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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

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.
      - e7620 12y ago
        In May 2004, a Debian packet maintainer (Eduard Bloch) started to send repeated personal insults to Jörg Schilling after one of Bloch's patch requests against mkisofs was rejected because it was full of bugs. In March 2006, a group of Debian maintainers started to attack the cdrtools project. The latter attacks have been based on the fact that cdrtools was licensed under the GPL. As a result, on May 15th 2006 most projects from the cdrtools project bundle have been relicensed under CDDL (giving more freedom to users than the GPL does). At the same time, an important amount of additional code (DVD support code from Jörg Schilling and a Reed Solomon decoder from Heiko Eißfeldt) has been added to the freely published sources. In summer 2006, the attacks from the group of Debian maintainers escalated and in September 2006, these people created something they call a fork from cdrtools. They soon added a lot of bugs and this way turned the "fork" into a questionable experiment. The last work on this "fork" has been done eight months later on May 6th 2007, then the leader of the attacks stopped his efforts on the fork and instead started to advertize for nerolinux. During the Debian project activity, the source code distributed by Debian was modified in a way that violates GPL and Copyright and makes it impossible to legally distribute this "fork" called "cdrkit". There is no license problem with the original cdrtools.
        _delirium 12y ago
        Ok, we can add that: there was also a debate about a cd-r/cd-rw app, spanning a period roughly 7-10 years ago. I'm not arguing that there has never been an acrimonious debate regarding a Debian package, just that it involves a vanishingly small proportion of packages. So few that I mostly only hear about these things via places like Slashdot (or a comment like this one).
        e7620 12y ago
        Ok, I agree with you entirely, just a quick response because I was quoting and so have the responsibility to avoid distorting other people's words. This didn't happen 7-10 years ago, that's when it started, but this continued happening until 2 or 3 years ago. I hope all is clear now. """ Ask your Linux distributor to include recent originals instead of broken forks. Tell them that you like to decide yourself which program you choose. Whether it is the fork or whether it is the original program depends on which package works better. [...] The following Linux distributions currently work against the freedom of their users: Debian, RedHat, Fedora If you know of other unfree distributions, please report. The following Linux distributions currently grant their users the freedom to select the better CD/DVD/Blu-Ray writing software: Slackware, Gentoo, OpenSuSE, Ark Linux
  - Lai0chee 12y ago
    I gave up on Debian after they've renamed Firefox to Iceweasel.
    - Lai0chee 12y ago
      Yessss, just down vote me for sharing my personal opinion.
    - Xylakant 12y ago
      Why that? AFAIK, they were not allowed to use the name firefox since their version of firefox contains or used to contain unofficial patches and mozilla forbids the use of the name "firefox" in that case. Renaming was one of the options, dropping the patches the other.
      - Lai0chee 12y ago
        How do other distros solve this "issue"?
        Xylakant 12y ago
        AFAIK, they do not include unofficial patches.
        _delirium 12y ago
        Some do, but they have them Mozilla-approved. Vendor-specific patches are allowed in a product called "Firefox", if Mozilla approves the patches before release. I believe Red Hat is one vendor that does that. Debian won't agree to include a package that needs third-party approval of modifications, though.
        Xylakant 12y ago
        I'm sorry about the miswording - I meant "unoffical" as in "not officially approved". Thanks for the correction.
        12y ago
yaantc 12y ago
Then be happy: the result of the vote is a clear majority of Debian developers saying "no more politics on this init topic" (by rejecting this GR as uneeded). In all group of a given size there's bound to be some amount of politics, even if it's desirable to keep it low. What's specific to Debian is that 1) it's big 2) it's fully open. That makes any emotionally loaded discussion noisy and widely heard. One just has to understand, accept and keep cool about this. Sausage taste best when you don't know how they're made for sure, but I still like the Debian sausage anyway ;)
- exarch 12y ago
  >the result of the vote is a clear majority of Debian developers saying "no more politics on this init topic" No, it's a thin majority of devs saying, "lets not make a decision of any kind, so please continue fighting these political battles amongst yourselves". Just wait for Jessie, you'll see. Package dependencies are going to become the next huge political football.
_delirium 12y ago
Eh, if you're worried about politics of the form of resignations/splits/forks and their impact on technical and social decisions, I'm not sure where in free software you can go. The BSD world has had its share of strong disagreements and resignations, which is why for example Theo de Raadt is no longer a NetBSD developer, and Matthew Dillon is no longer a FreeBSD committer. Though the BSD scene is as bit more stable at the moment than it was a few years ago.
- clarry 12y ago
  > Eh, if you're worried about politics of the form of resignations/splits/forks Splits, forks, and resignations sure do happen. However, it doesn't require votes, committees, lobby groups, rants, arguments and flamewars on blogs, bugs and mailing lists, complete with news coverage of the drama. It doesn't need to drag on forever... I think that's the part that makes it very much look like politics.
stefantalpalaru 12y ago
Try Gentoo if you're not happy with FreeBSD.
danielweber 12y ago
"Politics" is how humans interact with each other. It's often ugly because humans don't have nice interfaces. Any project of more than 2 people has politics.
bitmatrix 12y ago
>I don't have a problem with systemd from a technical perspective http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/commit/?id=036eeac5a1799fa2c0ae11a14d8c667b5d303189 http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/commit/?id=036ee...
- badgersandjam 12y ago
  Ah c'mon at least try a bit harder. '''password''' is defined as: char password[LINE_MAX]; So that's preventing a buffer overflow and is perfectly fine. LINE_MAX is a POSIX thing: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/limits.h.html http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/limi... There's no one putting a silly limit on password length there. I worked that out in 2 mins flat. Bear in mind I haven't even looked at the systemd source code before. Edit: you know I've actually read some of that code and it's pretty nice.

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.
    - e7620 12y ago
      In May 2004, a Debian packet maintainer (Eduard Bloch) started to send repeated personal insults to Jörg Schilling after one of Bloch's patch requests against mkisofs was rejected because it was full of bugs. In March 2006, a group of Debian maintainers started to attack the cdrtools project. The latter attacks have been based on the fact that cdrtools was licensed under the GPL. As a result, on May 15th 2006 most projects from the cdrtools project bundle have been relicensed under CDDL (giving more freedom to users than the GPL does). At the same time, an important amount of additional code (DVD support code from Jörg Schilling and a Reed Solomon decoder from Heiko Eißfeldt) has been added to the freely published sources. In summer 2006, the attacks from the group of Debian maintainers escalated and in September 2006, these people created something they call a fork from cdrtools. They soon added a lot of bugs and this way turned the "fork" into a questionable experiment. The last work on this "fork" has been done eight months later on May 6th 2007, then the leader of the attacks stopped his efforts on the fork and instead started to advertize for nerolinux. During the Debian project activity, the source code distributed by Debian was modified in a way that violates GPL and Copyright and makes it impossible to legally distribute this "fork" called "cdrkit". There is no license problem with the original cdrtools.
      - _delirium 12y ago
        Ok, we can add that: there was also a debate about a cd-r/cd-rw app, spanning a period roughly 7-10 years ago. I'm not arguing that there has never been an acrimonious debate regarding a Debian package, just that it involves a vanishingly small proportion of packages. So few that I mostly only hear about these things via places like Slashdot (or a comment like this one).
        e7620 12y ago
        Ok, I agree with you entirely, just a quick response because I was quoting and so have the responsibility to avoid distorting other people's words. This didn't happen 7-10 years ago, that's when it started, but this continued happening until 2 or 3 years ago. I hope all is clear now. """ Ask your Linux distributor to include recent originals instead of broken forks. Tell them that you like to decide yourself which program you choose. Whether it is the fork or whether it is the original program depends on which package works better. [...] The following Linux distributions currently work against the freedom of their users: Debian, RedHat, Fedora If you know of other unfree distributions, please report. The following Linux distributions currently grant their users the freedom to select the better CD/DVD/Blu-Ray writing software: Slackware, Gentoo, OpenSuSE, Ark Linux
- Lai0chee 12y ago
  I gave up on Debian after they've renamed Firefox to Iceweasel.
  - Lai0chee 12y ago
    Yessss, just down vote me for sharing my personal opinion.
  - Xylakant 12y ago
    Why that? AFAIK, they were not allowed to use the name firefox since their version of firefox contains or used to contain unofficial patches and mozilla forbids the use of the name "firefox" in that case. Renaming was one of the options, dropping the patches the other.
    - Lai0chee 12y ago
      How do other distros solve this "issue"?
      - Xylakant 12y ago
        AFAIK, they do not include unofficial patches.
        _delirium 12y ago
        Some do, but they have them Mozilla-approved. Vendor-specific patches are allowed in a product called "Firefox", if Mozilla approves the patches before release. I believe Red Hat is one vendor that does that. Debian won't agree to include a package that needs third-party approval of modifications, though.
        Xylakant 12y ago
        I'm sorry about the miswording - I meant "unoffical" as in "not officially approved". Thanks for the correction.
      - 12y ago

yaantc 12y ago

Then be happy: the result of the vote is a clear majority of Debian developers saying "no more politics on this init topic" (by rejecting this GR as uneeded). In all group of a given size there's bound to be some amount of politics, even if it's desirable to keep it low. What's specific to Debian is that 1) it's big 2) it's fully open. That makes any emotionally loaded discussion noisy and widely heard. One just has to understand, accept and keep cool about this. Sausage taste best when you don't know how they're made for sure, but I still like the Debian sausage anyway ;)

exarch 12y ago
>the result of the vote is a clear majority of Debian developers saying "no more politics on this init topic" No, it's a thin majority of devs saying, "lets not make a decision of any kind, so please continue fighting these political battles amongst yourselves". Just wait for Jessie, you'll see. Package dependencies are going to become the next huge political football.

_delirium 12y ago

Eh, if you're worried about politics of the form of resignations/splits/forks and their impact on technical and social decisions, I'm not sure where in free software you can go. The BSD world has had its share of strong disagreements and resignations, which is why for example Theo de Raadt is no longer a NetBSD developer, and Matthew Dillon is no longer a FreeBSD committer. Though the BSD scene is as bit more stable at the moment than it was a few years ago.

clarry 12y ago
> Eh, if you're worried about politics of the form of resignations/splits/forks Splits, forks, and resignations sure do happen. However, it doesn't require votes, committees, lobby groups, rants, arguments and flamewars on blogs, bugs and mailing lists, complete with news coverage of the drama. It doesn't need to drag on forever... I think that's the part that makes it very much look like politics.

stefantalpalaru 12y ago

Try Gentoo if you're not happy with FreeBSD.

danielweber 12y ago

"Politics" is how humans interact with each other. It's often ugly because humans don't have nice interfaces. Any project of more than 2 people has politics.

bitmatrix 12y ago

>I don't have a problem with systemd from a technical perspective http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/commit/?id=036eeac5a1799fa2c0ae11a14d8c667b5d303189 http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/commit/?id=036ee...

badgersandjam 12y ago
Ah c'mon at least try a bit harder. '''password''' is defined as: char password[LINE_MAX]; So that's preventing a buffer overflow and is perfectly fine. LINE_MAX is a POSIX thing: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/limits.h.html http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/limi... There's no one putting a silly limit on password length there. I worked that out in 2 mins flat. Bear in mind I haven't even looked at the systemd source code before. Edit: you know I've actually read some of that code and it's pretty nice.