Users/Developers Threatening Fork Of Debian GNU/Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Users/Developers Threatening Fork Of Debian GNU/Linux

In light of Debian's outlook for using systemd by default, a group of users/developers/administrators are talking about forking Debian GNU/Linux...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTgxNzg

[yoshi314]

I sort of feel they are barking at the wrong tree here.

Sure, debian might sway lots of influence towards systemd, but there are userspace projects adopting systemd already - not just distributions (RHEL with a bunch of popular desktop distributions did their part). Some userspace software is starting to take advantage of systemd, for now it might be just requiring that it is installed, soon it might be expecting it to be pid 1.


Is Debian supposed to take care of every single one of those userspace projects, and - if impossible to make them run without systemd - strip them out of the distribution? Being angry at Debian for systemd and shouting about boycotting it is not noticing the bigger shift in the background. Many big name distros accepted systemd, some offer it as an option, and so are some userspace programs as well. It's getting integrated slowly.

Personally, i think people who want to boycott Debian and fork it are welcome to do so. But i suppose they have no idea how much effort they will eventually have to put in to un-systemd more and more projects to keep their fork updated. Or reduce their fork to projects that will not be reliant on systemd.

[birdie]

Yes, because for an init system this is f*cking unacceptable: systemd segfaults, crashes and freezes.

Oh, maybe because Linux developers have lost their minds completely.

People and ISVs beg them for a stable platform, they make it even more unstable.

[RSpliet]

I sort of feel they are barking at the wrong tree here.
Personally, i think people who want to boycott Debian and fork it are welcome to do so. But i suppose they have no idea how much effort they will eventually have to put in to un-systemd more and more projects to keep their fork updated. Or reduce their fork to projects that will not be reliant on systemd.

I certainly hope these dependencies are limited to the format of the start-up scripts and nothing that'll tie in deeper. If so, there should be fairly little humps when using uselessd, a stripped down fork of systemd that gets rid of much of the disputed features in favour of a more modular approach.

[gigaplex]

Yes, because for an init system this is f*cking unacceptable: systemd segfaults, crashes and freezes.

Oh, maybe because Linux developers have lost their minds completely.

People and ISVs beg them for a stable platform, they make it even more unstable.

I'm generally against systemd in general, but that's a silly argument. The kernel itself also suffers from segfaults, crashes and freezes. Bugs happen, and showstopper systemd bugs should settle down eventually.

[Uqbar]

Sounds stupid.

First, can't they have an installation option?
At installation time you can choose which init system you want.
Or can't we have two Debian flavors (sysvinit and systemd) if the differences are too far apart (I don't think so)?
History will decree what is the most favorite (which is not the same as "the best") solution.

Second, this is what we really need now: yet another fork(tm).
Linux world is already suffering for the lack of development resources, mostly because of fragmentation.
Which in turn leads to resource (both human and economic) fragmentation.

Third, splitting the Debian community will lead to two weaker communities. Not to a stronger one.
Debian has been a reference for a lot of people. I am unsure this position will be kept by either part.
I also thing that the Linux community as a whole could suffer from the split.

My point (provided that it makes sense) is "choices".
We need choices, not forks.
More or less as we do with desktop environments, text editors, Java runtimes, web browsers, ...
IMHO.

[birdie]

If I hadn't experienced all of this firsthand, I wouldn't have posted these links here. I tried Fedora 20 just recently and I saw with my own eyes how systemd segfaulted. OK, that was a bug, yum update fixed it. Then it froze on boot trying to run two bad services over and over again - not even trying to realize that they cannot be launched.

Systemd is an abomination. An init system must be rock f*cking solid and equally simple. Systemd is anything but. There was a proposal to create a very simple, very basic init 1 process which spawns all other crazy systemd features as sub-processes so the whole system has no chance of crashing but no, Lennart doesn't think it's worth it.

[SpyroRyder]

Didn't this already happen

I'm sure this happened 10 years ago and the result was called Ubuntu. All jokes aside we may not have thousands of ubuntu and debian derivatives anymore but I fail to see what any fork could do that would change anything. As with most of those derivatives a single reason for existing doesn't exactly make for a product with great longevity. You often get a largish bunch at the begining that dwindles quite rapidly because the people that often start these loose interest in running them or underestimate the effort it takes. I can't see what makes this project any different except that the attention needed is going to grow as time goes on and more software is written in a way that assumes systemd even if it doesn't directly require it.

[froyo]

Quote from debianfork.org: "only few of us have the time and patience to interact with Debian on a voluntary basis"

Question for people behind debianfork.org: Where will you take the time from to create and maintain a Debian fork?

If they don't have a convincing answer to that, they should not be taken seriously, no matter what your position on the systemd debate is.

[aigarius]

This is pure bull**** - Ians proposal has nothing to do with that troll group. It is pretty clear to most Debian developers that it is a bug for software to depend on being started by any particular init system. What Ian is proposing is having the severity of that bug being determined as if all users were affected by such bugs, instead of just users of non-default init system. There is absolutely no credible interest in forking Debian at this point. And Debian is in fact intending to keep the possibility for users to freely switch init systems.