn't fork and that we kept choice for server people in one of the larger Linux distros just on an 'ecological diversity' basis. You can do a window manager on top of X with systemv right now in Jessie [3], the '--no-install-recommends' option to apt-get is helpful. But the result will be seriously old-school. Its rather fun for surfing in cafes and wasting time on forums but for my day to day work (not programming) I prefer a full fat desktop like KDE/Gnome. [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2014/msg00082.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2014/msg00... [2] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTc4NTE http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTc4NTE [3] http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/osd.html http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/osd.html
pantalaimon 12y ago
> Thanks for doing this. How can I help? > […] it can be helpful to monitor and update the Wikipedia page about SystemD. So they are basically suggesting to manipulate Wikipedia in order to paint a worse picture of systemd?
mahouse 12y ago
Now I'm just waiting for Poettering to post something on Google+ saying he's being bullied again by this initiative.
zokier 12y ago
Sure, feel free to fork Debian. Just don't call your fork Debian or "Pure Debian" or anything silly like that. Debian is a registered trademark of Software in the Public Interest, Inc., and as we saw with the Standard Markdown debacle, people do not like when names of established stuff is hijacked.
ownagefool 12y ago
There's a whole bunch of debian derivatives out there and veteran unix sysadmins don't necessarily have the skills to deliver this so not sure this is really all that news worthy until they create something.
deleted 12y ago
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nslqqq 12y ago
Apparently 'Veteran Unix Admins' can't even spell systemd right. It not necessarily correlates with their overall knowledge of systemd, but it's still very strange
- nslqqq 12y ago
  Ha, they fixed it. It was spelled SystemD before
bryanlarsen 12y ago
I think this is a great idea. - I think they're wrong about systemd, but if they're right, Debian can merge their fork back in, they can say "I told you so", and we can move on. - It gives us a place to point the anti-systemd people. Rather than spending their energy trying to fight the system, they can spend their energy productively on this fork. - This puts the burden of maintaining the SysV scripts on the fork, rather than the package maintainers, as it would be for Ian Jackson's proposal to maintain freedom of choice[1] Maintaining the scripts probably isn't hard for most; testing them probably would be. It would require maintainers to keep a SysV init system up and running on their machines. 1: https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2014/10/msg00001.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2014/10/msg00001.html
- justinsb 12y ago
  Exactly; this reminds me of the quote "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." A key axiom of free software is that if you don't like something, you can fork it. If your fork is better, it will win (in theory). It isn't necessarily an efficient allocation of resources, but open-source does not seek to achieve that: it values choice instead.
pmontra 12y ago
I'm a devop, not a system administrator. I setup and administered a number of single machine web services for my customers along the years, almost all of them with Debian plus some Ubuntus recently. Database, application server, web server. Nothing fancy. I also use Ubuntu as my primary desktop (some sort of gnome fallback DE) after I removed a lot of cruft if comes with by default. From my experience what I need on a desktop is very different from what I need on a server. On a server I don't care about displays, keyboards, backlighting, sound, USB disks, mics, scanners etc. On my desktop they are very important. There are a number of companies offering Linux VPSes with 512 MB RAM and they can be good to host a low traffic web service. Good luck running a modern Linux DE on a 512 MB machine. Not impossibile but not very productive. So I can imagine having very different init systems for desktops and servers if this means that the server won't be encumbered by a number subsystems which are of no use to it. Furthermore binaries instead of scripts and opaque log files leave a bad taste in my mouth. They make me figure a future with a Windows like event viewer to browse the log files, over a terminal based ssh connection. I'm quite concerned about it. It will waive one of the biggest advantages of a Linux server over a Windows one. A fork, or an alternative init system, could be a good solution. We should run this experiment, pick what we like and don't harass the people on the other side. We will see the results after some years. The satisfaction of the admins will decree the winner.
- srean 12y ago
  Wish I could upvote this a thousand times.
- grifferz 12y ago
  systemd has a number of features which are of interest to server operators, especially those who use containers, which may well be many of us before long. Running systemd as pid 1 does not imply running a desktop environment. I have plenty of VPS customers running systemd as pid 1 in 512MiB RAM. Running systemd as pid 1 doesn't imply having every single binary and subsystem of systemd running. I would encourage you to try it before deciding it's something you won't find useful. Avoiding it looks like it's going to be significant effort and you'd want to know for sure that you're justified in that before embarking on that course of action.
mseepgood 12y ago
They don't even know how to spell "systemd" correctly. Is there a better way to show your ignorance on the subject?
CrLf 12y ago
As much as I dislike the idea of systemd, I'm starting to think it's pointless to fight it. There's still a large chunk of people that think the desktop is important for Linux's future and will keep pushing for turning it into a brittle mess of opaque components, unaware of what's really important to maintain and troubleshoot servers on a daily basis, and unaware of what has made Linux so successful in this area. It may happen that systemd ends up being a good thing, or it may happen that something else takes the place that Debian and Red Hat currently occupy in the server space. That thing may very well be something other than Linux, and I don't care if it is anymore.
- XorNot 12y ago
  Since when have init.d scripts been anything but brittle?
  - nmcfarl 12y ago
    Forever, till this very day and presumably forever more. If there’s anything this debate shows me, it’s that people have VERY different experiences with SysV init.
  - CrLf 12y ago
    SysV init is brittle only for desktop scenarios, where many things can change between reboots. On servers I've always found it to be very predictable. Once you fix an issue, it usually stays fixed. I haven't ran into many startup race conditions in servers. SysV init has many problems and can be improved upon, but solutions that increase complexity exponentially and are impossible to reason about when problems arise aren't the solution. It worries me to see people justifying increased complexity pretenfing it matters for servers. Two examples: 1. I don't care how long my servers take to boot, that doesn't happen very often and when it does, who cares about cutting 30 seconds on the operating system side when the POST itself takes twice as long? 2. I don't care about too much hardware detection magic. Once a server is installed, at most it will get a memory upgrade sometime along the way, and replacement disks coming in and out of it will be transparently handled by the RAID controller. Most often it will just get scrapped in the exact same configuration it had on day one. The systemd approach is not unlike the Windows approach. I've managed Windows servers for may years and I've also had to deal with at least an order of magnitude more boot issues that with SysV-like init systems.
broodbucket 12y ago
I know this is just a nitpick, but calling it "SystemD" everywhere on this page when everything written about systemd asks you very nicely to call it "systemd" shows these guys are either not as familiar with systemd as you should probably be if it's that much of an issue for you, or they're deliberately trying to be edgy. Neither of which inspires confidence in their ability to maintain a potential fork.
thu 12y ago
Something's wrong with this thread. Being for or against systemd is one thing. Bashing the people who are ready to do some hard work to bring more choices to the table is another. If someone wants to write another Ruby (or whatever programming language) implementation, would you bash her/him ? Would you say "leave me alone, I'm very happy with MRI" ?
TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
So: what linux distributions don't use systemd by default?
- gergles 12y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#Adoption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#Adoption
- cenazoic 12y ago
  Of the major distros, only Slackware and Gentoo.
  - fmoralesc 12y ago
    And in Gentoo, it is optional.
legulere 12y ago
What a joke. They can't even spell things correctly. It's System V instead of SystemV and systemd instead of SystemD > only few of us have the time and patience to interact with Debian on a voluntary basis. But a fork is less work I guess? > Pure Debian by Veteran Unix Admins Pretty funny thing to say as GNU and Linux are pretty un-unixy to begin with. They link to mobile wikipedia
jeremyjh 12y ago
Don't threaten a fork. Just do it when the time comes. It sounds like you don't have a single Debian committer on board and no real influence there so you are going to have to prove yourselves, just like every other vanity distribution.
cpks 12y ago
A few points: * These folks seem clueless. The cite Eric Raymond. Enough said. * I like classic init. I'm actually not a big fan of systemd, but I clearly recognize something needs to be replaced. The system needs to handle parallelism and dependencies. It's essentially the same problem in a hundred different domains (from luigi, to things like make/ant/paver/rake, to things like supervisord). Each systems seems to solve it worse than the one before it. Personally, I'd actually go with forking make, since it's the one everyone knows and the most Unix-y, modify it to: * Handle long-running task and task restarts * Handle parallelism * Clean up some of the issues around modularity
byuu 12y ago
Debian has always seemed to be about choice. You can even run it (for now, at least) on the FreeBSD kernel if you so choose. Obviously they are going to have to require systemd for Gnome 3.14+, but I see no reason not to allow installing a different init system for people managing headless LAMP servers via SSH, if there is an appropriate amount of developers willing to maintain the necessary packages for this. Onto debianfork.org ... if history is any indication, naming it Pure Debian is only going to cause a world of pain for everyone. Forkers really need to stop trying to name their projects $superiorAdjective $projectName. That's never going to go over well with $projectName. And if they do fork Debian, I sure hope they don't set the default UI font to Georgia 40. (I know it adapts to browser width. I don't like setting my browser to 200px width to read a webpage comfortably.)
- adekok 12y ago
  > Debian has always seemed to be about choice. ... Obviously they are going to have to require systemd And that's the issue. See my earlier comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8415564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8415564
ancarda 12y ago
Am I the only person who prefers systemd? Maybe because it's the only init system I've managed to get my head around. Other init systems seem so complicated. A config file vs a bash script is far easier and they all seem to require forking. I only use Linux for servers so I may be unaware of a sane init system that works like systemd but isn't systemd. Until something like that appears, I'll stick to systemd.
- jws 12y ago
  I use systemd on all my servers. A couple of lines of declarative configure file to specify a daemon with its restart policy beats a messy shell script. For my custom processes I've ripped out all the chroot, fork, and setuid code added in a couple lines for systemd watchdog and status support calls. I'm not going back. Granted, journalctl with a filter is longer to type than cat. Someday I'll add nice alias to my shell rc.
- thomasz 12y ago
  No. It's just that the people who want to get systemd and those do not care deeply about their init system have left and only those who see it as a threat to linux still bother.
- IshKebab 12y ago
  I don't think you're wrong. I imagine all these people saying systemd is so awful are just worried that their hard-earned sysvinit knowledge will become obsolete and that new users won't have to go through silly bash scripts (that are totally secure of course - no chance of security vulnerabilities in something as ancient and wtf-free as bash). Instead they'll have something sane like this: [Unit] Description=Apache 2 HTTP Web Server After=network.target [Service] Type=forking EnvironmentFile=/etc/conf.d/apache2 ExecStartPre=/bin/echo performing: /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start $APACHE2_OPTS ExecStart=/usr/sbin/apache2 -k start $APACHE2_OPTS ExecStop=/usr/sbin/apache2 -k graceful-stop $APACHE2_OPTS ExecReload=/usr/sbin/apache2 -k graceful $APACHE2_OPTS PIDFile=/var/run/apache2.pid StandardOutput=syslog StandardError=syslog Restart=always [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target WantedBy=http-daemon.target This is the sysvinit file for apache from debian. #!/bin/sh ### BEGIN INIT INFO # Provides: apache2 # Required-Start: $local_fs $remote_fs $network $syslog $named # Required-Stop: $local_fs $remote_fs $network $syslog $named # Default-Start: 2 3 4 5 # Default-Stop: 0 1 6 # X-Interactive: true # Short-Description: Start/stop apache2 web server ### END INIT INFO set -e SCRIPTNAME="${0##*/}" SCRIPTNAME="${SCRIPTNAME##[KS][0-9][0-9]}" if [ -n "$APACHE_CONFDIR" ] ; then if [ "${APACHE_CONFDIR##/etc/apache2-}" != "${APACHE_CONFDIR}" ] ; then DIR_SUFFIX="${APACHE_CONFDIR##/etc/apache2-}" else DIR_SUFFIX= fi elif [ "${SCRIPTNAME##apache2-}" != "$SCRIPTNAME" ] ; then DIR_SUFFIX="-${SCRIPTNAME##apache2-}" APACHE_CONFDIR=/etc/apache2$DIR_SUFFIX else DIR_SUFFIX= APACHE_CONFDIR=/etc/apache2 fi if [ -z "$APACHE_ENVVARS" ] ; then APACHE_ENVVARS=$APACHE_CONFDIR/envvars fi export APACHE_CONFDIR APACHE_ENVVARS ENV="env -i LANG=C PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin" if [ "$APACHE_CONFDIR" != /etc/apache2 ] ; then ENV="$ENV APACHE_CONFDIR=$APACHE_CONFDIR" fi if [ "$APACHE_ENVVARS" != "$APACHE_CONFDIR/envvars" ] ; then ENV="$ENV APACHE_ENVVARS=$APACHE_ENVVARS" fi And so on...
Klasiaster 12y ago
poor minds, they are just ridiculus. and they make up too many false statements
zorked 12y ago
Can we as a community move on from this? If someone feels like forking a distro "because systemd", let them, and it's only newsworthy if it's successful. We could also move on from the accusations of "betraying the Unix philosophy". You know what else is the Unix philosophy? User-based security model. Fixed-length strings without overflow checks. World-readable passwords, badly hashed. Unencrypted remote shell with host-based trust. Maybe systemd is good, maybe systemd is bad, but accusing it of merely changing things is not a valid argument.
- linuxlizard 12y ago
  Thank you!
cuillevel3 12y ago
Yes, more lazy admins. Lifelong learning anyone? They can't vote because they've been using Debian for free all this time. Oh, the entitlement. Go ahead fork it. I'm confident systemd will modernize Linux servers and desktops alike. And if by next year there is something better, systemd will be replaced. Just take a look at device filessystems. Anyone remember devfsd? Let me cite wikipedia: "While devfs was a step forward, it had several disadvantages of its own.[2] Since Linux version 2.5 devfs has been succeeded by udev."
- phkamp 12y ago
  The way Linux did DEVFS was so utter moronic that it's no surprise it was strangled in the crib. Unfortunately people seem to have confused "this DEVFS implementation" with "The idea of DEVFS" and thrown the baby out with the bathwater. For comparison FreeBSD has had DEVFS for 14 years and had a prototype for a good number of years before that. And yes, I wrote that DEVFS for FreeBSD :-)
StevePerkins 12y ago
From the source: ..... > Why don't you do that [i.e. vote against systemd] yourselves? > > We are excluded from voting on the issue: only few of us > have the time and patience to interact with Debian on a > voluntary basis. ..... In that case, you don't have the time and patience to operate and maintain a worthwhile and ongoing Debian fork. In that case, there is no substance to the "question" you're raising, because you wouldn't actually do what you're calling for. In that case, you're just a handful of guys (or maybe even just one guy) who spent $10 on a domain name... to get more attention for your Slashdot/Reddit/HN post than it otherwise would have had if posted straight to Slashdot/Reddit/HN directly.
- IgorPartola 12y ago
  I came here to say exactly that. "We don't have time to work with the Debian folks on a solution, but have time to create our own distro." Right. Then again, they should go for it. If nobody but them uses it, that's that. If it gains traction, cool. On another point: why the hell would you have a choice in init systems? As a user of the OS, I care that the proceses start, stop, and keep running. I don't care how. A purist in me might care, but I am not going to futz with installing different init systems for no good reason.
  - feld 12y ago
    Nobody said you had to futz with it. Ideally packages would ship with the correct init scripts and things would work exactly as you expect them to, or as they did. Unlike with systemd. Why the hell would you have a choice in kernels? Why the hell would you have a choice in filesystems? Why the hell would you have a choice in sound systems? Why the hell would you have a choice in desktop environments?
    - IgorPartola 12y ago
      To clarify: why would you want a choice in init systems in a single distro? To me, a distro is a package manager+packages and an init system. You add a different init system, you have a different distro. Everything else is modular, but the init system is something that is at the very core of the OS. This is why most distros support multiple kernels, file systems, etc. but only one init system.
perlpimp 12y ago
I am not sure why debian needs to force replace sysvinit, can't they have systemd-debian distro that will have all the shiny stuff in it? and maybe have it grow and if it won't go down with their userbase then they can discontinue it? Everyone moving to systemd seems a bit fishy. C is very insecure for daemon coding with all other options why no use go for example? There might be some influence on behalf interested governmental parties giving a push to systemd. I don't have a problem with systemd its just I think it should have been an option not a default for server setups. C programs if they are not really carefully coded can be easily hacked by stack smashers, race condition inducers etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcl17Q0bpk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcl17Q0bpk
- icebraining 12y ago
  I am not sure why debian needs to force replace sysvinit, can't they have systemd-debian distro that will have all the shiny stuff in it? and maybe have it grow and if it won't go down with their userbase then they can discontinue it? Go read the arguments, there are many reasons why they decided to switch. A big part of it is that Gnome/KDE and other upstream software is already dependent on systemd, so keeping SysV means extra effort to fix that. C is very insecure for daemon coding with all other options why no use go for example? What do you think the current init system is written in? That's not a reason to keep sysv.
  - perlpimp 12y ago
    what does linus say about systemd?
    - icebraining 12y ago
      That he doesn't have any strong opinions about it.
- rodgerd 12y ago
  > C is very insecure for daemon coding with all other options why no use go for example? What's sysvinit written in? What are bash and dash written in? What are coreutils written in?
pjmlp 12y ago
And this is why the only victory for desktop GNU/Linux has actually been Android/Linux. I don't care what init system is used. I care about a GUI workstation experience. This whole UNIX experience is long lost in GNU/Linux distributions. Just go out and install an Aix, HP-UX, Solaris, Tru64, DG/UX... system and see what the real UNIX experience looks like.
ck2 12y ago
Gosh I wish this would happen with CentOS (7 has systemd)
trapnii 12y ago
this whole website rather sounds like a blackmail. I'm not a big fan of systemd (anymore) either. but forking is not a solution to the init-system problem et al.
AndyKelley 12y ago
"shell scripts that are readable" ...are they trolling?
ausjke 12y ago
I'm for this move, choice is _always_ good, be it systemd or anything else.
ThinkBeat 12y ago
The person(s) who wrote up this little hissy fit, does not seem able to, nor want to, invest the effort to create and maintain a fork. "Unless you meet our demands, we shall fork". More like "You gotta do what I say, or I am going to scream shout and bang my hands against the wall for a while". or "Please someone, fork Debian in the way we want it, and spend your time and energy maintaining it, because we cant be bothered to". Also, disagreeing with the direction of Debian is not a risky move. Why not sign your names to it? Is this again because you wish to avoid any personal responsibility and work?. If you are well known in the Unix/Linux/Oss community signing your name would give weight to the hissyfit.
ThinkBeat 12y ago
The person(s) who wrote up this little hissy fit, does not seem able to, nor want to, invest the effort to create and maintain a fork. "Unless you meet our demands, we shall fork". More like "You gotta do what I say, or I am going to scream shout and bang my hands against the wall for a while". or "Please someone, fork Debian in the way we want it, and spend your time and energy maintaining it, because we cant be bothered to". Also, disagreeing with the direction of Debian is not a risky move. Why not sign your names to it? Is this again because you wish to avoid any personal responsibility and work?. If you are well known in the Unix/Linux/Oss community signing your name would give weight to the hissyfit.
click170 12y ago
So, all I've really heard about Systemd are arguments from proponents and complaints from opponents, and based on that alone it's difficult to get an idea of the true merits of one vs the other because rarely does any one comment lay out all the Pros and Cons for the different init systems. So I went searching, and found this Page. It probably isn't complete, and probably comes at this from a single perspective though. http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Talk:Comparison_of_init_systems http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Talk:Comparison_of_init_systems I am interested in any other comparisons that you believe is a good representation of both sides. I just want to fully understand the two before making a choice. Edit: Removed references to there only being 2 options, there are multiple init systems. Edit: Additional comparison from the perspective of someone involved with Systemd - http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/why.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/why.html and A Unix.StackExchange question asking the same thing with a variety of answers. http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5877/what-are-the-pros-cons-of-upstart-and-systemd http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5877/what-are-the-pr...
chias 12y ago
Please fork Debian. I find it very difficult to get behind a movement whose primary complains are that the status quo is "a slap in the face to the _____ philosophy" and "betrays the _____ philosophy" and so on. If you want to sway me, you have to tell me why your way is better. The alternative is "offensive" to you? I cannot begin to describe how much I don't care. You can tell a lot about a movement by those they stand with, and you've listed your them as "Harbinger of the Linux Apocalypse", a boycott, and finally something that does nothing but mock those it disagrees with. I mean you may be bringing up valid points but curb the drama, eh? So I'm all for a fork. That is the point of open source, no? Go on and make a fork and if it's awesome people will use it, otherwise people won't. And maybe then we can curtail the endless arguments about this in Debian. But in spite of the title this article, it really didn't read like it was asking if we should fork Debian. It read like it was asking people to pressure Debian to follow the authors' agendas, with a threat (?) of making a fork if it didn't.
- VLM 12y ago
  The problem is most of us are just quietly moving to freebsd.
- spb 12y ago
  > It read like it was asking people to pressure Debian to follow the authors' agendas, with a threat (?) of making a fork if it didn't. This. The point of this site seems to be the author begging Debian not to make him fork, because that would be such an imposition on him. It's the same threat as a child threatening to run away from home (except that parents have a reason to care about their child's life).

214 points by kissgyorgy 12y ago

jermo 12y ago

The main reason for forking seems to be opposition to SystemD. Initially I was unconvinced but then I remembered the recent story of Lennart Poettering (one of the authors of SystemD) on The State Of Open Source Communities where he describes the hostility towards him personally https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859 In light of that, forking is a more civilised approach than bullying and threatening the author.

_ak 12y ago
Lennart Poettering is a bully himself, with a well-documented instance where he continuously interruped a talk at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress, even going as far as taking over the stage while insulting the presenter. Lennart Poettering is a toxic person, toxic to the OSS community, and he's the last person that can complain about bullying.
- the_why_of_y 12y ago
  You mean that famous talk when the very poorly prepared presenter ("Datenwolf") took the stage to trash-talk and spread misinformation about large parts of the Linux Desktop, evidently oblivious to important requirements like accessibility that modern desktops such as Gnome and KDE are designed to meet, which LP had to correct by comments?
- dnlrn 12y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0 This is the talk you mean right? Have you actually seen the talk? Yes, Lennart interrupts the talk but everything he says is correct, while the presenter just spreads random FUD. The presenter clearly shows that he doesn’t understand most of the stuff he talks about, talks about 3 year old bugs that already got fixed, etc. Yes, it’s not the nicest way to interrupt a talk, but the presenter should have expected some kind of reaction, given the controversial headline. People like Lennart put their heart into their software. If you shit all over it and spread random FUD, you can expect some response. What would you have done? Also he doesn’t “take over the stage”. He comes up after the talk has ended, because people on IRC asked him to.
  - enneff 12y ago
    The way Lennart interacted with the speaker during that talk was extremely inappropriate. If he had corrections to make he could have arranged a short talk afterwards or a written blog post. It is very poor form to be so disruptive to a speaker, no matter how much you disagree with them.
    - tinco 12y ago
      No it isn't.. being on a soap box doesn't give you some special permission to just spread false information without being interrupted. I heard this argument before, there was an article about book reviews, and that authors who interacted with reviewers (by writing on their own blogs about them or on twitter) would be labeled Bad Behaving Author and be shunned by the review community. What's up with that? If someone talks shit, he should be challenged as soon as possible, preferably in front of the same crowd they are talking shit in front of. If you take the opportunity to talk in front of a lot of people, you should also take the responsibility to be properly prepared, and be ready to face the consequence of not performing adequately.
      - enneff 12y ago
        > being on a soap box Let's get this straight: he's not on a soap box (a term that refers to people who shout at passers by on the street), but rather at a conference at which he was invited to speak. The audience came into the room to hear him give his talk. Lennart rudely interrupted this. > I heard this argument before, there was an article about book reviews, and that authors who interacted with reviewers (by writing on their own blogs about them or on twitter) would be labeled Bad Behaving Author and be shunned by the review community. That's not my argument at all. I specifically suggested he _should_ respond with a blog post. Don't put me in the same group as those people. I encourage anyone to share their views on their own blogs, in comment sections, and on Twitter. > If someone talks shit, he should be challenged as soon as possible, preferably in front of the same crowd they are talking shit in front of. I disagree that it is appropriate to interrupt and shout someone down just because you think they are "talking shit". The definition of "talking shit" is subjective. If someone is interrupted before they can make their point, then the observer does not have the ability to judge whether they are right or wrong. It instead becomes a matter of whoever has the best rhetorical tactics. (Or who can shout the loudest.) My job involves giving a lot of talks, and if someone were to engage with me like this I _would_ be prepared: I'd be prepared to tell them to wait until I have finished my talk and address their comments afterward. This has happened many times, and it worked out fine for all involved. It's called civility.
seba_dos1 12y ago
Yeah, especially if everything what he wrote there was like that bitcoin hitman stuff, which turned out to be just a line like "maybe we should start btc fund?" from IRC written after someone else complained about issue with systemd by guy known from his funny trolling there - and absolutely nothing more than that. While at first I felt a bit sorry for him when I read that post, after I learned about what exactly was that "hitman threat" I lost any remaining respect to Poettering. That's just grabbing attention and playing victim. He deserves negative response for that.
- adekok 12y ago
  > I'd really welcome the anti-systemd ranters to just do some work that makes them feel happy, such as making a new distribution that has the exact init system they want. Most people are already working on things that make them happy. The frustration here is that the tools they depend on are changing... in a way that they don't like. They also have limited time for projects. Any time spent fixing other peoples projects is time they don't spend on their own projects. I left the Linux desktop world nearly 10 years ago, for these kind of reasons. I use a Mac as my desktop, because I don't have to fight with it. 99% of everything works, and the other 1% breakages are ones I can live with.
  - XorNot 12y ago
    You know, provided Apple continue to agree with you...it seems more like you're just zenning over the fact that even if you did disagree, you couldn't change anything. Choice is widely regarded as actually making people more unhappy. EDIT: It's also an ironic comment, since a frequent criticism of systemd is that it's trying to be too much like Apple's launchd.
    - adekok 12y ago
      I'm not "zenning over" anything. I need a computer to get work done. I don't need to be mucking with the computer to keep it working. My choice is to use a (mostly) closed system, because it meets my needs. Other people don't like systemd because they feel it removes their choices. There is no contradiction in the two approaches. There's also no irony. If Unix had started out with something like systemd, fewer people would be complaining about it now. It's the change that people don't like. And the apparent removal of choice.
cbsmith 12y ago
> In light of that, forking is a more civilised approach than bullying and threatening the author. Yes, but it is sad that the more straightforward approach of contributing back to the community isn't taking hold. If you are worried about mission creep... you help stamp out a very clear mission. If you are worried about bloat, you contribute patches. If you are worried about a nasty hairball... you contribute code reviews. If you consider C code less readable than Unix shell... please don't reference the Unix Philosophy as the principle behind that thinking.
grifferz 12y ago
forking is a more civilised approach than bullying and threatening the author. Absolutely, in that almost anything is. :) But specifically, at this point I'd really welcome the anti-systemd ranters to just do some work that makes them feel happy, such as making a new distribution that has the exact init system they want. I suspect that Debian would love for them to do that as well. Debian is in general welcoming of downstream distros since the downstream distros—if given proper care and feeding—often feed back useful improvements to Debian. The problem here is that no one is actually doing a fork (yet). Some of the same loud, uninformed minority have just created a ranty web page that presents a skewed view of history and makes threats. It's just more of the same interminable mailing list snarks but in web page format. Trying to put out and support an entire distribution may serve to broaden their minds as to the delicate position the distribution is in with regard to integrating upstream work into a coherent whole. Sadly I'm not convinced that any enlightenment is going to be achieved because the people behind this web site admit that they haven't even got the time to become involved enough in Debian to have a vote, so I don't know where they're going to find the time to launch a non-toy distribution.

iptel 12y ago

Yes

martin_ 12y ago

From the article: We are excluded from voting on the issue: only few of us have the time and patience to interact with Debian on a voluntary basis. Using the same argument, forking would seem like a horrible idea if there isn't active maintainers.

linuxydave 12y ago
I think their idea is to try get the ball rolling so that others will pick it up. Still a lazy idea if they don't have the time to maintain :(
vacri 12y ago
I saw that as a giant red warning flag as well. Why would I expect them to maintain a fork and ensure it has full sysv init support, if they don't even have the time to engage in the current process? It's all a bit overdramatic anyway - there are heaps of Debian forks; they're called 'downstream distros'. Ubuntu is one.
- deleted 12y ago
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- deleted 12y ago
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- progman 12y ago
  > Why would I expect them to maintain a fork and ensure it has full sysv init support, if they don't even have the time to engage in the current process? Probably because they (experienced Unix veterans) realized that it makes much more sense to test the demand of a fork (that's what they made the website for) than to continue any useless discussion about systemd. Some systemd proponents obviously have serious problems to make a sober discussion anyway (interestingly also in a prominent German forum). Notice: "If SystemD will be substituting SystemV in Debian, we will fork the project and create a new distro: Pure Debian by Veteran Unix Admins. We hope this won't be necessary, but we are well prepared for it." They are not eager to make a fork but I think they will actually do it if necesary.
12y ago

qznc 12y ago

How does forking Debian solve anything? The issue is that Gnome, KDE, and other software requires systemd. You need to fix/maintain their compatibility with other init systems. Then it is easy for Debian user to switch init systems.

stonith 12y ago
You listed two desktop environments, neither of which are of interest to sysadmins. Eg. I run an Openstack cluster and do not care if there are gnome or kde packages available. I don't particularly like systemd and would be happier not having to deal with the compatibility and/or conversion issues for what I perceive as minimal benefit.
- justincormack 12y ago
  The idea of a server based fork of Debian is kind of appealing in some ways, like the Fedora server and cloud projects[1][2] which are quite interesting work, aimed at a (sub)distribution with focus on particular use cases, not the kitchen sink approach. [1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Server/Product_Requirements_Document http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Server/Product_Requirements_Do... [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Cloud/Cloud_PRD?rd=Cloud_PRD https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Cloud/Cloud_PRD?rd=Cloud_PRD
  - VLM 12y ago
    "The idea of a server based fork of Debian" I'd be running it on my desktops. All I need is a way to spawn chromium and emacs and consoles (I like konsole, but if it drags in too many dependencies I'll put something else on). If/When chromium depends on systemd (WTF, a web browser / page renderer logically SHOULD depend on your init system, of course) then I'll use another browser... somehow.
- grifferz 12y ago
  I'm in a similar position with regard to those (or any) desktop features not being relevant for most of the systems I administer. I'm kind of irritated about having to learn a whole set of new things. I do recognise that there are some benefits for my use case in systemd. The desktop stuff aren't the only things that systemd brings. More than that though, is the fact that it's going to be the new default everywhere. So while you say I don't particularly like systemd and would be happier not having to deal with the compatibility and/or conversion issues for what I perceive as minimal benefit. I think you (and I) will actually face more work in trying to avoid systemd than convert to it. You'll be fighting against your distribution's default and the default of every bit of third party software targeted at your distro. From what I have seen most conversions are fairly painless. So from my position that sits somewhere between "ambivalent" and "that's kind of nice", going with the flow seems the easier path.

23david 12y ago

Yes we shall...

LukaD 12y ago

Go ahead and fork. Just leave me alone while I enjoy using systemd. I think some people are taking this way too personal and overreact. Forking is probably the best way to stop all the whining.

keithpeter 12y ago
A fork would also mean that Debian (systemd edition) would not have to keep legacy init script support. You could have a 'clean' systemd in around Jessie+1 I imagine.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  Debian already supports non-Linux kernels on which systemd won't function. So the legacy init support (or a compatible alternative) will still be required.
  - mseepgood 12y ago
    The fork could maintain these.
  - asdfaoeu 12y ago
    It remains to be seen if the kFreeBSD ports will part of the official release https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2014/09/msg00002.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2014/09/msg00... .

awalton 12y ago

Yes, please. But I won't be surprised to see them come slinking back in four months with their tails tucked when nobody's actually maintaining any software for the fork. Fork off and die. p.s.: it's systemd, not SystemD.

AdrianRossouw 12y ago

man. reading up on the systemd mess again, I sure as hell have no desire to let it anywhere near my servers.

fapjacks 12y ago

Yes. My spidey sense has been tingling about a Debian fork, given the facts mentioned on the link, consistent problems with at least one of Lennart Poettering's previous projects (pulseaudio), and the strong likelihood that politics played a bigger part in the "adoption" of systemd versus technical merit. If the answer from systemd people is that we have no choice but to use systemd, then I hope that a fork happens, and I will contribute a lot to that project, despite the trite downvotes these affirmative comments get.

cliffbean 12y ago
One thing I struggle with: how does one calibrate one's spidey sense? Reading comments in online forums is likely to bias one towards the people talking the most, which is not a good bet as a representative sample. It's not just systemd; it's any topic of heated discussion. All we hear from on many topics are the people with the strongest emotions. How can we compensate?

lovelearning 12y ago

While I agree with the concept of supporting multiple init systems, I don't quite understand why they'd want to fork it out into an entirely different distro. Isn't it possible to do this with patches, similar to how the linux kernel has RT patches?

lifeisstillgood 12y ago

No. Even the pro-fork advocates (even the above article) see the Jackson / Vernon proposal as a much better idea (choice of init systems with a systemd default) No. IMHO Debian is less a distro than a democratic experiment - and systemd shows it is working. If you don't like systemd (and I vastly prefer my FreeBSD world) get on board with the democratic process - it is always messy, frustrating, driving you insane slow. That's how you can tell it is working Don't fork. Edit: Matthew Vaughn is an actor not a Dev.

justincormack 12y ago
But isnt that proposal kind of too late, the process has already chosen systemd?
- icebraining 12y ago
  systemd has been chosen as the default, but there's a proposal to keep Debian open to other init systems: https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2014/10/msg00001.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2014/10/msg00001.html

lubomir 12y ago

Why is it that so many opponents of systemd can not spell its name properly?

DoubleMalt 12y ago

Just use coreOS and docker on the server and leave the init system discussion to the desktop people. There are some fundamentally different and sometimes conflicting requirements regarding the startup process on a server and on a desktop machine and I think systemd which is obviously desktop driven will be the catalyst for a split between server and desktop distros. I don't think classical desktop environments have much future personally, but that's just my gut feeling. Server will definitely move further into modularization of services, and that will make init systems there less and less interesting.

justincormack 12y ago
CoreOS is entirely based on systemd. Fleet is a distributed systemd. It is far more systemd oriented than any other distro, having built it in as a core feature form day one.
- TheSwordsman 12y ago
  Which makes using any useful features of the project impossible.
  - cbsmith 12y ago
    That's a rather bold thing to say considering people are using both the useful and useless features of the project without difficulty.
  - voltagex_ 12y ago
    How? CoreOS has very defined goals of what it does and doesn't do. What have you been prevented from using?
EmanueleAina 12y ago
Sorry, are you being sarcastic or you really don't know that systemd is the other central piece of CoreOS, together with Docker?

atmosx 12y ago

If Ritchie and Thompson knew the damage fork-ing would cause to the open source community, they would have never implemented the idea, as a system call in UNIX[1] in 1971. [1] http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/man21.pdf http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/man21.pdf

mseepgood 12y ago
I don't think that they care(d) much about "the open source community". And why do you think forking causes damage to the open source community? It helps resolve conflicts of interest.
- atmosx 12y ago
  I know they didnt care (there wasnt any significant OS community at the time) and even if they did its not reason to remove a core feature of like fork, because someone might abuse the idea. It was a kind of pun to state my disaproval to level of fragmentation the linux community has gotten into. Okay this SystemD saga might or might be AS important as some people tend to think. But fragmenting the community so much and having people working to 10 different, unstable solutions instead of 3 stable ones, its a waste of resources IMHO.
  - EmanueleAina 12y ago
    Indeed. Reducing fragmentation is one of the reasons many distribution maintainers liked systemd, since it replaces tons of special snowflake tooling that every distro reimplemented differently with one common upstream (eg. set the hostname, configure binary formats, where to store the OS release name, etc.)

brute 12y ago

The website could be replaced by a much shorter version simply stating "I dont like SystemD. -anonymous". The author is essentially making a threat, that there will be a fork of Debian if the project does not give in to his demands. Then he states that he is totally not just speaking for himself, but for a much larger group, and in fact claims to have the majority on his side. I have a hard time evaluating the seriousness of these claims, as there is no intend to back up any of this. As far as the arguments go, there is nothing new here. The concerns have been stated before, and have been heard, too.

buster 12y ago

Or just shut up and put your efforts into maintaining https://packages.debian.org/jessie/systemd-shim https://packages.debian.org/jessie/systemd-shim Also, critique starts with "We like controlling the startup of the system with shell scripts that are readable".. How on earth is a systemd service file less readable then a hundreds of lines bash script? Also relevant: http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/65684-debian-leader-says-users-can-continue-with-sysvinit http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/65684-deb...

fapjacks 12y ago
Your attitude is exactly the problem. "Shut up and do what I say" is exactly what systemd is about.
- keithpeter 12y ago
  I read the 'shut up' line in the post above yours as more along the lines of 'do something useful, post bugs, show some commitment' rather than 'shut up systemd is the Only Way'. Perhaps the sponsors of the linked site are doing bug reports on packages like systemd-shim and others. Perhaps the upstream project members involved are ensuring that they have init scripts for systemv available. They could add a question with links along those lines easily.
- buster 12y ago
  This sentence (if it's not obvious) is a hint to invest energies into making debian work fine without systemd instead of countless whining and crying but in the end doing nothing. There may be some people opposed to systemd, but there have been votes that saw systemd as the clear winner for the default init system. Why should the majority of users who are FOR systemd bending to some users who don't like systemd out of some philosophical view? Instead of behaving like a little child, people can work on letting Debian run fine without systemd (which IS the fact today, i can simply switch between sysvinit and systemd just by installing a package). And in the end, you should remind yourself that this is only about the default for one linux distribution. You will still be able to use sysvinit if you like. There is choice. The majority wants systemd. The minority wants sysvinit. Only because the opposers are loud and make a lot of noise about this doesn't change the fact that they are a relatively small number. Changing the default is the only sane thing to do.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

mappu 12y ago

>SystemD betrays the UNIX Philosophy Not so convinced by this. "Those days are dead and gone and the eulogy was delivered by Perl." -- Rob Pike Systemd in debian would have an easier time making friends if it didn't usurp PID1 for roles that are currently outside PID1, and if it didn't encourage software which is currently init-system agnostic to grow a dependency on a specific init-system implementation.

the_mitsuhiko 12y ago
> Systemd in debian would have an easier time making friends if it didn't usurp PID1 for roles that are currently outside PID1 Like what exactly? This is a non issue. systemd has very little actually running in PID1.
- jude- 12y ago
  All of systemd's other components require systemd-PID-1. So yes, systemd does usurp PID 1.

n0body 12y ago

Do people not have better things to do with their time? It doesn't make sense.

keithpeter 12y ago

Looks like the Squeeze LTS project[1] could use some help[2] and the team proposing a fork are server type folk reading between the lines. Good fit of skill sets and a way of generating positive outcomes quickly to build confidence? So fork from squeeze forward updating strategic packages? PS: I love the 'how long are your beards?' line. Obviously, I'd rather Debian didn't fork and that we kept choice for server people in one of the larger Linux distros just on an 'ecological diversity' basis. You can do a window manager on top of X with systemv right now in Jessie [3], the '--no-install-recommends' option to apt-get is helpful. But the result will be seriously old-school. Its rather fun for surfing in cafes and wasting time on forums but for my day to day work (not programming) I prefer a full fat desktop like KDE/Gnome. [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2014/msg00082.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2014/msg00... [2] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTc4NTE http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTc4NTE [3] http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/osd.html http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/osd.html

pantalaimon 12y ago

> Thanks for doing this. How can I help? > […] it can be helpful to monitor and update the Wikipedia page about SystemD. So they are basically suggesting to manipulate Wikipedia in order to paint a worse picture of systemd?

mahouse 12y ago

Now I'm just waiting for Poettering to post something on Google+ saying he's being bullied again by this initiative.

zokier 12y ago

Sure, feel free to fork Debian. Just don't call your fork Debian or "Pure Debian" or anything silly like that. Debian is a registered trademark of Software in the Public Interest, Inc., and as we saw with the Standard Markdown debacle, people do not like when names of established stuff is hijacked.

ownagefool 12y ago

There's a whole bunch of debian derivatives out there and veteran unix sysadmins don't necessarily have the skills to deliver this so not sure this is really all that news worthy until they create something.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

nslqqq 12y ago

Apparently 'Veteran Unix Admins' can't even spell systemd right. It not necessarily correlates with their overall knowledge of systemd, but it's still very strange

nslqqq 12y ago
Ha, they fixed it. It was spelled SystemD before

bryanlarsen 12y ago

I think this is a great idea. - I think they're wrong about systemd, but if they're right, Debian can merge their fork back in, they can say "I told you so", and we can move on. - It gives us a place to point the anti-systemd people. Rather than spending their energy trying to fight the system, they can spend their energy productively on this fork. - This puts the burden of maintaining the SysV scripts on the fork, rather than the package maintainers, as it would be for Ian Jackson's proposal to maintain freedom of choice[1] Maintaining the scripts probably isn't hard for most; testing them probably would be. It would require maintainers to keep a SysV init system up and running on their machines. 1: https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2014/10/msg00001.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2014/10/msg00001.html

justinsb 12y ago
Exactly; this reminds me of the quote "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." A key axiom of free software is that if you don't like something, you can fork it. If your fork is better, it will win (in theory). It isn't necessarily an efficient allocation of resources, but open-source does not seek to achieve that: it values choice instead.

pmontra 12y ago

I'm a devop, not a system administrator. I setup and administered a number of single machine web services for my customers along the years, almost all of them with Debian plus some Ubuntus recently. Database, application server, web server. Nothing fancy. I also use Ubuntu as my primary desktop (some sort of gnome fallback DE) after I removed a lot of cruft if comes with by default. From my experience what I need on a desktop is very different from what I need on a server. On a server I don't care about displays, keyboards, backlighting, sound, USB disks, mics, scanners etc. On my desktop they are very important. There are a number of companies offering Linux VPSes with 512 MB RAM and they can be good to host a low traffic web service. Good luck running a modern Linux DE on a 512 MB machine. Not impossibile but not very productive. So I can imagine having very different init systems for desktops and servers if this means that the server won't be encumbered by a number subsystems which are of no use to it. Furthermore binaries instead of scripts and opaque log files leave a bad taste in my mouth. They make me figure a future with a Windows like event viewer to browse the log files, over a terminal based ssh connection. I'm quite concerned about it. It will waive one of the biggest advantages of a Linux server over a Windows one. A fork, or an alternative init system, could be a good solution. We should run this experiment, pick what we like and don't harass the people on the other side. We will see the results after some years. The satisfaction of the admins will decree the winner.

srean 12y ago
Wish I could upvote this a thousand times.
grifferz 12y ago
systemd has a number of features which are of interest to server operators, especially those who use containers, which may well be many of us before long. Running systemd as pid 1 does not imply running a desktop environment. I have plenty of VPS customers running systemd as pid 1 in 512MiB RAM. Running systemd as pid 1 doesn't imply having every single binary and subsystem of systemd running. I would encourage you to try it before deciding it's something you won't find useful. Avoiding it looks like it's going to be significant effort and you'd want to know for sure that you're justified in that before embarking on that course of action.

mseepgood 12y ago

They don't even know how to spell "systemd" correctly. Is there a better way to show your ignorance on the subject?

CrLf 12y ago

As much as I dislike the idea of systemd, I'm starting to think it's pointless to fight it. There's still a large chunk of people that think the desktop is important for Linux's future and will keep pushing for turning it into a brittle mess of opaque components, unaware of what's really important to maintain and troubleshoot servers on a daily basis, and unaware of what has made Linux so successful in this area. It may happen that systemd ends up being a good thing, or it may happen that something else takes the place that Debian and Red Hat currently occupy in the server space. That thing may very well be something other than Linux, and I don't care if it is anymore.

XorNot 12y ago
Since when have init.d scripts been anything but brittle?
- nmcfarl 12y ago
  Forever, till this very day and presumably forever more. If there’s anything this debate shows me, it’s that people have VERY different experiences with SysV init.
- CrLf 12y ago
  SysV init is brittle only for desktop scenarios, where many things can change between reboots. On servers I've always found it to be very predictable. Once you fix an issue, it usually stays fixed. I haven't ran into many startup race conditions in servers. SysV init has many problems and can be improved upon, but solutions that increase complexity exponentially and are impossible to reason about when problems arise aren't the solution. It worries me to see people justifying increased complexity pretenfing it matters for servers. Two examples: 1. I don't care how long my servers take to boot, that doesn't happen very often and when it does, who cares about cutting 30 seconds on the operating system side when the POST itself takes twice as long? 2. I don't care about too much hardware detection magic. Once a server is installed, at most it will get a memory upgrade sometime along the way, and replacement disks coming in and out of it will be transparently handled by the RAID controller. Most often it will just get scrapped in the exact same configuration it had on day one. The systemd approach is not unlike the Windows approach. I've managed Windows servers for may years and I've also had to deal with at least an order of magnitude more boot issues that with SysV-like init systems.

broodbucket 12y ago

I know this is just a nitpick, but calling it "SystemD" everywhere on this page when everything written about systemd asks you very nicely to call it "systemd" shows these guys are either not as familiar with systemd as you should probably be if it's that much of an issue for you, or they're deliberately trying to be edgy. Neither of which inspires confidence in their ability to maintain a potential fork.

thu 12y ago

Something's wrong with this thread. Being for or against systemd is one thing. Bashing the people who are ready to do some hard work to bring more choices to the table is another. If someone wants to write another Ruby (or whatever programming language) implementation, would you bash her/him ? Would you say "leave me alone, I'm very happy with MRI" ?

TheLoneWolfling 12y ago

So: what linux distributions don't use systemd by default?

gergles 12y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#Adoption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#Adoption
cenazoic 12y ago
Of the major distros, only Slackware and Gentoo.
- fmoralesc 12y ago
  And in Gentoo, it is optional.

legulere 12y ago

What a joke. They can't even spell things correctly. It's System V instead of SystemV and systemd instead of SystemD > only few of us have the time and patience to interact with Debian on a voluntary basis. But a fork is less work I guess? > Pure Debian by Veteran Unix Admins Pretty funny thing to say as GNU and Linux are pretty un-unixy to begin with. They link to mobile wikipedia

jeremyjh 12y ago

Don't threaten a fork. Just do it when the time comes. It sounds like you don't have a single Debian committer on board and no real influence there so you are going to have to prove yourselves, just like every other vanity distribution.

cpks 12y ago

A few points: * These folks seem clueless. The cite Eric Raymond. Enough said. * I like classic init. I'm actually not a big fan of systemd, but I clearly recognize something needs to be replaced. The system needs to handle parallelism and dependencies. It's essentially the same problem in a hundred different domains (from luigi, to things like make/ant/paver/rake, to things like supervisord). Each systems seems to solve it worse than the one before it. Personally, I'd actually go with forking make, since it's the one everyone knows and the most Unix-y, modify it to: * Handle long-running task and task restarts * Handle parallelism * Clean up some of the issues around modularity

byuu 12y ago

Debian has always seemed to be about choice. You can even run it (for now, at least) on the FreeBSD kernel if you so choose. Obviously they are going to have to require systemd for Gnome 3.14+, but I see no reason not to allow installing a different init system for people managing headless LAMP servers via SSH, if there is an appropriate amount of developers willing to maintain the necessary packages for this. Onto debianfork.org ... if history is any indication, naming it Pure Debian is only going to cause a world of pain for everyone. Forkers really need to stop trying to name their projects $superiorAdjective $projectName. That's never going to go over well with $projectName. And if they do fork Debian, I sure hope they don't set the default UI font to Georgia 40. (I know it adapts to browser width. I don't like setting my browser to 200px width to read a webpage comfortably.)

adekok 12y ago
> Debian has always seemed to be about choice. ... Obviously they are going to have to require systemd And that's the issue. See my earlier comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8415564 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8415564

ancarda 12y ago

Am I the only person who prefers systemd? Maybe because it's the only init system I've managed to get my head around. Other init systems seem so complicated. A config file vs a bash script is far easier and they all seem to require forking. I only use Linux for servers so I may be unaware of a sane init system that works like systemd but isn't systemd. Until something like that appears, I'll stick to systemd.

jws 12y ago
I use systemd on all my servers. A couple of lines of declarative configure file to specify a daemon with its restart policy beats a messy shell script. For my custom processes I've ripped out all the chroot, fork, and setuid code added in a couple lines for systemd watchdog and status support calls. I'm not going back. Granted, journalctl with a filter is longer to type than cat. Someday I'll add nice alias to my shell rc.
thomasz 12y ago
No. It's just that the people who want to get systemd and those do not care deeply about their init system have left and only those who see it as a threat to linux still bother.
IshKebab 12y ago
I don't think you're wrong. I imagine all these people saying systemd is so awful are just worried that their hard-earned sysvinit knowledge will become obsolete and that new users won't have to go through silly bash scripts (that are totally secure of course - no chance of security vulnerabilities in something as ancient and wtf-free as bash). Instead they'll have something sane like this: [Unit] Description=Apache 2 HTTP Web Server After=network.target [Service] Type=forking EnvironmentFile=/etc/conf.d/apache2 ExecStartPre=/bin/echo performing: /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start $APACHE2_OPTS ExecStart=/usr/sbin/apache2 -k start $APACHE2_OPTS ExecStop=/usr/sbin/apache2 -k graceful-stop $APACHE2_OPTS ExecReload=/usr/sbin/apache2 -k graceful $APACHE2_OPTS PIDFile=/var/run/apache2.pid StandardOutput=syslog StandardError=syslog Restart=always [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target WantedBy=http-daemon.target This is the sysvinit file for apache from debian. #!/bin/sh ### BEGIN INIT INFO # Provides: apache2 # Required-Start: $local_fs $remote_fs $network $syslog $named # Required-Stop: $local_fs $remote_fs $network $syslog $named # Default-Start: 2 3 4 5 # Default-Stop: 0 1 6 # X-Interactive: true # Short-Description: Start/stop apache2 web server ### END INIT INFO set -e SCRIPTNAME="${0##*/}" SCRIPTNAME="${SCRIPTNAME##[KS][0-9][0-9]}" if [ -n "$APACHE_CONFDIR" ] ; then if [ "${APACHE_CONFDIR##/etc/apache2-}" != "${APACHE_CONFDIR}" ] ; then DIR_SUFFIX="${APACHE_CONFDIR##/etc/apache2-}" else DIR_SUFFIX= fi elif [ "${SCRIPTNAME##apache2-}" != "$SCRIPTNAME" ] ; then DIR_SUFFIX="-${SCRIPTNAME##apache2-}" APACHE_CONFDIR=/etc/apache2$DIR_SUFFIX else DIR_SUFFIX= APACHE_CONFDIR=/etc/apache2 fi if [ -z "$APACHE_ENVVARS" ] ; then APACHE_ENVVARS=$APACHE_CONFDIR/envvars fi export APACHE_CONFDIR APACHE_ENVVARS ENV="env -i LANG=C PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin" if [ "$APACHE_CONFDIR" != /etc/apache2 ] ; then ENV="$ENV APACHE_CONFDIR=$APACHE_CONFDIR" fi if [ "$APACHE_ENVVARS" != "$APACHE_CONFDIR/envvars" ] ; then ENV="$ENV APACHE_ENVVARS=$APACHE_ENVVARS" fi And so on...

Klasiaster 12y ago

poor minds, they are just ridiculus. and they make up too many false statements

zorked 12y ago

Can we as a community move on from this? If someone feels like forking a distro "because systemd", let them, and it's only newsworthy if it's successful. We could also move on from the accusations of "betraying the Unix philosophy". You know what else is the Unix philosophy? User-based security model. Fixed-length strings without overflow checks. World-readable passwords, badly hashed. Unencrypted remote shell with host-based trust. Maybe systemd is good, maybe systemd is bad, but accusing it of merely changing things is not a valid argument.

linuxlizard 12y ago
Thank you!

cuillevel3 12y ago

Yes, more lazy admins. Lifelong learning anyone? They can't vote because they've been using Debian for free all this time. Oh, the entitlement. Go ahead fork it. I'm confident systemd will modernize Linux servers and desktops alike. And if by next year there is something better, systemd will be replaced. Just take a look at device filessystems. Anyone remember devfsd? Let me cite wikipedia: "While devfs was a step forward, it had several disadvantages of its own.[2] Since Linux version 2.5 devfs has been succeeded by udev."

phkamp 12y ago
The way Linux did DEVFS was so utter moronic that it's no surprise it was strangled in the crib. Unfortunately people seem to have confused "this DEVFS implementation" with "The idea of DEVFS" and thrown the baby out with the bathwater. For comparison FreeBSD has had DEVFS for 14 years and had a prototype for a good number of years before that. And yes, I wrote that DEVFS for FreeBSD :-)

StevePerkins 12y ago

From the source: ..... > Why don't you do that [i.e. vote against systemd] yourselves? > > We are excluded from voting on the issue: only few of us > have the time and patience to interact with Debian on a > voluntary basis. ..... In that case, you don't have the time and patience to operate and maintain a worthwhile and ongoing Debian fork. In that case, there is no substance to the "question" you're raising, because you wouldn't actually do what you're calling for. In that case, you're just a handful of guys (or maybe even just one guy) who spent $10 on a domain name... to get more attention for your Slashdot/Reddit/HN post than it otherwise would have had if posted straight to Slashdot/Reddit/HN directly.

IgorPartola 12y ago
I came here to say exactly that. "We don't have time to work with the Debian folks on a solution, but have time to create our own distro." Right. Then again, they should go for it. If nobody but them uses it, that's that. If it gains traction, cool. On another point: why the hell would you have a choice in init systems? As a user of the OS, I care that the proceses start, stop, and keep running. I don't care how. A purist in me might care, but I am not going to futz with installing different init systems for no good reason.
- feld 12y ago
  Nobody said you had to futz with it. Ideally packages would ship with the correct init scripts and things would work exactly as you expect them to, or as they did. Unlike with systemd. Why the hell would you have a choice in kernels? Why the hell would you have a choice in filesystems? Why the hell would you have a choice in sound systems? Why the hell would you have a choice in desktop environments?
  - IgorPartola 12y ago
    To clarify: why would you want a choice in init systems in a single distro? To me, a distro is a package manager+packages and an init system. You add a different init system, you have a different distro. Everything else is modular, but the init system is something that is at the very core of the OS. This is why most distros support multiple kernels, file systems, etc. but only one init system.

perlpimp 12y ago

I am not sure why debian needs to force replace sysvinit, can't they have systemd-debian distro that will have all the shiny stuff in it? and maybe have it grow and if it won't go down with their userbase then they can discontinue it? Everyone moving to systemd seems a bit fishy. C is very insecure for daemon coding with all other options why no use go for example? There might be some influence on behalf interested governmental parties giving a push to systemd. I don't have a problem with systemd its just I think it should have been an option not a default for server setups. C programs if they are not really carefully coded can be easily hacked by stack smashers, race condition inducers etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcl17Q0bpk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcl17Q0bpk

icebraining 12y ago
I am not sure why debian needs to force replace sysvinit, can't they have systemd-debian distro that will have all the shiny stuff in it? and maybe have it grow and if it won't go down with their userbase then they can discontinue it? Go read the arguments, there are many reasons why they decided to switch. A big part of it is that Gnome/KDE and other upstream software is already dependent on systemd, so keeping SysV means extra effort to fix that. C is very insecure for daemon coding with all other options why no use go for example? What do you think the current init system is written in? That's not a reason to keep sysv.
- perlpimp 12y ago
  what does linus say about systemd?
  - icebraining 12y ago
    That he doesn't have any strong opinions about it.
rodgerd 12y ago
> C is very insecure for daemon coding with all other options why no use go for example? What's sysvinit written in? What are bash and dash written in? What are coreutils written in?

pjmlp 12y ago

And this is why the only victory for desktop GNU/Linux has actually been Android/Linux. I don't care what init system is used. I care about a GUI workstation experience. This whole UNIX experience is long lost in GNU/Linux distributions. Just go out and install an Aix, HP-UX, Solaris, Tru64, DG/UX... system and see what the real UNIX experience looks like.

ck2 12y ago

Gosh I wish this would happen with CentOS (7 has systemd)

trapnii 12y ago

this whole website rather sounds like a blackmail. I'm not a big fan of systemd (anymore) either. but forking is not a solution to the init-system problem et al.

AndyKelley 12y ago

"shell scripts that are readable" ...are they trolling?

ausjke 12y ago

I'm for this move, choice is _always_ good, be it systemd or anything else.

ThinkBeat 12y ago

The person(s) who wrote up this little hissy fit, does not seem able to, nor want to, invest the effort to create and maintain a fork. "Unless you meet our demands, we shall fork". More like "You gotta do what I say, or I am going to scream shout and bang my hands against the wall for a while". or "Please someone, fork Debian in the way we want it, and spend your time and energy maintaining it, because we cant be bothered to". Also, disagreeing with the direction of Debian is not a risky move. Why not sign your names to it? Is this again because you wish to avoid any personal responsibility and work?. If you are well known in the Unix/Linux/Oss community signing your name would give weight to the hissyfit.

ThinkBeat 12y ago

click170 12y ago

So, all I've really heard about Systemd are arguments from proponents and complaints from opponents, and based on that alone it's difficult to get an idea of the true merits of one vs the other because rarely does any one comment lay out all the Pros and Cons for the different init systems. So I went searching, and found this Page. It probably isn't complete, and probably comes at this from a single perspective though. http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Talk:Comparison_of_init_systems http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Talk:Comparison_of_init_systems I am interested in any other comparisons that you believe is a good representation of both sides. I just want to fully understand the two before making a choice. Edit: Removed references to there only being 2 options, there are multiple init systems. Edit: Additional comparison from the perspective of someone involved with Systemd - http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/why.html http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/why.html and A Unix.StackExchange question asking the same thing with a variety of answers. http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5877/what-are-the-pros-cons-of-upstart-and-systemd http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5877/what-are-the-pr...

chias 12y ago

Please fork Debian. I find it very difficult to get behind a movement whose primary complains are that the status quo is "a slap in the face to the _____ philosophy" and "betrays the _____ philosophy" and so on. If you want to sway me, you have to tell me why your way is better. The alternative is "offensive" to you? I cannot begin to describe how much I don't care. You can tell a lot about a movement by those they stand with, and you've listed your them as "Harbinger of the Linux Apocalypse", a boycott, and finally something that does nothing but mock those it disagrees with. I mean you may be bringing up valid points but curb the drama, eh? So I'm all for a fork. That is the point of open source, no? Go on and make a fork and if it's awesome people will use it, otherwise people won't. And maybe then we can curtail the endless arguments about this in Debian. But in spite of the title this article, it really didn't read like it was asking if we should fork Debian. It read like it was asking people to pressure Debian to follow the authors' agendas, with a threat (?) of making a fork if it didn't.

VLM 12y ago
The problem is most of us are just quietly moving to freebsd.
spb 12y ago
> It read like it was asking people to pressure Debian to follow the authors' agendas, with a threat (?) of making a fork if it didn't. This. The point of this site seems to be the author begging Debian not to make him fork, because that would be such an imposition on him. It's the same threat as a child threatening to run away from home (except that parents have a reason to care about their child's life).