About the Devuan excision [LWN.net]

About the Devuan excision

Posted Jul 1, 2026 4:05 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: About the Devuan excision by pizza
Parent article: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

It's a systemd bug, as it's a part of the default systemd installation. The distro is Fedora, btw.

> (I mean, an init script that a distro upgrade sets up to run only once after a system upgrade would break the same way for similar dependency issues. Or more likely, fail silently leaving things in a [not-so-]subtly incorrect state afterwards)

Probably. Or maybe not. The issue here is that systemd is a huge mess at the moment. It seems to do _everything_, but it does almost nothing completely right.

The core process supervision and journaling are OK. Everything around it is not. Mount units are a particular disaster area. I dare anyone to say that THIS is acceptable: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/ee9a70ccc7a35b224...

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About the Devuan excision

Posted Jul 1, 2026 14:32 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Mount units are a particular disaster area.

If mount units are a "disaster area" then the previous status quo mudball (static /etc/fstab + autofs + bespoke distro scripts that keeled over when you stray off the beaten path and/or something inevitably went wrong, no meaningful dependency tracking vs the filesystem(s) being online/accessible, etc) was an extinction-level-event asteroid impact.

Is it perfect? far from it. But it's still a *huge* net improvement.

About the Devuan excision

Posted Jul 2, 2026 8:17 UTC (Thu) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link] (1 responses)

> The issue here is that systemd is a huge mess at the moment. It seems to do _everything_, but it does almost nothing completely right.

It does most of the things pretty much right. People used to split hairs over "completely" since computing happened, and will do so for the foreseeable future.

> The core process supervision and journaling are OK. Everything around it is not. Mount units are a particular disaster area. Mount units are a particular disaster area. I dare anyone to say that THIS is acceptable: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/ee9a70ccc7a35b224...

You are sensationalizing. If that's the worst you have, I'd say we are in pretty damn good place.

This is not an article about systemd

Posted Jul 2, 2026 18:49 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

I think that the systemd wars, beyond having been mostly settled years ago, are somewhat off-topic here. Let's not relitigate that one yet again.