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Ian Jackson Resigns from Debian Technical Committee

127 points by onestone 12y ago

privong 12y ago
Can someone provide context for this? I am not familiar with Debian and do not know the back-story. Also, I assume this is not directly related to the recent resignation[0] of Heen. But does the resignation of two people (whose resignations were deemed worthy of being voted to near the top of the HN front page) within a few day span suggest concernening structural issues or is this just poisson statistics at work? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8617874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8617874
- walterbell 12y ago
  Proposal: https://lwn.net/Articles/616571/ https://lwn.net/Articles/616571/ Vote: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/11/msg00891.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/11/msg00891.html
  - pilif 12y ago
    I get that there's a lot of politics in Debian. I also get that systemd is a controversial topic, but is this really a vote that just came out with the result that no vote was needed? How many votes will there be about systemd in Debian that will turn out inconclusive? Also, I have yet to see a single article of somebody running into all the various horror scenarios envisioned by adversaries of systemd. I mean: Multiple distros have already switched and there still aren't that many blog posts about systems dying in flames because of the switch. I would so love for this discussion to happen based on technical merits and (by now actually available) real world experiences than FUD (on both sides)
    - _delirium 12y ago
      The outcome of the vote was something roughly like, "The General Resolution (GR) process is not the right venue to resolve this issue". The GR process has traditionally been used rarely, and mainly for "meta" things (deciding how Debian Developers are approved, that kind of thing). So it's not a huge surprise that sentiment against involving the GR process in the "init wars" was high.
      - VLM 12y ago
        All GRs also have a meta-option of "more discussion needed". Sort of a "no confidence" vote on all the candidates/options although in actual use unless it comes in first, when ranking it creates a border something like "absolutely positively no way". Technically the "no GR needed" people were abusing the system and should have just put "more discussion needed" as their highest rank. Its the same concept but this is a "funny" rephrasing of the same concept. Perhaps the only thing everyone on all sides can agree on is funny, is that "further discussion" didn't get many votes. Somewhere last night I read a quote about there's hundreds on each side but only nine masochists who voted for "further discussion"
    - yaantc 12y ago
      I think this is the last vote related to systemd for a while. There can only be a single default init system obviously, so a vote was required there. It was a hot topic, no need to rehash this. The second vote, initiated by Ian Jackson, was controversial from the start. A lot of people were tired about the init topic and wanted to move on, and didn't want the GR. And they got the majority here: the result of the vote is "General Resolution is not required". This is the majority clearly expressing it's now time to move on. And to be honest I'm happy about this, although I'm just a Debian user and do not vote. With this, it's now unlikely to be another vote. And this desire to move on can be now felt on all sides of the argument, hence the resignations and people moving to other things. I just want to point out that except for Joey Hess (really sorry about that) all are still remaining part of Debian. They just move out of the TC (or systemd maintainership) but are still DD, working on some parts of Debian. And now, hopefully, everyone can cool off and move to other things too.
    - deong 12y ago
      If adopting systemd actually broke everything, then of course they'd be doing something else instead. The anti-systemd crowd looks at this issue the way you might look at someone who took a working piece of software, and then did a completely correct transformation of all loops and conditionals to use bare gotos. It's not incorrect to do that. Nothing crashes. It might actually even be faster or use less memory if you were sufficiently clever about it. However, the argument is that you just bought yourself a future full of pain and misery for not a big enough present gain. Look at poor technical decisions from the past. The earliest browsers were encouraged to be liberal in what they accepted (an adaptation of Postel's law to HTML parsing). I think a lot of people today regard that as a decision that probably held the internet back by a decade -- think of the time we wasted writing compatibility layers and artificially restricting what our web pages could do. But it wasn't immediately obvious that that was the case. It took 10 or 15 years for the implications of that decision to really hit home. What happens next is not a collapse of the world. It's a slow accrual of follow-up decisions that are needed to keep the lights on, until one day you look at the Eldritch horror you've had to build over 10 years and go, "Jesus, that was a bone-headed idea." Maybe they're completely wrong in opposing it, but systemd isn't anywhere near old enough to have decided that just yet.
      - walterbell 12y ago
        Someone needs to dedicate an academic thesis to documenting how systemd advocates pulled off their coup, and what improvements are needed to OSS governance structures to prevent a repeat. By the time the pain becomes visible, no one will remember how the actual decision got made.
        digi_owl 12y ago
        A bunch of devs scratching itches, Just so happened that their scratching sticks where tired together and covered in super glue.
        the_why_of_y 12y ago
        Yes definitely, and the thesis should discuss in detail the role of the Illuminati in getting systemd adopted, and provide a by-the-minute protocol of what went down at Area 51.
    - digi_owl 12y ago
      I keep seeing the odd one over at G+. One i found some months back when the whole systemd issue got my attention was of someone that ended up doing a parallel arch install to read the journald logs. Going from memory the problem seemed to be that he could not run the required command to get the logs dumped into readable form without systemd running as pid1. And systemd was refusing to boot for no apparent reason. Thats the kind of thing that will get seasoned admins, that are used to cat being all you need to get at the logs, backing away with a "no way, no how".
      - teddyh 12y ago
        This “binary logs!” thing is approaching FUD-like levels. “The logs” will not be binary. The logs will be where they have always been, in the format they have always been in. Sure, journald has some binary logs of its own, but it puts all the log messages also into the normal syslog daemon, so nothing changes. As far as I can tell, the whole brouhaha started when there was a bug in the packaging of syslog-ng so it would not start properly after installing systemd. Since syslog-ng was not running, the only logs left were journald’s binary logs, and people assumed that “systemd ate my log files!”. No. It was a bug, the bug was not even in systemd, your log files will always be where you want them. Unless you uninstall your syslog daemon, but then you are on your own.
        jude- 12y ago
        Either I'm using journald to log to a binary format, or I'm having journald forward everything to syslog. If I'm trying to avoid binary logs in the first place, then there's really no point for journald to be running--just forward directly to syslog in the first place. Journald is just dead weight in this use-case.
        teddyh 12y ago
        Actually, journald exists for a number of reasons, listed here: https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1IC9yOXj7j6cdLLxWEBAGRL6wl97tFxgjLUEHIX3MSTs https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1IC9yOXj7j6cdLLxWEBA...
- danieldk 12y ago
  You missed some: https://lwn.net/Articles/621895/ https://lwn.net/Articles/621895/ https://lwn.net/Articles/621003/ https://lwn.net/Articles/621003/ https://lwn.net/Articles/620879/ https://lwn.net/Articles/620879/ https://lwn.net/Articles/620878/ https://lwn.net/Articles/620878/ https://lwn.net/Articles/619749/ https://lwn.net/Articles/619749/ They are related in the sense that are all fall-out of the struggle to integrate or block systemd in Debian and/or how it exposed some problems with the Debian constitution. It's a shame to see that so much talent is lost and frustrated over what in my eyes seems to be a small issue. systemd and Upstart are both a large improvement over the System V init scripts. So, it's quite logical that it should be replaced at some point. Since systemd seems to have the most traction in other major distributions and upstream software, it makes sense to make that the default, while making it still possible to switch to Upstart et al. if someone wants to (at the risk of losing support for some upstream software). If it turns out in three years that systemd is a dead-end, rip it out, and use whatever is better then. Distributions did that with devfs, the old hotplug scripts, egcs (which was merged back in mainline), etc.
  - zaphar 12y ago
    I get the impression which is admittedly informed by very cursory examination of the issues that ripping systemd out may be far more difficult than ripping say, Upstart. Systemd seems to have taken the approach of owning far more than just the Systemv init stuff and that removing it might entail sweeping changes to huge parts of a linux distribution. Systemd does seem to be pushing somewhat of a lock-in strategy and for many in the linux community that rubs them the wrong way. Personally I don't really care much either way.
    - danieldk 12y ago
      I get the impression which is admittedly informed by very cursory examination of the issues that ripping systemd out may be far more difficult than ripping say, Upstart. Definitely. But this is probably true for many things at a low-level in the stack. E.g., it would also be hard to replace D-BUS or the Linux kernel (as evidenced by the fact that Debian/KFreeBSD will probably not be in Jessy). I agree that it is a worry. But you can never make progress without taking any risks. We have tried 'fully isolated init' for years and it does not really work for modern systems/applications.
- pjc50 12y ago
  Ian Jackson has been involved with Debian for 20 years and is not one to back down easily in an argument or quit over trivia.
CJefferson 12y ago
This is the 3rd person to resign in 10 days (Colin Watson, Russ Allbery and now Ian Jackson).
- RexRollman 12y ago
  and Joey Hess.
  - onestone 12y ago
    And Tollef Fog Heen (partial resignation), but he and Joey were not Technical Committee members.
  - cgh 12y ago
    According to his blog, he didn't resign because of systemd. In fact, he seems to quite like it: https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/a_programmable_alarm_clock_using_systemd/ https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/a_programmable_alarm_clock_usi...
- danohuiginn 12y ago
  That's 3 of the 8-member Technical Committee, which is the group that's ultimately responsible for all technical decisions in Debian.
  - _delirium 12y ago
    That's a bit of an overstatement; it's responsible for very few technical decisions in Debian, and doesn't normally have even a theoretical ultimate-decision-maker role of regularly reviewing or steering them. Their only role is technical dispute-resolution, and they are supposed to wade into even that as minimally as possible. Most technical decisions are made by a mixture of individual package maintainers, the Debian Project Leader and release-management team, and informal consensus-building. To the extent there's an "ultimate" technical decision-maker, I would say for the majority of issues, the release team working with the project leader functions in that role.
  - morsch 12y ago
badgersandjam 12y ago
This is a confidence builder for migrating my two servers to FreeBSD from Debian. I don't have a problem with systemd from a technical perspective but I do have a big problem with politics getting in the way of progress or forcing hands.
- Lai0chee 12y ago
  IMHO Debian's problem is not systemd the problem are the crazy politics. :-(
  - _delirium 12y ago
    Depending on what you're interested in, I don't think you need to be involved in politics in the Debian world. I've been a minor participant for years and haven't run into much. A huge proportion of decisions, even some fairly complex ones, are made without fanfare. Most of that happens in the discussion threads of individual bugs, on the various collaborative-maintainership mailing lists, at Debcon, etc. There are definitely issues that do have a lot of fanfare, but they are fairly uncommon.
    - e7620 12y ago
      cough FFmpeg cough
      - _delirium 12y ago
        Yeah, that's one of the 1% or so of politically-tinged bits of the project. The ones I can recall from the past few years are: systemd, ffmpeg vs. libav, libjpeg vs. libjpeg-turbo, and whether to ship GFDL-licensed documentation with invariant sections. Fortunately I don't really care about any of those. :-) The systemd debate is the only one of those that's actually a bit interesting to follow imo. One quasi-political issue that has somewhat more pervasive importance is the general relationship between Debian packages and the Ubuntu packages derived from them, which occasionally is a point of friction if the maintainers have different goals. In most cases it isn't a big problem though, afaict. There are reasonable number of cases where it's even the same maintainer.
ClashTheBunny 12y ago
Ladies and gentlemen, this is open source at work. Open source empowers people and if you don't like it some way, you have the power to move on. There are so many other platforms that this will never be possible on. Don't like something in Windows, tough. Don't like something in OS X, tough. Don't like something in Linux, xBSD, etc? Fork or go home. I'm excited to see what happens next and if it will be folded back into Debian in the future.
- eots 12y ago
  I'm sorry but I really don't understand this comment. If you don't like something in an open-source project you can walk away, but if you don't like something in a proprietary project you can't?
  - stinos 12y ago
    Also kind of the opposite of the open source 'Don't like it? Fix it yourself' mantra. (of course there's lots of truth in that, but people sometimes throw this at me when filing bug reports for a project I know nothing about except how to use it, not even the language it is written in, which make them come over as extremist crusaders:)
- lmm 12y ago
  We used to say "linux is about choice". It was a point of pride for Debian that it ran on dozens of platforms - multiple architectures, multiple kernels even - that multiple desktop environments were available, multiple MTAs, multiple webservers, all fully supported, all benefiting from the shared infrastructure and spirit of collaboration. Debian runs on enormous Itanium servers and tiny ARM chips, and it doesn't need a fork to do so. It's sad to see an end to this era - and it's an end that's been brought not by Dr Jackson (who's been part of Debian for decades) but by SystemD abusing the spirit of openness, following the letter of open source but not the spirit of open standards, of allowing a diversity of solutions to blossom and letting users mix and match whatever best suits their needs. There will be a fork; there are enough people who care about good engineering not to let this lie (unless they all turn to FreeBSD). But it's sad that it's come to this, and it shouldn't have happened this way.
ausjke 12y ago
I'm very concerned, systemd becomes system-Destruction, people are leaving for BSDs likely because of it too. It's very sad to watch this, systemd is too intrusive with the strong support from the OSS Microsoft, that is, the Redhat behind the scene. No other project can be so controversial so fast, it's really bad.
- e7620 12y ago
  I followed a link to webarchive and, coincidentally, ended up on the slashdot homepage from about 2000 I think, RedHat was becoming a threat to Linux, just like Microsoft, and it's interesting to me how well they predicted the future, they noticed that GPL, open source... (as Microsoft's github account shows) wouldn't stop a company from maneuvering, entrenching its position and dominating the marketplace.
pmoriarty 12y ago
systemd is a cancer. I am glad some are taking a firm stand against forcing it down the throats of the Linux community.
- walterbell 12y ago
  At least the vote is on the record. Time will tell whether this is another Elop moment.
peterwwillis 12y ago
If all these people dropping out of Debian is due to systemd, somebody needs to step up and force some kind of compromise. (I have no clue who; does Debian have a Dictator For Life position?) I may not like systemd, but I sure as shit would find some way to coexist with it rather than drive people away from a project.
- lmm 12y ago
  > If all these people dropping out of Debian is due to systemd, somebody needs to step up and force some kind of compromise. That's what Ian Jackson proposed - that while systemd would be the default, Debian would fully support users using other systems (bugs that only affected SysV users would be considered equally critical). He was voted down, hence his resignation. The systemd folks don't seem to be interested in compromise.
  - Xylakant 12y ago
    From what I gathered following the discussion the problematic option was actually "no package that depends on systemd and does not provide an alternative that works with sysV is permitted". That would require that somebody provides the code to make the alternative way viable, work that neither the upstream would do nor the maintainers were willing to shoulder. It's fine to make that demand, but if you do, IMHO you should also step forward and say "and because this is what we propose, we will be providing said code."
    - teddyh 12y ago
      Yes. Saying “We permit systemd to exist in Debian, but we will not permit any packages which uses systemd’s extra features or advantages.” is hardly a compromise.
      - wtbob 12y ago
        Neither, of course, is saying, 'we will permit packages to fail to work with any init system other than systemd.'
toyg 12y ago
If I had a penny for every Debian bust-up I've read about on LWN... Debian will survive. That constitutional document and those processes people like to moan about all the time, are the same document and processes that ensured Debian's success, solidity and continuous development. For every great engineer stepping down, I'm sure Debian will attract new talent who wants to make a difference. For every controversial decision like on systemd, there will be a time when that decision will be either vindicated or corrected. Like the Linux kernel, the Debian project is now too big to die because of a single but controversial technical choice.
- e7620 12y ago
  systemd is not an init system, that's how it started, but they state they want to comprise a whole OS. Debian may seem too big to die, but they are slowly being commoditized away, because RedHat is known to offer better sales force, better service and support: How do you differentiate your product if your core mission is to ensure that your product operates exactly as your competition? The bottom line is that you don't
  - hga 12y ago
    "because RedHat is known to offer better sales force, better service and support" And tremendously longer support periods. Right now I'm helping a non-profit move from squeeze and XCP/XenCenter (which is CentOS), which I initially set up for them, to wheezy. And we're looking rather enviously at the RHEL/CentOS support periods. Even before this systemd debacle, something else was looking likely for when wheezy support ends.
    - e7620 12y ago
      Don't quote me on this, but I recall reading from official channels that the last Debian version without mandatory systemd is going to see its support period indefinitely extended for a long time. Good luck! :)
      - hga 12y ago
kolanos 12y ago
I think this is only the beginning. The Linux community is in the midst of an identity crisis. Linux has a well established history of fragmentation. Fragmentation represents choice, flexibility, modularity and so forth. It also represents control for the individual user. For a long time, this was considered Linux's biggest strength. It was the anti-Windows. However, in the past few years a unification movement has grown, largely inspired by OSX. I think GNOME has pushed the hardest in this direction, systemd is just the latest battle. The success of Ubuntu has also added fuel to the unification fire as it continues to break away from the old guard and build their own unified experience (Unity). While I think unification has its merits, it will continue to meet significant resistance as long as there is still a large contingent of fragmentists (just made that term up). I think it will come to a head in the near future and the Linux community will break into two sides; the unification side and the fragmentation side. The irony is that the unification side stands as much a chance of fragmentation, since it appears Ubuntu will continue to move away from GNOME. But so is the nature of OSS.
anonbanker 12y ago
That means today is the last time I install a debian-derivative on a machine. I mean, I had switched to gentoo for other reasons, but when the founder steps down over systemd, this means we're seeing a quiet war being waged. And it isn't by the guy who put the Ian in Debian.
- teddyh 12y ago
  Ian Jackson had nothing to do with the founding of Debian, Ian Murdock created (and named) Debian.

127 points by onestone 12y ago

Can someone provide context for this? I am not familiar with Debian and do not know the back-story. Also, I assume this is not directly related to the recent resignation[0] of Heen. But does the resignation of two people (whose resignations were deemed worthy of being voted to near the top of the HN front page) within a few day span suggest concernening structural issues or is this just poisson statistics at work? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8617874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8617874

walterbell 12y ago
Proposal: https://lwn.net/Articles/616571/ https://lwn.net/Articles/616571/ Vote: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/11/msg00891.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/11/msg00891.html
- pilif 12y ago
  I get that there's a lot of politics in Debian. I also get that systemd is a controversial topic, but is this really a vote that just came out with the result that no vote was needed? How many votes will there be about systemd in Debian that will turn out inconclusive? Also, I have yet to see a single article of somebody running into all the various horror scenarios envisioned by adversaries of systemd. I mean: Multiple distros have already switched and there still aren't that many blog posts about systems dying in flames because of the switch. I would so love for this discussion to happen based on technical merits and (by now actually available) real world experiences than FUD (on both sides)
  - _delirium 12y ago
    The outcome of the vote was something roughly like, "The General Resolution (GR) process is not the right venue to resolve this issue". The GR process has traditionally been used rarely, and mainly for "meta" things (deciding how Debian Developers are approved, that kind of thing). So it's not a huge surprise that sentiment against involving the GR process in the "init wars" was high.
    - VLM 12y ago
      All GRs also have a meta-option of "more discussion needed". Sort of a "no confidence" vote on all the candidates/options although in actual use unless it comes in first, when ranking it creates a border something like "absolutely positively no way". Technically the "no GR needed" people were abusing the system and should have just put "more discussion needed" as their highest rank. Its the same concept but this is a "funny" rephrasing of the same concept. Perhaps the only thing everyone on all sides can agree on is funny, is that "further discussion" didn't get many votes. Somewhere last night I read a quote about there's hundreds on each side but only nine masochists who voted for "further discussion"
  - yaantc 12y ago
    I think this is the last vote related to systemd for a while. There can only be a single default init system obviously, so a vote was required there. It was a hot topic, no need to rehash this. The second vote, initiated by Ian Jackson, was controversial from the start. A lot of people were tired about the init topic and wanted to move on, and didn't want the GR. And they got the majority here: the result of the vote is "General Resolution is not required". This is the majority clearly expressing it's now time to move on. And to be honest I'm happy about this, although I'm just a Debian user and do not vote. With this, it's now unlikely to be another vote. And this desire to move on can be now felt on all sides of the argument, hence the resignations and people moving to other things. I just want to point out that except for Joey Hess (really sorry about that) all are still remaining part of Debian. They just move out of the TC (or systemd maintainership) but are still DD, working on some parts of Debian. And now, hopefully, everyone can cool off and move to other things too.
  - deong 12y ago
    If adopting systemd actually broke everything, then of course they'd be doing something else instead. The anti-systemd crowd looks at this issue the way you might look at someone who took a working piece of software, and then did a completely correct transformation of all loops and conditionals to use bare gotos. It's not incorrect to do that. Nothing crashes. It might actually even be faster or use less memory if you were sufficiently clever about it. However, the argument is that you just bought yourself a future full of pain and misery for not a big enough present gain. Look at poor technical decisions from the past. The earliest browsers were encouraged to be liberal in what they accepted (an adaptation of Postel's law to HTML parsing). I think a lot of people today regard that as a decision that probably held the internet back by a decade -- think of the time we wasted writing compatibility layers and artificially restricting what our web pages could do. But it wasn't immediately obvious that that was the case. It took 10 or 15 years for the implications of that decision to really hit home. What happens next is not a collapse of the world. It's a slow accrual of follow-up decisions that are needed to keep the lights on, until one day you look at the Eldritch horror you've had to build over 10 years and go, "Jesus, that was a bone-headed idea." Maybe they're completely wrong in opposing it, but systemd isn't anywhere near old enough to have decided that just yet.
    - walterbell 12y ago
      Someone needs to dedicate an academic thesis to documenting how systemd advocates pulled off their coup, and what improvements are needed to OSS governance structures to prevent a repeat. By the time the pain becomes visible, no one will remember how the actual decision got made.
      - digi_owl 12y ago
        A bunch of devs scratching itches, Just so happened that their scratching sticks where tired together and covered in super glue.
      - the_why_of_y 12y ago
        Yes definitely, and the thesis should discuss in detail the role of the Illuminati in getting systemd adopted, and provide a by-the-minute protocol of what went down at Area 51.
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    I keep seeing the odd one over at G+. One i found some months back when the whole systemd issue got my attention was of someone that ended up doing a parallel arch install to read the journald logs. Going from memory the problem seemed to be that he could not run the required command to get the logs dumped into readable form without systemd running as pid1. And systemd was refusing to boot for no apparent reason. Thats the kind of thing that will get seasoned admins, that are used to cat being all you need to get at the logs, backing away with a "no way, no how".
    - teddyh 12y ago
      This “binary logs!” thing is approaching FUD-like levels. “The logs” will not be binary. The logs will be where they have always been, in the format they have always been in. Sure, journald has some binary logs of its own, but it puts all the log messages also into the normal syslog daemon, so nothing changes. As far as I can tell, the whole brouhaha started when there was a bug in the packaging of syslog-ng so it would not start properly after installing systemd. Since syslog-ng was not running, the only logs left were journald’s binary logs, and people assumed that “systemd ate my log files!”. No. It was a bug, the bug was not even in systemd, your log files will always be where you want them. Unless you uninstall your syslog daemon, but then you are on your own.
      - jude- 12y ago
        Either I'm using journald to log to a binary format, or I'm having journald forward everything to syslog. If I'm trying to avoid binary logs in the first place, then there's really no point for journald to be running--just forward directly to syslog in the first place. Journald is just dead weight in this use-case.
        teddyh 12y ago
        Actually, journald exists for a number of reasons, listed here: https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1IC9yOXj7j6cdLLxWEBAGRL6wl97tFxgjLUEHIX3MSTs https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1IC9yOXj7j6cdLLxWEBA...
danieldk 12y ago
You missed some: https://lwn.net/Articles/621895/ https://lwn.net/Articles/621895/ https://lwn.net/Articles/621003/ https://lwn.net/Articles/621003/ https://lwn.net/Articles/620879/ https://lwn.net/Articles/620879/ https://lwn.net/Articles/620878/ https://lwn.net/Articles/620878/ https://lwn.net/Articles/619749/ https://lwn.net/Articles/619749/ They are related in the sense that are all fall-out of the struggle to integrate or block systemd in Debian and/or how it exposed some problems with the Debian constitution. It's a shame to see that so much talent is lost and frustrated over what in my eyes seems to be a small issue. systemd and Upstart are both a large improvement over the System V init scripts. So, it's quite logical that it should be replaced at some point. Since systemd seems to have the most traction in other major distributions and upstream software, it makes sense to make that the default, while making it still possible to switch to Upstart et al. if someone wants to (at the risk of losing support for some upstream software). If it turns out in three years that systemd is a dead-end, rip it out, and use whatever is better then. Distributions did that with devfs, the old hotplug scripts, egcs (which was merged back in mainline), etc.
- zaphar 12y ago
  I get the impression which is admittedly informed by very cursory examination of the issues that ripping systemd out may be far more difficult than ripping say, Upstart. Systemd seems to have taken the approach of owning far more than just the Systemv init stuff and that removing it might entail sweeping changes to huge parts of a linux distribution. Systemd does seem to be pushing somewhat of a lock-in strategy and for many in the linux community that rubs them the wrong way. Personally I don't really care much either way.
  - danieldk 12y ago
    I get the impression which is admittedly informed by very cursory examination of the issues that ripping systemd out may be far more difficult than ripping say, Upstart. Definitely. But this is probably true for many things at a low-level in the stack. E.g., it would also be hard to replace D-BUS or the Linux kernel (as evidenced by the fact that Debian/KFreeBSD will probably not be in Jessy). I agree that it is a worry. But you can never make progress without taking any risks. We have tried 'fully isolated init' for years and it does not really work for modern systems/applications.
pjc50 12y ago
Ian Jackson has been involved with Debian for 20 years and is not one to back down easily in an argument or quit over trivia.

CJefferson 12y ago

This is the 3rd person to resign in 10 days (Colin Watson, Russ Allbery and now Ian Jackson).

RexRollman 12y ago
and Joey Hess.
- onestone 12y ago
  And Tollef Fog Heen (partial resignation), but he and Joey were not Technical Committee members.
- cgh 12y ago
  According to his blog, he didn't resign because of systemd. In fact, he seems to quite like it: https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/a_programmable_alarm_clock_using_systemd/ https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/a_programmable_alarm_clock_usi...
danohuiginn 12y ago
That's 3 of the 8-member Technical Committee, which is the group that's ultimately responsible for all technical decisions in Debian.
- _delirium 12y ago
  That's a bit of an overstatement; it's responsible for very few technical decisions in Debian, and doesn't normally have even a theoretical ultimate-decision-maker role of regularly reviewing or steering them. Their only role is technical dispute-resolution, and they are supposed to wade into even that as minimally as possible. Most technical decisions are made by a mixture of individual package maintainers, the Debian Project Leader and release-management team, and informal consensus-building. To the extent there's an "ultimate" technical decision-maker, I would say for the majority of issues, the release team working with the project leader functions in that role.
- morsch 12y ago

badgersandjam 12y ago

This is a confidence builder for migrating my two servers to FreeBSD from Debian. I don't have a problem with systemd from a technical perspective but I do have a big problem with politics getting in the way of progress or forcing hands.

Lai0chee 12y ago
IMHO Debian's problem is not systemd the problem are the crazy politics. :-(
- _delirium 12y ago
  Depending on what you're interested in, I don't think you need to be involved in politics in the Debian world. I've been a minor participant for years and haven't run into much. A huge proportion of decisions, even some fairly complex ones, are made without fanfare. Most of that happens in the discussion threads of individual bugs, on the various collaborative-maintainership mailing lists, at Debcon, etc. There are definitely issues that do have a lot of fanfare, but they are fairly uncommon.
  - e7620 12y ago
    cough FFmpeg cough
    - _delirium 12y ago
      Yeah, that's one of the 1% or so of politically-tinged bits of the project. The ones I can recall from the past few years are: systemd, ffmpeg vs. libav, libjpeg vs. libjpeg-turbo, and whether to ship GFDL-licensed documentation with invariant sections. Fortunately I don't really care about any of those. :-) The systemd debate is the only one of those that's actually a bit interesting to follow imo. One quasi-political issue that has somewhat more pervasive importance is the general relationship between Debian packages and the Ubuntu packages derived from them, which occasionally is a point of friction if the maintainers have different goals. In most cases it isn't a big problem though, afaict. There are reasonable number of cases where it's even the same maintainer.

ClashTheBunny 12y ago

Ladies and gentlemen, this is open source at work. Open source empowers people and if you don't like it some way, you have the power to move on. There are so many other platforms that this will never be possible on. Don't like something in Windows, tough. Don't like something in OS X, tough. Don't like something in Linux, xBSD, etc? Fork or go home. I'm excited to see what happens next and if it will be folded back into Debian in the future.

eots 12y ago
I'm sorry but I really don't understand this comment. If you don't like something in an open-source project you can walk away, but if you don't like something in a proprietary project you can't?
- stinos 12y ago
  Also kind of the opposite of the open source 'Don't like it? Fix it yourself' mantra. (of course there's lots of truth in that, but people sometimes throw this at me when filing bug reports for a project I know nothing about except how to use it, not even the language it is written in, which make them come over as extremist crusaders:)
lmm 12y ago
We used to say "linux is about choice". It was a point of pride for Debian that it ran on dozens of platforms - multiple architectures, multiple kernels even - that multiple desktop environments were available, multiple MTAs, multiple webservers, all fully supported, all benefiting from the shared infrastructure and spirit of collaboration. Debian runs on enormous Itanium servers and tiny ARM chips, and it doesn't need a fork to do so. It's sad to see an end to this era - and it's an end that's been brought not by Dr Jackson (who's been part of Debian for decades) but by SystemD abusing the spirit of openness, following the letter of open source but not the spirit of open standards, of allowing a diversity of solutions to blossom and letting users mix and match whatever best suits their needs. There will be a fork; there are enough people who care about good engineering not to let this lie (unless they all turn to FreeBSD). But it's sad that it's come to this, and it shouldn't have happened this way.

ausjke 12y ago

I'm very concerned, systemd becomes system-Destruction, people are leaving for BSDs likely because of it too. It's very sad to watch this, systemd is too intrusive with the strong support from the OSS Microsoft, that is, the Redhat behind the scene. No other project can be so controversial so fast, it's really bad.

e7620 12y ago
I followed a link to webarchive and, coincidentally, ended up on the slashdot homepage from about 2000 I think, RedHat was becoming a threat to Linux, just like Microsoft, and it's interesting to me how well they predicted the future, they noticed that GPL, open source... (as Microsoft's github account shows) wouldn't stop a company from maneuvering, entrenching its position and dominating the marketplace.

pmoriarty 12y ago

systemd is a cancer. I am glad some are taking a firm stand against forcing it down the throats of the Linux community.

walterbell 12y ago
At least the vote is on the record. Time will tell whether this is another Elop moment.

peterwwillis 12y ago

If all these people dropping out of Debian is due to systemd, somebody needs to step up and force some kind of compromise. (I have no clue who; does Debian have a Dictator For Life position?) I may not like systemd, but I sure as shit would find some way to coexist with it rather than drive people away from a project.

lmm 12y ago
> If all these people dropping out of Debian is due to systemd, somebody needs to step up and force some kind of compromise. That's what Ian Jackson proposed - that while systemd would be the default, Debian would fully support users using other systems (bugs that only affected SysV users would be considered equally critical). He was voted down, hence his resignation. The systemd folks don't seem to be interested in compromise.
- Xylakant 12y ago
  From what I gathered following the discussion the problematic option was actually "no package that depends on systemd and does not provide an alternative that works with sysV is permitted". That would require that somebody provides the code to make the alternative way viable, work that neither the upstream would do nor the maintainers were willing to shoulder. It's fine to make that demand, but if you do, IMHO you should also step forward and say "and because this is what we propose, we will be providing said code."
  - teddyh 12y ago
    Yes. Saying “We permit systemd to exist in Debian, but we will not permit any packages which uses systemd’s extra features or advantages.” is hardly a compromise.
    - wtbob 12y ago
      Neither, of course, is saying, 'we will permit packages to fail to work with any init system other than systemd.'

toyg 12y ago

If I had a penny for every Debian bust-up I've read about on LWN... Debian will survive. That constitutional document and those processes people like to moan about all the time, are the same document and processes that ensured Debian's success, solidity and continuous development. For every great engineer stepping down, I'm sure Debian will attract new talent who wants to make a difference. For every controversial decision like on systemd, there will be a time when that decision will be either vindicated or corrected. Like the Linux kernel, the Debian project is now too big to die because of a single but controversial technical choice.

e7620 12y ago
systemd is not an init system, that's how it started, but they state they want to comprise a whole OS. Debian may seem too big to die, but they are slowly being commoditized away, because RedHat is known to offer better sales force, better service and support: How do you differentiate your product if your core mission is to ensure that your product operates exactly as your competition? The bottom line is that you don't
- hga 12y ago
  "because RedHat is known to offer better sales force, better service and support" And tremendously longer support periods. Right now I'm helping a non-profit move from squeeze and XCP/XenCenter (which is CentOS), which I initially set up for them, to wheezy. And we're looking rather enviously at the RHEL/CentOS support periods. Even before this systemd debacle, something else was looking likely for when wheezy support ends.
  - e7620 12y ago
    Don't quote me on this, but I recall reading from official channels that the last Debian version without mandatory systemd is going to see its support period indefinitely extended for a long time. Good luck! :)
    - hga 12y ago

kolanos 12y ago

I think this is only the beginning. The Linux community is in the midst of an identity crisis. Linux has a well established history of fragmentation. Fragmentation represents choice, flexibility, modularity and so forth. It also represents control for the individual user. For a long time, this was considered Linux's biggest strength. It was the anti-Windows. However, in the past few years a unification movement has grown, largely inspired by OSX. I think GNOME has pushed the hardest in this direction, systemd is just the latest battle. The success of Ubuntu has also added fuel to the unification fire as it continues to break away from the old guard and build their own unified experience (Unity). While I think unification has its merits, it will continue to meet significant resistance as long as there is still a large contingent of fragmentists (just made that term up). I think it will come to a head in the near future and the Linux community will break into two sides; the unification side and the fragmentation side. The irony is that the unification side stands as much a chance of fragmentation, since it appears Ubuntu will continue to move away from GNOME. But so is the nature of OSS.

anonbanker 12y ago

That means today is the last time I install a debian-derivative on a machine. I mean, I had switched to gentoo for other reasons, but when the founder steps down over systemd, this means we're seeing a quiet war being waged. And it isn't by the guy who put the Ian in Debian.

teddyh 12y ago
Ian Jackson had nothing to do with the founding of Debian, Ian Murdock created (and named) Debian.