It's time to put on the brakes [LWN.net]

It's time to put on the brakes

Posted Nov 18, 2014 13:21 UTC (Tue) by obi (guest, #5784)
In reply to: It's time to put on the brakes by tjc
Parent article: Fog Heen: Resigning as a Debian systemd maintainer

At this point, I'd like to see a fork: at least the anti-systemd crowd would then put in the work to make Gnome and other things work on non-systemd. And just maybe it'd act as a pressure release valve for all the bitterness we've seen for the last few years on the Debian ML.

But if I'm honest, I doubt a fork will happen. It's quite telling that most of the people actively doing the work seem to have no compunctions about working with systemd.

to post comments

It's time to put on the brakes

Posted Nov 18, 2014 14:11 UTC (Tue) by Zack (guest, #37335) [Link] (1 responses)

Talking of forks and forking is silly in the Debian context. There would be a Debian Blend at most.

The question here is, how willing are systemd proponents (since they are the default init) to accommodate users who do not want to have systemd installed for whatever reason? If the majority is more than willing to acknowledge the need of some for a systemd free OS, there is no problem at all.
If the majority is unwilling to do put some sort of guarantee in place, there might be a need to create a blend which will probably consist of a modified installer, and a handful of packages, but will remain as close as possible to Debian the main project.

There is no major schism on the horizon here. Just a minor one where Debian at large can decide to continue as one whole project, or most-of-the-project-and-then-a-little, possibly at the cost of losing the "Universal OS" moniker.

It's time to put on the brakes

Posted Nov 18, 2014 15:09 UTC (Tue) by obi (guest, #5784) [Link]

I agree on your point that talking about forks (wrt Debian) is a bit silly, and that if one would diverge a bit a blend would be the way to go.

I may be wrong, but you seem to imply that the systemd side should accommodate users who want to avoid systemd; I respectfully disagree - it's up to those users to work with upstreams (like Gnome) and packaging teams to provide patches and implement the things that are needed (alternative logind f.e.). If they did, I doubt we'd even need a blend. IMHO the question is "who should do the work", not "will the work be accepted".

It's time to put on the brakes

Posted Nov 18, 2014 16:01 UTC (Tue) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

> At this point, I'd like to see a fork: at least the anti-systemd crowd would then put in the work to make Gnome and other things work on non-systemd.

I'd rather not see a fork. Splitting an already small community does not seem like a good idea, especially over something that can be fixed by a few packages and a modified installer. But if there is a fork, I wouldn't expect things like Gnome to be a problem, since there are alternatives.