Re: [Dng] recommendation for consideration: keep as close to debian as possible
On 02/14/2015 06:59 PM, Luke Leighton wrote: what i wrote makes the following things very clear: 1) your debian system will not be screwed up or compromised by using devuan. you will also not lose any functionality or packages. *** I guess that really depends on the case: as mentioned earlier in this list, if you're using Gnome the transition may be more difficult. Regarding functionality, I can foresee, given the number of packages that didn't make into Debian Jessie from Wheezy, it might actually be better in Devuan than in Debian. In any case, I expect the Devuan community will provide thorough testing, debugging, and support for edge cases that may appear from replacing packages whose dependency chain heavily relies on systemd. 2) we understand the difficulty of maintaining an entire distro. we implicitly understand that we will not get to 1,000 maintainers in the immediate future, so we are being realistic and will not be doing a complete fork. it's too much effort for us, and we recognise that you probably wouldn't trust us (i.e. wouldn't even want to *try* upgrading to devuan) if we created one. *** The original version seems more appropriate to me: it does not justify being a small team to begin with, but sets clear and reasonable goals and baby steps that demonstrate the sanity of the approach rather than asking for trust. 3) we're restricting the scope of what we're doing to a few key strategic packages, and we're going to make it easy for you to remove systemd. that's our core focus. *** Again, that's part of how the VUA implement their strategy. They say it clearly enough, and that's for the *initial phase*. The version you wrote, that I reported as Issue #8, wants to tell a different story than what has been told so far. The project description clearly states that: + *removing mandatory dependencies on systemd* is the primary goal + in order to reach that goal *Devuan will pin some packages on top of Debian repositories* + once that goal is reached, and users have a choice, then Devuan will consider other changes. At which point, I would say that it depends on Debian whether Devuan remains compatible or not. Devuan will have made it possible for Debian to revert the decision of using systemd as the default init system. It is unlikely to happen, for a variety of reasons. In any case, Devuan will have to continue to exist because having systemd as default init in Debian Jessie *will* influence how developers consider what they can do: those with a consciousness and a vetted interest in supporting universality (including legacy or non-mainstream hardware) will go for Devuan, while others will happily write systemd-dependent code. There's a remote possibility that systemd will become universal and stable, or that it will run with a higher PID. Until then, it seems to me that Devuan will remain the closest available free software distribution to Debian Wheezy. From what I've read so far, I can feel a strong consensus towards independence. That doesn't mean incompatibility. It would have been so much easier if Debian had decided to implement the systemd init as a Debian Blend. But we're far beyond that situation: this is a fork. with a small (busy) team, you are stuck in the middle between a rock and a hard place. *** You can move a small team away from that situation with no casualties. A bigger team will undoubtedly leave some behind. See Debian. on one hand you need to keep the alternative packages fully up-to-date: even *one day* late means that people will have a system which becomes unuseable due to version-bumps from debian. *** With apt-pinning, you can delay such upgrades. If a package becomes broken due to a systemd dependency, it will be added to the Devuan package repository for fixing. Once there, it will live happily. Surely the transition may be hairy for some packages, but there's no reason why it should happen a lot. If it does, it's a sign that Debian is poetterizing, so it will be a good long term indicator of whether Devuan and Debian will remain compatible. That said, the current setup of `devuan-sdk` takes into account the possibility that Debian upstream may become unusable, and allows bypassing Debian to package directly from upstream. This defensive mechanism will allow for example to revert to sanity where Debian maintainers introduce dependencies on systemd where upstream does not, or to include packages from Debian Wheezy that missed Debian Jessie. and on the other hand you have to consider doing a complete total fork of debian, with all that that implies *** You're right. As the VUA said: We are aware of how huge effort, time and blood is needed to maintain a so huge distro like debian is, so, initially, it will NOT be a complete fork. The more successful the first phase, the more reachable the scope of a complete fork. Keeping the heads cool and focused is
Re: [Dng] recommendation for consideration: keep as close to debian as possible
KatolaZ is 100% correct. Software distributions are remarkably evolutionary in nature and while it's possible to co-exist, it's a useful populous and funding that keeps distros alive. Devuan is the divergence of Debian user base so to stay alive we need to increase our number of useful people as fast as possible and/or get funded. While appearance doesn't count for much once you are invested, it's an important attracting element. The question is, who are we trying to attract that is best for our survival and what will we do to attract them. I'm not sure how many will actually switch to avoid systemd but they will be our users if we release soon enough. Like KatolaZ wrote, the whole Debian project might crumble and the truth is Devuan may be the acid rain deepening the cracks that have appeared on the stone statue we know as Debian. As long as we dont make absurdly radical changes, it should be easy for derivatives and independent packagers to switch to the Devuan base. --Gravis On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 3:12 AM, KatolaZ kato...@freaknet.org wrote: On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 04:01:58PM +, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: [cut] so. to clarify: is it the intent of the devuan team to: (a) create a fork which will always, at all times, without fail, require that a debian repo be placed in /etc/apt/sources.list or (b) create a fork of the *entire debian package repository*, such that it will end up over time to be as completely incompatible with debian as ubuntu is today. this is very very important to make absolutely and unambiguously clear on the web site, as well as to developers who may wish to get involved, _and_ to end-users. to illustrate this, whilst i am sure that you have the confidence and the desire to continue this project - and i say this *entirely without prejudice* - it is perfectly reasonable and rational and logical to surmise that at some point the devuan project _could_ conceivably fail, forcing people to reconsider what they are doing, *or*, much more benignly, end-users may, for reasons which are entirely their choice, *choose* to return to debian. now, if it has not been made clear that an end-user, once they are on devuan, may *NEVER* return to debian because there is no transition path, they're going to be pissed. i feel that, this, therefore, should be something that is discussed and made absolutely clear. Luke, I don't know what Devuan will be in 5 years, I don't even know if it will still exist by then, and I think nobody can assure you that the transition to and from Devuan from and to anything else will be smooth and easy and straightforward and painless. Before a few months ago I had never thought that I could ever been forced to leave Debian after about 15 years of using and loving it. I hope that eventually we will see a happy ending to this story, but I don't have good feelings about that. I am concretely scared that the whole Debian project might crumble, piece by piece, under the axe of progress and usability, and with it most of its derivatives and companions. For me it's either having a (possibly Debian-like) functioning and fuss-free GNU/Linux, which I can tinker with as like and I have done so far, or going somewhere else, e.g. to FreeBSD. HND KatolaZ -- [ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ --- GLUG Catania -- Freaknet Medialab ] [ me [at] katolaz.homeunix.net -- http://katolaz.homeunix.net -- ] [ GNU/Linux User:#325780/ICQ UIN: #258332181/GPG key ID 0B5F062F ] [ Fingerprint: 8E59 D6AA 445E FDB4 A153 3D5A 5F20 B3AE 0B5F 062F ] ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] Towards systemd-free packages
+1 for this pragmatic approach. On 14.02.2015 11:30, Jaromil wrote: hi Jack, Isaac, On Fri, 13 Feb 2015, Jack L. Frost wrote: That's because by default X tries to hotplug input devices with evdev. And evdev requires libudev. There is a evdev fork that works with libsysdev tho: https://github.com/idunham/xf86-input-evdev I'm curious to read Nextime's opinions on this, however to me it looks like we are going to keep libudev and systemd's udev around for a while in order to minimize the changes in Devuan 1.0. While I look forward to vdev's development, I think we should change as little as possible here, despite the fact we will keep some systemd code around for a little longer (but no systemd daemon running anyway). ciao ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] recommendation for consideration: keep as close to debian as possible
On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 11:27:55AM -0430, Richard wrote: While this seems an admirable idea, it seems that Debian's change of direction is the reason we are here. A fork means that you take a different path. Inevitably those paths diverge --a fork. We have the benefit of where Debian was with Wheezy and Jessie. That is our resource. Devuan's goal I believe, is to create a distro similar to Debian without systemd. With one choice of DE, one init, essentially one of everything. You are free to add whatever you wish. Once a usable, stable systemdless Devuan is available, then attention might be turned to maintain and share those parts that are not tainted with systemd. Until then, I believe that Devuan resources are better spent on building a viable, usable, systemdless distro. Wasn't the initial plan to have a Devuan repository that could be added to the existing Debian repositories (but pinned to higher priority) so we could focus on changing what needed changing, but not waste time on replicating *everything*? and leaving the question of whether to replicate *everything* to later, if and when we discovere it to be necessary, and we may also have the resources needed to do it? Of course what needs to be done later likely depend on what Debian does, but at the moment it does rather seem that the two are going to diverge. Indeed, if many Debian users migrate to Devuan, the remainder will probably be happy with systemd and thus Debian will probably turn fully into a system-d-only distro. -- hendrik ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] recommendation for consideration: keep as close to debian as possible
On Sat, 14 Feb 2015 08:00:03 + KatolaZ kato...@freaknet.org wrote: I am sorry but revolutions are not cheap, and every time you choose to go for something then you have to give up on something else. I really hope Debian will reconsider the systemd nonsense, but I suspect that the probability for this event to occur is practically zero. I agree for several reasons, not the least of which is that most of the Debianistas enlightened enough to see that King Systemd has no clothes are all in *our* project now. Hence, I must conclude that Debian and Devuan will most probably not merge any time soon, and will most probably keep diverging instead, as it has already appened with Mandrake, SuSe, Ubuntu, and as it happened for Debian, back in the days, which effectively diverged from *nothing* :) Precisely! Additionally, I think there's a large contingent of Devuan supporters, and I'm one of them, who would never go back to Debian, even if Debian did a 180 on systemd, because we were thoroughly disgusted by the way the Debian community conducted the entire affair. So KatolaZ, I agree with you 1000%: an eventual re-merge with Debian will never happen: We burned that bridge several months ago, and I, for one, am glad to see that bridge in flames. Even if Devuan somehow died in its infancy, I'd *never* go back to Debian. In light of this, I agree with GoLinux that Devuan should get something out there soon. Call it a prototype. Call it an experiment. Even if it doesn't support Gnome or NetworkManager, and you need to follow a 20 step process to set up networking, get *something* out there. I'd like to quote Eric Raymond's words from The Cathedral and the Bizaar: = When you start community-building, what you need to be able to present is a plausible promise. Your program doesn't have to work particularly well. It can be crude, buggy, incomplete and poorly documented. What it must not fail to do is (a) run, and (b) convince potential co-developers that it can be evolved into something really neat in the forseeable future. = Finally, two words to all you people working to get Devuan working: THANK YOU!!! SteveT Steve Litt* http://www.troubleshooters.com/ Troubleshooting Training * Human Performance ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] recommendation for consideration: keep as close to debian as possible
On Sat, 14 Feb 2015 08:12:38 + KatolaZ kato...@freaknet.org wrote: Before a few months ago I had never thought that I could ever been forced to leave Debian after about 15 years of using and loving it. I hope that eventually we will see a happy ending to this story, but I don't have good feelings about that. I am concretely scared that the whole Debian project might crumble, piece by piece, under the axe of progress and usability, and with it most of its derivatives and companions. For me it's either having a (possibly Debian-like) functioning and fuss-free GNU/Linux, which I can tinker with as like and I have done so far, or going somewhere else, e.g. to FreeBSD. HND KatolaZ Quoted for truth!!! SteveT ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] recommendation for consideration: keep as close to debian as possible
[to richard, top-posted deliberately so that the chances are high that he will read it] - richard, apologies, i appreciate you are using gmail which provides a nice clean way to encourage people to top-post, but in case you have never encountered the reasons why it is bad, may i suggest you read these: http://linux.sgms-centre.com/misc/netiquette.php#toppost http://www.idallen.com/topposting.html there is a very funny joke as well which explains why it is bad: A: Because we read from top to bottom, left to right. Q: Why should I start my reply below the quoted text? A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: The lost context. Q: What makes top-posted replies harder to read than bottom-posted? A: Yes. Q: Should I trim down the quoted part of an email to which I'm replying? so. joke no 3 applies to what you have written let's proceed with another round of additional work... On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 3:56 PM, Richard richard.h...@gmail.com wrote: MX-14, PCLOS, MINT-LTS, Gobo i'm sorry, but top-posting to a large message containing several points and paragraphs without cutting any of the context makes it impossible for me to understand the relevance of what you are saying. if i _were_ to attempt to understand the relevance, you have made it extremely difficult and time-consuming. perhaps you might kindly - with a second message - firstly apologise for taking up my time (and everyone else's) in having to ask you what you meant, given that you didn't follow standard communications guidelines that have been established practice for over 3 decades - and secondly provide an explanation as to the relevance of the list of what i assume to be the names of GNU/Linux OSes. thanks richard. l. ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] Towards systemd-free packages
Jaromil: dear Jude, On Mon, 02 Feb 2015, Jude Nelson wrote: Hey everyone, Is there a list somewhere that has the packages in Jessie that depend on some part of systemd?* I'd like to get the ball rolling on compiling out systemd dependencies for Devuan packages, but I don't want to duplicate anyone's efforts. here the current thread on this https://git.devuan.org/devuan/devuan-project/issues/6 Over the weekend I've assessed the first minimal group of packages, processed them via the new Devuan SDK and committed them on our packages-base git https://git.devuan.org/groups/packages-base If you like to adopt maintainance of a package there, please open an issue and I'll give you write access. The package-base repos will be automatically pulled by our Jenkins, compiled and if succesful put into the Devuan package repository, so all the work can be done here. There seem to be no systemd dep. in base-files: $ git remote -v origin https://git.devuan.org/packages-base/base-files.git (fetch) origin https://git.devuan.org/packages-base/base-files.git (push) $ git rev-parse HEAD fdeafaffaf3a8e3c3ea926401266df63a771ea15 $ find . -type f | xargs grep systemd $ Maybe it is just about name change debian - devuan... About systemd extirpation: the real culprit is bsdutils, aka util-linux, that Debian has tied to systemd because of the logger. What a paradox to have 'bsdutils' bound to systemd however... I'm still in an early stage of development and haven't yet completed the SDK with functions to test the installer, however this is my current approach at cleaning up util-linux, touching as less as possible https://git.devuan.org/packages-base/util-linux/commit/a51bce5830336af3c5ec9da6de95af926c1b1609 Tell me, if you need help. ... My guess now is that we'll have i386 and amd64 as available architectures for a start and arm will come slightly later. I have two sparcs I can experiment on if need be. Regards, /Karl Hammar --- Aspö Data Lilla Aspö 148 S-742 94 Östhammar Sweden +46 173 140 57 ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] recommendation for consideration: keep as close to debian as possible
Le 14/02/2015 17:08, Steve Litt a écrit : On Sat, 14 Feb 2015 08:12:38 + KatolaZ kato...@freaknet.org wrote: Before a few months ago I had never thought that I could ever been forced to leave Debian after about 15 years of using and loving it. I hope that eventually we will see a happy ending to this story, but I don't have good feelings about that. I am concretely scared that the whole Debian project might crumble, piece by piece, under the axe of progress and usability, and with it most of its derivatives and companions. For me it's either having a (possibly Debian-like) functioning and fuss-free GNU/Linux, which I can tinker with as like and I have done so far, or going somewhere else, e.g. to FreeBSD. HND KatolaZ Quoted for truth!!! SteveT Same. I would not flame the Debian community as a whole, though. first because they have provided us up to now a wonderfull piece of work, and they will continue, since Devuan starts in the form of Mostly Debian, but desinfected, second because many of them still do not realize the extent of the crime. You start with a small crime and you are forced to another, etc... One cannot judge everything by oneself; there are questions for which you tend to trust people you consider having a better educated opinion. But after sometime you may change your mind. I had a personnal opinion on init only because I had been following many discussions on the subject on the Busybox mailing list and because I went trough the work of writing my own init for embedded devices. At least part of the Debian maintainers, who didn't dare or mind to follow the Devuan fork might well change their mind in the future and I'm afraid Devuan needs them. I think it is important that these guys feel welcome in Devuan and can find there a familiar development infrastructure. And some of them might even be willing to contribute to both lines of the fork. Let's reserve the flames to the borgs proper and their enraged supporters. I must confess I enjoy the words depoeterization and desinfection each time I read them on this list :-D Didier ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] recommendation for consideration: keep as close to debian as possible
KatolaZ katolaz at freaknet.org writes: On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 12:46:42PM -0300, Renaud OLGIATI wrote: Fork is permanent only as long as the two branches do not later converge and rejoin. Yes, I know that, but have you ever seen anything similar happening in the past? no - but that is, honestly, completely irrelevant. firstly: past indicators have absolutely nothing to do with the future. secondly, all of the examples you give below, as well as all of the ones that *i* can think of, have *very good reasons* why a merge is either (a) unnecessary (b) possible. let's go through them, looking for possible reasons - interest on either side - as to why *each party* would *want* to merge. Have Mandrake or SuSe ever reconciled with RedHat? mandrake was a complete fork, with optimised recompiles specifically for redhat packages. they only supported 686. also, because they were _not_ Redhat plc they were required to *remove* all mention of the word Redhat from all RPMs. as that was a massive undertaking it was an irreconcilable fork. also, what possible interest would redhat have to reconcile what mandrake had done? no reason that i can think of. suse, likewise, was an irreconcilable fork due to name changes, and a complete direction change. again, there is no possible reason that i can think of as to why suse would want to merge with redhat, not why redhat would want to merge with suse. Will Ubuntu or Mint or GnewSense ever merge again with Debian? ubuntu was a fuck-up that annoyed a hell of a lot of people. canonical decided that the best way forward was to make a complete and total fork of all of the debian packages, change the release organisation, change the release management, change even the damn package names. so not only is a merge flat-out impractical for _technical_ reasons, but debian developers are generally quite happy that ubuntu exists because, as ubuntu is designed to be idiot-proof, it keeps the idiots away from the debian mailing lists. assessment of the possibility and *desire* of a debian-ubuntu merge: ZERO. mint: that's an interesting one. i haven't looked closely but my understanding is that it's an option (a) style fork [requires two repos, one which replaces key packages of the other but no more]. if that's the case, then one would be left with what desire is there for the two to merge, and that, obviously, requires canonical to consider adding the mint developers to the payroll of canonical. this might not be something that they wish to do. GnewSense: GnewSense is an interesting one because it has stricter software libre package selection criteria even than debian. not just the non-free repo is removed but much more. also they will have name-changes (replacements of incorrect occurrences of Linux where it should be GNU/Linux and much more to consider). all that makes it less likely for a merge to be considered... but not completely impractical. which leaves desire to merge to be considered. what *desire* is there for GnewSense to be merged into debian? well, if GnewSense is merged into debian, it does so by destroying the entire very founding principle of GnewSense! why is that so? because to be merged into Debian, it becomes possible - easily possible - for end-users to either deliberately, accidentally or unknowingly add in non-free packages by editing sources.list. so there is *no way* that the GnewSense developers would even *want* GnewSense to be merged with Debian, as it is founded on much stronger Software Freedom Principles. then there is deb-multimedia, which, similar to GnewSense, goes the *opposite* way. there is therefore, likewise, absolutely no *desire* to merge deb-multimedia into debian because that would be in violation of the *debian* charter due to the patent and licensing issues around the deb-multimedia packages. does this give enough of a strong illustration as to why your statement is not applicable, KatolatZ? let's look then at debian-devuan. firstly it *is* possible to create a re-mergeable fork, if care is taken over the package creation, and the scope of devuan is kept strictly under control. and secondly this is one of the very rare circumstances where i believe it would be *desirable* for a future merge to actually take place. i mentioned this in my previous post, that devuan could be a testing ground for radical ideas such as shredding systemd, which debian could not possibly do without a massive amount of risky disruption. Nope. I'm sorry but merging does not in fact exists for distributions. i trust that i have illustrated that this is a short-sighted self-fulfilling conclusion to reach? Who knows, maybe the Debian devs will realize they are missing something, and integrate the non-systemd in a later release... how will they do that if you have made it impossible - technically - for them to consider doing that? if you
Re: [Dng] recommendation for consideration: keep as close to debian as possible
Hendrik Boom hendrik at topoi.pooq.com writes: Wasn't the initial plan to have a Devuan repository that could be added to the existing Debian repositories (but pinned to higher priority) so we could focus on changing what needed changing, but not waste time on replicating *everything*? that is exactly what i am endeavouring to get clarity on, hendrik. your question is precisely the one that has not been made clear, in any way, shape or form. it is not made clear on the web site; it has not been made clear on the wiki (which is hard to access btw), and i have yet to see a response which answers yes or no out of nearly 30 messages so far, from around 10 people. we have however had a number of messages which indicate that there is a *belief* that it is an entire fork being developed (due to the use of the word fork). there has been another message with a clarification that forks _can_ be merged, and another which expresses the (faulty) opinion that because no fork has ever yet been merged it must logically (incorrectly) follow that this fork must, with a 100% guarantee, *never* be possible to merge. which is silly. so there is a lot of confusion and lack of clarity about exactly what the direction and focus of the devuan project is. hence the reason why i am asking the questions. l. ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
[Dng] pre alpha valentine (secret love declaration)
re all, Here is a pre-alpha sneak preview of Devuan at the current state of affairs. It is my valentine to Franco: despite we probably never met in person, I love him. He is really dedicated to this project and putting hard work in it. I also fell in love with another VUA, whose name I won't tell, but he is the one hosting the gitlab, running very well. http://mirror.debianfork.org/devuan-jessie-i386-xfce-prealpha-valentine.iso http://mirror.debianfork.org/devuan-jessie-i386-xfce-prealpha-valentine.iso.asc http://mirror.debianfork.org/devuan-jessie-i386-xfce-prealpha-valentine.iso.sha do not use this in production, this is an internal preview (not even an alpha) for the Devuan enthusiastic community and for those wondering if we'll really make it: yes we will. Journalists and DWN editors reading: please do not link this. We will have another more public release soon :^) Let it be a private valentine Also please note that this is not yet rebranded, so it says Debian almost everywhere. Didn't find the time for that yet. default user is 'devuan' password is always 'devuan', also for root sources are those of Debian 8 RC1 jessie plus the mods here: https://git.devuan.org/groups/packages-base and packed with the SDK https://git.devuan.org/devuan/devuan-sdk happy hacking -- Jaromil, Dyne.org Free Software Foundry (est. 2000) We are free to share code and we code to share freedom Web: https://j.dyne.org Contact: https://j.dyne.org/c.vcf GPG: 6113 D89C A825 C5CE DD02 C872 73B3 5DA5 4ACB 7D10 Confidential communications: https://keybase.io/jaromil signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] pre alpha valentine (secret love declaration)
3 On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 4:36 PM, Jaromil jaro...@dyne.org wrote: re all, Here is a pre-alpha sneak preview of Devuan at the current state of affairs. It is my valentine to Franco: despite we probably never met in person, I love him. He is really dedicated to this project and putting hard work in it. I also fell in love with another VUA, whose name I won't tell, but he is the one hosting the gitlab, running very well. http://mirror.debianfork.org/devuan-jessie-i386-xfce-prealpha-valentine.iso http://mirror.debianfork.org/devuan-jessie-i386-xfce-prealpha-valentine.iso.asc http://mirror.debianfork.org/devuan-jessie-i386-xfce-prealpha-valentine.iso.sha do not use this in production, this is an internal preview (not even an alpha) for the Devuan enthusiastic community and for those wondering if we'll really make it: yes we will. Journalists and DWN editors reading: please do not link this. We will have another more public release soon :^) Let it be a private valentine Also please note that this is not yet rebranded, so it says Debian almost everywhere. Didn't find the time for that yet. default user is 'devuan' password is always 'devuan', also for root sources are those of Debian 8 RC1 jessie plus the mods here: https://git.devuan.org/groups/packages-base and packed with the SDK https://git.devuan.org/devuan/devuan-sdk happy hacking -- Jaromil, Dyne.org Free Software Foundry (est. 2000) We are free to share code and we code to share freedom Web: https://j.dyne.org Contact: https://j.dyne.org/c.vcf GPG: 6113 D89C A825 C5CE DD02 C872 73B3 5DA5 4ACB 7D10 Confidential communications: https://keybase.io/jaromil ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] recommendation for consideration: keep as close to debian as possible
Gravis ring3k at adaptivetime.com writes: well, here's what _can_ assure that the transition will be at least not complete hell and requiring a total abandonment of devuan for debian and vice-versa (i.e. a total and complete wipe-down of a hard drive and a reinstall from scratch): Why do you say that? I use parts of stable/testing/unstable/experimental debian with parts of ubuntu and mint just fine without having to clear my system. wow. you are incredibly brave. much respect. question: are you an experienced computer user? the reason i ask: what chances would you rate an average computer user being able to recover their system if they made a mixture of debian and ubuntu packages and it went wrong? for a client, i maintain a system with both TDE (Trinity Desktop) and deb-multimedia packages on it. the reason why i added TDE is because KDE 4 is such hell, and gnome has gone the let's put everything in binary databases route, that i was forced to stick with KDE 3.5 for as long as possible (in order to be able to remotely ssh in and edit KDE's text-based config files for my computer-illiterate client). now that i've converted to TDE, i am in a *different* kind of hell - one where upgrades (including in some cases security upgrades) are flat-out impossible. to support the purchase of a new (recent) printer which requires hplip 3.16 for example i had to compile hplip *from source code* because TDE *even with latest packages* forces hplip 3.12 *not* 3.16. i cannot do an apt-get dist-upgrade on this system because TDE has replaced some of the key debian packages and they've not been upgraded by the TDE team. we are now in package dependency hell. this kind of package dependency hell is the kind of thing that only really *really* experienced developers are capable of getting themselves out of. the average end-user would just... give up and look for an alternative OS. or would ask an experienced developer for help. the only reason why i am accepting this package dependency hell is because it provides the client with what they need. ... but you and i are both experienced debian systems administrators. and that's the point: i didn't ask if *in your personal experience* *you* were happy to maintain a complex system. i was pointing out that the *average person* is likely to get into absolute hell-on-earth by even remotely contemplating mixing two incompatible debian-based distros. would you agree that such risky scenarios are something that the devuan team should work hard to ensure that the average end-user does not get into absolute hell? l. ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
[Dng] Weekly developer status update (Was: Re: OT: Programming languages again.)
The dev teams seems very quiet and isolated, which is okay - but it makes them seem less approachable if you are on the list. I think this is a good idea, even if only to keep me motivated :) I'll start. ** vdev ** It's been slow-going for me these past couple weeks since I've had to devote more time to $DAYJOB than usual. Hopefully that'll wind down in the next couple of weeks so I can spend more time on this. That said, I'm currently working on vdev issue #16 (daemon infrastructure), and that'll be pushed sometime tonight. This will entail adding the usual daemon boilerplate code (interfacing with syslog, init script, run-in-foreground vs run-in-background). I'm also doing a bit of refactoring to merge options-parsing with config-file parsing. I'm discovering that the hard part to developing vdev is keeping it compatible with udev. By virtue of the fact that udev is over 10 years old and sees wide-spread use, it handles a lot of corner cases that have to be painstakingly re-implemented. Fortunately, vdev's architecture is amenable to doing so in a piecemeal fashion. Once I make an alpha release, it will be possible to parcel this work out technically-inclined individuals who encounter a regression against udev, and can write a script that fixes it. Documentation on how to do this will be forthcoming, but I'm happy to say that it's much simpler to get vdev to set up your hardware than udev :) ** dbus ** I've taken up maintenance for the dbus package. It's currently at 1.8.16-1+devuan1 (the same version as Debian unstable), and includes patches for all the latest CVEs. It also has all of the commit history and tags imported from Debian, so you should be able to check out and build any prior version. ** How to Import a Package from Debian ** Jaromil and I worked out a (semi-)general way to import packages from Debian's git. Here are the steps taken for dbus (but they should work for most packages). This brief tutorial is meant to help future maintainers get off the ground: $ git clone g...@git.devuan.org:packages-base/dbus.git pkgdir # or whatever package $ cd pkgdir $ git remote add debian git://anonscm.debian.org/pkg-utopia/dbus.git # remote Debian git $ git fetch debian $ git checkout -b debian-upstream $ git merge debian/master # or whatever remote branch you want--see git branch -r) merge conflicts; we usually want to keep HEAD and disregard debian/master ... $ git commit -a $ git checkout master $ git merge debian-upstream # should cleanly fast-forward, since we already merged into debian-upstream, which is the same as master at this point) $ git push $ git tag $DEVUAN_TAGGED_VERSION $ git push --tags Regards, Jude On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 4:16 PM, T.J. Duchene t.j.duch...@gmail.com wrote: On Saturday, February 14, 2015 09:27:57 AM Didier Kryn wrote: No no , T.J. , I don't think your emails are a nuisance. I was rather thinking of mine, having expressed all sorts of frustrations on this list while the good guys are silently doing the job we are all waiting for with great hope. I was just thinking it was not very polite, and therefore I was just trying to moderate what I had said. I know others have been more pushy than me :-) . Didier I never felt your expressing your frustrations was a problem. In fact, I appreciate them, as there are few people outside of programmers and hobbyists who understand them. Commiseration is not bad thing. I've already considered you to be very civil and that is much appreciated. As for doing work on Devuan, I'd like to help, but I honestly do not have a sense of where to begin. The dev teams seems very quiet and isolated, which is okay - but it makes them seem less approachable if you are on the list. I would very much appreciate it if the core team posted a weekly list of things that need doing, as well as an email address to someone to whom we can coordinate efforts so that we do not swamp the list. I can understand if they don't want too many members in the core team. It leads to QA problems. All I would like to do is help out, and then submit the work for quality assessment. After that, it is up to the core team. T.J. ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
[Dng] Weekly developer status update
I think this is a good idea, even if only to keep me motivated I'll start. Thanks for the update, Jude. It is appreciated. I'll state from the outset this is entirely a suggestion. I think it may help get outsiders involved, but the concepts are entirely subjective. What I was really looking for though something like this: 1. The dev team creates a list of core packages that need to be in place for Devuan to boot. Core packages need not include anything related to X at this point, just what is needed to get to a terminal. 2. The dev team then posts a list of things needed to create an acceptable Devuan build environment. 3. Dev team posts a list of packages that need work. 4. People on the list express interest in taking them on. 5. Once finished they send them back to the dev team for assessment. If they decide things are good, then the package can be included in Devuan, otherwise not. If you do enough good work, then perhaps you might be invited as a core member someday. 6. Repeat step one, eventually with X, etc The idea that I am trying to endorse here is to extend communication to the wider community to speed work, without expanding the core dev team beyond manageable proportions. It might sound a bit like the core dev team is a bit of a dictatorship, but personally I'd rather have a meritocracy rather than a democracy at this point. Devuan needs people willing to actually do the needed work. ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] recommendation for consideration: keep as close to debian as possible
On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 01:01:21PM -0300, hellekin wrote: [cut] a functioning and fuss-free GNU/Linux, which I can tinker with as like *** Word, KatolaZ, word. :) I am sorry I am trashing your mailboxes with tons of words :( I would rather like to help you guys doing the hard work... HND KatolaZ -- [ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ --- GLUG Catania -- Freaknet Medialab ] [ me [at] katolaz.homeunix.net -- http://katolaz.homeunix.net -- ] [ GNU/Linux User:#325780/ICQ UIN: #258332181/GPG key ID 0B5F062F ] [ Fingerprint: 8E59 D6AA 445E FDB4 A153 3D5A 5F20 B3AE 0B5F 062F ] ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] recommendation for consideration: keep as close to debian as possible
hellekin hellekin at dyne.org writes: On 02/14/2015 10:16 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 8:12 AM, KatolaZ katolaz at freaknet.org wrote: On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 04:01:58PM +, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: is it the intent of the devuan team to: (a) create a fork which will always, at all times, without fail, require that a debian repo be placed in /etc/apt/sources.list or (b) create a fork of the *entire debian package repository*, such that it will end up over time to be as completely incompatible with debian as ubuntu is today. *** From https://git.devuan.org/devuan/devuan-project/wikis/ProjectDescription Devuan is born for a simple goal: having a systemd-free debian jessie to preserve freedom choice on init and decoupling between init and the rest of the system ... initially, it will NOT be a complete fork, but just a complete infrastructure to distribute a personalized version of debian jessie, testing and unstable where some packages from us will be pinned up on top of the debian repositories... ok, great. whilst it's close, it still doesn't clearly answer the question, though, and i notice, also, that the above is not made clear on the web site. in other words, there are a lot of words on the main http://devuan.org web site but nothing that's definitive. a lot of position statements and aims, but nothing concrete. to illustrate the difference, let's rewrite the above: Devuan has a simple goal: to make it easy for Debian users to entirely remove systemd yet to keep their Debian systems fully functional, up-to-date and fully compatible with Debian. The initial method to achieve this will be to add one extra line to sources.list (in a similar fashion to deb-multimedia), where key strategic packages can then be replaced with systemd-free equivalents by simply running 'apt-get upgrade' Our immediate goal is to provide automated transition scripts integrated into the replacement packages for debian jessie, testing and unstable, and to maintain them indefinitely. Whilst it may prove unavoidable, we seek to actively avoid a complete fork of Debian (learning the lessons from Ubuntu), not least because we wish to make it easy for users to transition between Devuan and Debian (with and without systemd) and we appreciate that a complete fork would make that much more challenging. hellenkin: can you see the difference between that and what's on the wiki (and on the web site)? what i wrote makes the following things very clear: 1) your debian system will not be screwed up or compromised by using devuan. you will also not lose any functionality or packages. 2) we understand the difficulty of maintaining an entire distro. we implicitly understand that we will not get to 1,000 maintainers in the immediate future, so we are being realistic and will not be doing a complete fork. it's too much effort for us, and we recognise that you probably wouldn't trust us (i.e. wouldn't even want to *try* upgrading to devuan) if we created one. 3) we're restricting the scope of what we're doing to a few key strategic packages, and we're going to make it easy for you to remove systemd. that's our core focus. and a few more things, besides. if you recall, i said that my initial concern was that devuan was giving serious consideration to including TDE and many other things besides. i've tried TDE: it works... but because it has to replace one of the key packages (which they haven't kept up-to-date because they don't have enough resources) i am now in package dependency hell even though i have specified to use the debian/testing version of TDE. this is a common problem that anyone who has regularly upgraded a debian/testing system that uses deb-multimedia will be familiar with: packages from two disparate repositories are *NOT* properly kept in sync: it's simply not possible. at one point back when ffmpeg was depending on versions 0.49 of libav and friends, my system went into complete melt-down due to broken package dependencies. i couldn't upgrade *anything* because of it. in the end i had to remove deb-multimedia entirely, compile some of the packages from source (!) to do what i needed to do, and i waited about 6 months for things to stabilise before beginning again. [note: with deb-multimedia i was lucky because it was not key strategic packages, i *could* remove them. if it had been anything in the core packages - the essential ones - i would have been *really* screwed. and that's really the whole point of why i seek clarity on what it is that you are doing, here]. with a small (busy) team, you are stuck in the middle between a rock and a hard place. on one hand you need to keep the alternative packages fully up-to-date: even *one day* late means that people will have a system which becomes unuseable due to
Re: [Dng] recommendation for consideration: keep as close to debian as possible
On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 10:55 PM, KatolaZ kato...@freaknet.org wrote: On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 05:46:03PM +, Luke Leighton wrote: [very long cut] this is again a self-fulfilling statement of intent, where i have demonstrated logically and rationally above that the grounds for the conclusion that you draw are incorrect. is there anything that you can perceive which is incorrect about the rationale i give above? Hi Luke, a very nice theory is yours, indeed, and I am not kidding. thanks. occasionally i have useful insights - even more occasionally i'm able to communicate them effectively :) Unfortunately, in practice we already might miss some of the packages of Jessie because of the systemd-nonsense, and not because of an explicit anti-Debian choice of Devuan developers. And things will apparently not get better anytime soon, since more and more packages are including dependencies on the systemd-nonsense, and this is totally beyond your control. welll there's a difference between including dependencies on systemd *itself* and converting code over to use the d-bus API. not that i like d-bus (long story: in 2005 i compared the spec to DCE/RPC and it was absolutely identical... except that d-bus only implemented about 25% of what is in DCE/RPC... *sigh* but i digress... ) so for example here: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/kde-plasma-5.47280/ it would seem that someone has noticed that the hard-dependency in KDE5 is *not* on logind itself, but is on the d-bus interface *to* logind ... therefore, as long as you can provide a re-implementation of the other side of that service, you're good to go. and as long as *all* the applications which use systemd do so via d-bus interfaces, then it is really not so disruptive a proposition to replace them all as it first seems. ... luckily, when searching alternative logind guess what came up? https://git.devuan.org/pkgs-utopia-substitution/loginkit/blob/master/debian/control hey you should talk to those guys, they might have something that could do the job, as long as it's behind a d-bus interface :) For the moment I would be content to have a working Devuan (i.e., a Debian without the systemd-nonsense), knowing that it inherits some of the merits of one of the most important collaborative projects in the history of Free Software, wouldn't you? :) i'm tempted to say yes - really! but i need several things: continuity for my clients (including two desktop systems), access to weird archaic packages at the forefront of software libre technology (four years ago i provided *full* python bindings to over 20,000 functions and properties in webkit that are considered the exclusive domain of javascript for example), and continuity on the (five or so) servers that i run. so whatever i go with, it has to be stable (or small enough for me to maintain myself). i can't even contemplate, right now, converting to e.g. FreeBSD even though i use fvwm2, because i am going to be in the middle of a huge project running qemu, librecad, openscad, blender, repsnapper and more, for several more months. i can't afford any downtime on it for things like convert to FreeBSD, esp. on a strange piece of hardware as a macbook pro (UEFI boot only). bottom line is: i *really* have to be careful, when previously i would have been happy to just go yippeee! :) l. ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] recommendation for consideration: keep as close to debian as possible
On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 09:59:00PM +, Luke Leighton wrote: Whilst it may prove unavoidable, we seek to actively avoid a complete fork of Debian (learning the lessons from Ubuntu), not least because we wish to make it easy for users to transition between Devuan and Debian (with and without systemd) and we appreciate that a complete fork would make that much more challenging. It might be politic to remove the dig on Ubuntu before anyone places it on the web site. There are eough people who like Ubuntu that they might be misled into thinking that Devuan isn't any good. -- hendrik ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
[Dng] pre-alpha-valentine on qemu
Hi guys, a few simple steps to have Devuan-pre-alpha-valentine installed and running on qemu: 0)# wget http://mirror.debianfork.org/devuan-jessie-i386-xfce-prealpha-valentine.iso; 1)$ apt-get install qemu-kvm 2)$ qemu-img create devuan_disk 5G (creates a 5G qemu disk image for devuan) 3)$ qemu-system-x86_64 -cdrom devuan-jessie-i386-xfce-prealpha-valentine.iso -hda devuan_disk -boot d -net nic -net user -m 256 -localtime (installs Devuan on the qemu disk image) 4)$ qemu-system-x86_64 -hda devuan_disk -boot c -net nic -net user -m 256 -localtime (boots the system) Just two words: IT WORKS :) HH KatolaZ -- [ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ --- GLUG Catania -- Freaknet Medialab ] [ me [at] katolaz.homeunix.net -- http://katolaz.homeunix.net -- ] [ GNU/Linux User:#325780/ICQ UIN: #258332181/GPG key ID 0B5F062F ] [ Fingerprint: 8E59 D6AA 445E FDB4 A153 3D5A 5F20 B3AE 0B5F 062F ] ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] recommendation for consideration: keep as close to debian as possible
On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 12:46:42PM -0300, Renaud OLGIATI wrote: On Thu, 12 Feb 2015 15:40:33 + KatolaZ kato...@freaknet.org wrote: Having said that, and besides the fact that I don't understand what you mean by a temporary fork (a fork is a fork, it happens at a point in time and unless you can travel back in the past, a fork has to be *permanent* by definition), nobody can decide now whether in the long run Devuan will drift apart from Debian only a bit or substantually. Fork is permanent only as long as the two branches do not later converge and rejoin. Yes, I know that, but have you ever seen anything similar happening in the past? Have Mandrake or SuSe ever reconciled with RedHat? Will Ubuntu or Mint or GnewSense ever merge again with Debian? Nope. I'm sorry but merging does not in fact exists for distributions. It's either live or die. And even if sometimes a distro might steal things from the corpse of another failed distro, this has never represented a usual habit and/or has brought any revolutionary jump ahead that I can remember. Consequently, IMHO, either Devuan and similar projects live and flourish and bring new air and new energies to the community (as it is happening right now with all the development of systemd and udev replacements) or these efforts will be just useless in the long run. Who knows, maybe the Debian devs will realize they are missing something, and integrate the non-systemd in a later release... Oh yes, it might be. But it is very unlikely, since in two years it could basically mean maintaining two debians... I am sorry but revolutions are not cheap, and every time you choose to go for something then you have to give up on something else. I really hope Debian will reconsider the systemd nonsense, but I suspect that the probability for this event to occur is practically zero. Hence, I must conclude that Debian and Devuan will most probably not merge any time soon, and will most probably keep diverging instead, as it has already appened with Mandrake, SuSe, Ubuntu, and as it happened for Debian, back in the days, which effectively diverged from *nothing* :) HND KatolaZ -- [ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ --- GLUG Catania -- Freaknet Medialab ] [ me [at] katolaz.homeunix.net -- http://katolaz.homeunix.net -- ] [ GNU/Linux User:#325780/ICQ UIN: #258332181/GPG key ID 0B5F062F ] [ Fingerprint: 8E59 D6AA 445E FDB4 A153 3D5A 5F20 B3AE 0B5F 062F ] ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] OT: Programming languages again.
No no , T.J. , I don't think your emails are a nuisance. I was rather thinking of mine, having expressed all sorts of frustrations on this list while the good guys are silently doing the job we are all waiting for with great hope. I was just thinking it was not very polite, and therefore I was just trying to moderate what I had said. I know others have been more pushy than me :-) . Didier Le 14/02/2015 02:54, T.J. Duchene a écrit : Dear developpers and maintainers, please continue providing us with applications written in the language you prefer. That is always an appreciated request, Diedler! =) I have personnal feelings about which languages are productive and produce bug-free software and which, in the contrary let you waste your time in correcting your bugs and eventually produce wrong result without people even noticing. But I am afraid this leads to endless discussions. Such discussions can be productive if they remains civilized, and does not distract from the overall work of the project. If my recent discussion with Steve Litt about C, etc has been considered a distraction, I will be happy to remove it to private messaging, with no offense taken whatsoever. I had to intention of being a nuisance. Just the following restriction: please, when your piece of software is first of all an API, like dbus is, let it be not too much language-oriented. I mean don't force other programmers to think like you, or, worse, don't make the API only usable by applications written in one language. Since many APIs are stored in C/C++ libraries or accessible via IPC/pipes, creating bindings for whatever language you happen to be using is not excessively difficult as long as the language you are using supports some form of external calling. If there is something in particular you need help with, please by all means post it to the list, and I will help if I can. T.J. ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
Re: [Dng] OT: Programming languages again.
On Fri, 13 Feb 2015, T.J. Duchene wrote: Such discussions can be productive if they remains civilized, and does not distract from the overall work of the project. If my recent discussion with Steve Litt about C, etc has been considered a distraction, I will be happy to remove it to private messaging, with no offense taken whatsoever. I had to intention of being a nuisance. I for one can say it is rather pleasant to read discussions on such topics on this list, despite them being somehow OT (but then declaredly so) and considering this list is somehow a campfire. Your tone so far also shows well how it is possible to have civilized dissent between people that know well what everyone is talking about. Perhaps this may be seen as a good exercise for grown-ups netizens, setting a positive example after so much flaming. ciao ___ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
