On 17/11/18 at 23:24, Simon Hobson wrote: > Alessandro Selli <[email protected]> wrote: > >> If Devuan is going to have a brilliant future it is going to disenfranchise >> itself from Debian. Being forever a Debian without systemd will keep it in >> the backseat, vulnerable to all the odd decisions and arguable development >> directions that Devuan/FD are going to take. > In the long term, Devuan is likely to slowly diverge from Debian - and > hopefully will gather support from Debian devs/package maintainers fed up > with the Debian shenanigans. it's even possible to foresee a time when Devuan > overtakes Debian and Debian ends up as a derivative of Devuan - but a long > time off I think. > In the meantime, there simply are not enough Devuan devs to simply dump > Debian as an upstream. At the moment, most packages available in Devuan are > unmodified Debian packages - there simply is no justification for > re-inventing loads of stuff that doesn't need re-inventing, it would be a > waste of effort. In the meantime, the devs the Devuan project does have can > tackle those packages that need work - mostly de-systemdising broken packages > and making substitutes for some bits.
I'm well aware of the present limitations that make it impossible to let Devuan be an indipendent distribution: too little manpower behind it and too llittle corporate/VC support for it. It could well be that Devuan will never be anything more than a systemd-less-Debian, always behind it's parent distribution and always trying to catch up to their design implementations. Of course I wouldn't call this success. I was just stating the obvious: a distribution that succeeds is one that sets the path, not one that keeps trailing the trend-setters. Devuan was born to remedy a wrong turn taken by Debian's Technical Committee, the VUAs who launched the project decided to take into their hands the burden of reinstating to the fullest user's freedom of choice. Now there's another pending decision that might erode again this freedom. It could well be that Devuan will have to give in given it's manpower and budget constrains. Shall this happen it will mean Devuan failed to show the world it's principles and directions were sounder than Debian's, but I think that trying to achieve the success I deem it deserves implies sticking with taking the brave decision to keep undoing the wrong turns Debian's TC takes. Shall the market consider Devuan, decades after the split from Debian, still nothing more that a copy of Debian with some minor changes, it will likely fail to impress enough to be seriously considered and alternative in critical installations and deployments. "the Devuan project does have can tackle those packages that need work - mostly de-systemdising broken packages" Of course you understand that the / -> /usr merge fits systemd/FD's design goals, flattening all GNU/Linux distributions into the same mold, making alternative designs very hard to implement and maintain and letting the few FD's blessed distributions stand out as the Most Perfect ones and the only one deserving any consideration from CTOs and corporate decision-makers. Shall you agree with this, you should understand that the reasons to want to de-systemdise "broken packages" apply to the de-unmerging / and /usr as well. Devuan could fail to do this, of course. I hope it will not. Shall it not fail it will necessarily rise into prominence among the crowd of the alternative Linux distributions. Again, I think I'm stating the obvious here. -- Alessandro Selli <[email protected]> VOIP SIP: [email protected] Chiave firma e cifratura PGP/GPG signing and encoding key: BA651E4050DDFC31E17384BABCE7BD1A1B0DF2AE
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