Voice of the Masses: Is the Devuan fork a good thing?
There’s been plenty of controversy in the Debian camp recently, with fiery debates about the default init system, resignations from the Technical Committee, and the systemd package maintainer quitting after receiving piles of abuse. Now a gang of “Veteran Unix Admins” has forked the distro: say hello to Devuan.
The idea is to make a version of Debian that respects “Init-Freedom” — in other words, it will offer more choices for PID 1 than just systemd. But is this fork a good thing? Will it help to stop all the arguments in the Debian camp, and provide a distro that people are really calling for? Or is it just a knee-jerk reaction, with no real long-term vision, and it would be better if the “Veteran Unix Admins” worked with package maintainers to reduce dependencies on systemd instead?
Let us know what you think, and we’ll read out the best comments in our next podcast. A podcast which, by the way, could have a very interesting guest presenter…
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Mike Saunders
Mike stores his data by printing out hex dumps and laminating the sheets. He's the author of The Haynes Linux Manual and the creator of MikeOS, an operating system hand-built from assembly language.
Too early to know. What have they done? As far I know, just a no particularly nice website.
The fork could be a good thing. In the same way that LibreOffice was a good fork. Frankly, I don’t have the technical background to know if systemd is a good idea or not. But, I feel that many distros, including Debian, are going too fast. It seems one of these things that have been tested *a lot* before installing them in your computer. It is not a text editor that you can substitute easily.
It might take the pressure off the Debian camp a bit. They will at least have a URL to direct people to if they have a real beef with systemd.
A fork of Debian is going to be a huge undertaking and I think they might struggle to gain traction after the initial ranting phase.
I think forks are a great thing and an essential right in the open source community, as many others have stated, this devuan fork will be a place for systemd haters to vent their passion to.
Meh. They’re scratching their own itch, which is perfectly reasonable. As has been pointed out before, if there’s a sufficient demand for other init systems, people will step up to maintain them. Personally, I’m really happy with systemd so I’m not too fussed.
Debian’s greatest advantages have revolved around how it’s components are loosely coupled. If Devuan keeps that going, good.
Nah, they’re just Luddites. Even the BSDs are looking at something like SMF, launchd or systemd.
I think so. If Systemd is such a point of contention, this should ease the pressure.
I worry slightly that no one will use it, and that splitting resources is somewhat counterproductuve, but forking is an inevitable feature of open projects, and we shouldn’t fight against it.
Forking Debian will be a mammoth task and difficult to sustain. I expect it to peter out sooner rather than later.
I think developing a better init system than systemd that is in line with Unix philosophy would be a better use of their creativity energy.
But you never know, Devuan might be fantastic.
If people feel strongly about systemd, then yes, forking is the correct thing to do. It is the inherent advantage of the FOSS community that such things happen – it is up to the users whether it gains traction.
Personally, I have no problem with systemd – it has been introduced over the last couple of releases into Fedora and it is obviously stable and mature enough for RedHat to use it in RHEL7.
Sure, it is fine to fork, let’s see whether they will manage.
So far I have seen two people on IRC investing work, about 5 making angry jokes about Lennart, 30 or so flaming systemd by parroting slogans found on the internet and about 300 hanging out and enjoying the show.
On the other hand there are people volunteering their time, servers and energy. But without the basic infrastructure in place it is hard to do much, so we will have to wait and see how many are still interested once actual work is to be done.
I am a bit shocked that anybody that has shown any understanding about systemd was asked to leave for trolling. Many people seem to be more motivated by hate and disgust than by any rational motive: You do need to understand what you want to replace after all.
I read about Devuan earlier today. I saw this article on my rss when I went to look it up so that I could go check it out. I’m thinking about trying to contribute somehow.
If I do, it’ll be my first foray into really “giving back” to the open-source community – I’ve got a github account with a few things on it, but I haven’t made any “serious” contributions to anything so far.
So, I think it’s a good thing because it might encourage people to get involved. I suspect that maybe if more people were involved in the decision-making process the debian vote might not have gone the way it did – maybe too many of us were just complacent end-users who didn’t vote when we had the chance and then started complaining.
I don’t know if devuan will succeed or not, or even whether I’ll contribute. But I think that piquing people’s interest and trying to give people more choice is ultimately a good thing.
Yes, I think it’s a good thing. I’ve no time for angry or obsessive arguing or trolling, so getting heads-down to a constructive fork after democracy has played out sounds like the best way forward. Ideally, of course, we’d have one cohesive community and a new init system everyone could be happy with… but hang on, we’re humans, and that’s not how we do things.
In the marketplace of ideas, choice is good. Some work will be duplicated, but in the end if there is enough of a demand, there will be a community to sustain Devuan. If not, there won’t.
Had someone asked me after Ubuntu’s initial release whether or not it was necessary to have a distro that would provide codecs and other components that weren’t installed by default in Ubuntu, I would have said “no”. Yet Linux Mint is now so much more than just Ubuntu + proprietary codecs.
Will I use it? Not likely. But I’m not about to dismiss it, either.
If you don.t like systemd just run
echo -e “Package: systemd\nPin: origin “”\nPin-Priority: -1” > /etc/apt/preferences.d/systemd
before a dist-upgrade to jessie.
Also systemd can easily be removed if installed.
If only that were the case, hard depends have found their way throughout debian packages that have support (but don’t actually depend on) systemd. The result is that removing systemd bjorks most systems.
This seems to be SOP for a group of developers involved in systemd, pulseaudio and avahi.
If this weren’t the case there wouldn’t be a fork.
We won’t know for a while. I am convinced from talking to some technical folks that there are legitimate reasons to be cautious about systemd, and it certainly felt like a small cabal rammed it down everyone;s throats. But will forking Debian really work? Most forks die a merciful death after a period of time because there was not enough of a need to draw a community,
Would have been great if it had been more timely. Now that most of the Distros have shipped to systemd, Devuan will have great difficulty getting traction. It is so invasive that pretty soon removing systemd will be nigh on impossible without breaking a large number of key utilities (e.g. Gnome, etc) which are now being produced with systemd as a dependency. I do hope Devuan is a success, though.
Forks are part if the open source world, a vital part. What would be the point of open source at all if people weren’t encouraged to take the code and move a project in the direction they want. The poorer projects will fall to the side, and we will be left with the better ones. I say good luck to them – Devuan might become the next great open source project.
But then again, forking is dumb. 😉
Forking is Open Source’s asexual reproduction. Nature will decide which project is fittest, and natural selection will have done its work. Yay forking!
I have no strong feelings on the matter.
I don’t like the drop-shadow on their H1s, though.
We’ll see. Forking is a right that they have.
Don’t see the big problem with systemd, but if they want to make a distro without it, I say go ahead!
Let’s look at the facts:
– You can only have one default
– There can only be one PID 1 running at any given time
– A jury of technical peers (tech ctte) already decided that the default would be systemd
– A democratic vote of the project already decided that the project need not force packages to work with other inits if the upstreams don’t want them to.
If you disagree with all of that, what do you now do? It’s unreasonable to think that you can be part of any large project and always agree with every decision made. You absolutely have to be prepared to compromise.
What they have is an extremely vocal (to the poiint of personal attacksa and trolling) minority who will not accept that they can’t have their own way.
I personally some how doubt that there is enough of them, with enough technical ability, to manage an entire successful distribution.
But at this point I think it is absolutely best for everyone that those who refuse to reach consensus take their right to fork and instead put their energy towards making something that they WOULD be happy being a part of, instead of sabotaging something that they no longer do feel happy with.
I think diversity is as essential for open source development as it is for the evolution of meatbags. So yes, if anyone thinks their favourite project isn’t goint the way it should, fork away…
On the other hand, I misspelled Devuan as Devaun in my DuckDuckGo search and got articles about a “porn star who likes to be tied up” instead of the project’s page. Given that I’m not the only one who’s going to misspell it, they could have thought of a better name.
It is likely there is a larger contingent of contrarian personality types in the GnuLinux community, so I suppose these heated rebellions shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. It does seem that the real answer is not to roll back to SysVinit, but to come up with something that addresses the problems and limitations of the old init without the perceived overreach and binary aspects of systemd. I haven’t seen any serious movement to come up with a real rival to systemd. In that respect I think the Devuan, if it gets off the ground at all, will end up at best a small niche distro.
Just as long as there is a suitable Linux distribution at the end of this evolutionary event, let the Developers vent their spleens.
(By the way can anything be done about the contrast of the text when writing these comments? They are difficult to see with my older eyes.)
Maybe, I don’t know. I know more about Blue Systems than I do about the “Veteran Unix Admin collective”. And I know very, very little about Blue Systems.
From what I’ve been able to gather on the interwebs this doesn’t sound like a true fork, but rather another Debian derivative. To be an actual fork they would have to be taking the current code and going their own way with it henceforth. Correct? It sounds as if they will merely be making their own Debian-based distro with the difference being choice of Init systems. It doesn’t sound like the “Veteran Unix Admin collective” is made of Debian team members jumping ship and leaving Debian itself fragmented. So to me it seems like just a lot of hoopla over a new distro. New distros are good. One created by “Veteran Unix Admins” sounds way too neck beardy for me though. I’m just barely geeky enough to use pure Debian.
“To be an actual fork they would have to be taking the current code and going their own way with it henceforth. Correct?” Correct, and it sounds like they could be doing exactly that, although it is not clear yet.
Actually, Debian itself sounds like the fork, not Devuan – as the latter is to be a more conservative evolution in Debian’s past style, while systemd is an abrupt change of direction. With the systemd team making such widespread inroads to the system I would be unsuprised if they started on an alternative kernel next.
The only concrete advantage I have heard about systemd so far (other than comments, like seen above, that “it works”) is that it boots quicker. Well, whoopee; I only reboot about four times a year and takes a minute each time. I’ve spent more time typing this.
Nuke: see the “Benefits” section of this post for more advantages to Systemd: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530
It’s way beyond boot times (which I’m not fussed about either) I was pretty skeptical about Systemd at first, but the more time I spend with it, and see how it all fits together, the more I like it.
> It’s way beyond boot times
Very true. It’s much more about Red Hat having Microsoft like monopoly on Linux.
I think it’s a very good thing, If we didn’t get this port then we’d have much more of a monopoly which will cause lock in, within Linux if we accept that deep technology as the one and only!
Personally, It doesn’t bother me much either way. It just has to work consistently and reliably. If people want to fork Debian, more power to them, but their fork had better work without issue.
Debian has done a good job so far. A fork is common in OSS. Devuan want to just make Debian particular better. That’s all. IMHO the GNU/Linux is much more influenced by desktop agnostic developers than from real users in a productive environment. It does a very good job on the server side and also on embedded systems. But systemd does not fit in this kind of applications. Debian refused the freedom of choosing the right init system for the user. The developers ruled out the users instead of serving them. It was not a technical discusssion, because there are pro und cons to systemd and the compromise would have been to let the user choose. Now the user can choose between Debian and Devuan.
Point of view of a non-technical Linux/Debian user: systemd seems to be a consequence of a general development away from the more transparent Linux that was a few years ago, when even such users could compile kernels and modify, set up their systems in extensive ways themselves. I have noticed that this has gotten more difficult. (Good thing maybe that it is no longer needed). But then, this good old Linux seems to still exist in the case of Slackware. I can only say that I tried Jessie (Solydx) and soon got a feeling that someting was up. And a dist-upgrade of antiX 13 rendered it unusable. A couple programs that I do not exactly depend on but want to have, have always worked now refuse to work and the causes are not easily determined, it seems from bug reports. Bottom line: for me the solution is Salix. Another solution would perhaps be to join and strenghten the Slackware community and help them overcome the difficulties in avoiding a change like systemd.