Dear Init Freedom lovers, Once again the Veteran Unix Admin collective salutes you!
As most of you know, we have followed up with our intentions in developing Devuan GNU/Linux right after Ian Jackson's GR vote resolution in Debian. We have made great progress and achieved several milestones among them a complete SDK to facilitate package maintainance, a new package repository software "Amprolla" and a continuous integration workflow based on gitlab and Jenkins. We are also proud to have facilitate the work of Jude Nelson on a new /dev daemon implementation called VDev and more in general to have given voice to all those who had doubts about systemd being a viable course of evolution for GNU/Linux operating systems. By doing so we have obviously looked deep inside Debian and systemd itself and we have never refrained from critically analysing what systemd was doing as well what we were doing and the reasons for it. We firmly believe every responsible and critical engineer out there should at least think twice about developing something new systems and even Donald Knuth teaches us in the Art of Programming that is always appropriate to re-think and re-design algorithms and challenge ourselves over our own initial beliefs. That's why today, after 7 months of work in the direction of forking Debian we have decided that not, we will not do that. Today we give up and we accept to be assimilated. After all, we think that systemd is not so bad and we can live with it. We understand some of you may not be convinced, but please consider our decision here is really well thought. It is also too hard for us to catch up with the rampant development going on in systemd and we believe that we can live just fine with systemd and some shims. We tried hard, now we hope you will believe us and even if you don't, at least please give systemd a try. With the existing infrastructure in place, we will start maintaining a mirror of systemd and use our CI infrastructure to contribute deterministic reproducible builds of Debian packages. We ask the free and open source software community at large to please accept our apologies for making so much noise on this issue, today we feel like we have just been trolled by all those complainers we initially gave voice and leverage, while it is evident they have nothing to contribute really. It took us some time to understand that systemd is the future and we hope this experience contributes to a critical understanding of systemd. To all those who have donated substantial amounts of money so far: we commit to return you all the donations in EUR or Dogecoin. The donations that cannot be returned will be used for a petition campaign to give back Kay Sievers access to push modifications to the Linux kernel, as well to distribute the upcoming O'Reilly book on systemd to poor children in Africa. so long and thanks for all the fish, The Veteran Unix Admins _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list [email protected] https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
