The "Devuan" Debian fork and the fuss about systemd

And if 3.14 is needed for that feature, there is maybe a reason.
( and in practice, requiring new kernel is not really a new debate, since it already erupted in 2006, with the same people like Al Viro and GKH ( http://lwn.net/Articles/193603/ ).

The discussion on the boundaries of kernel space and user space is still not resolved, and that's just yet another issue of it. There is different things that push to that result, from "we should be free to break internal API" to "let's use sysfs to expose internal API to userspace, so we can push more stuff outside of the kernel".

And that's not like we as a community get API right on the first time, kernel, libraries, etc do change the API and ABI, so breakages are expected, and they are expected because there is no coordination nor central deadline, no committee to decide on ABI and not the kind of stuff you would fine in a closed source UNIX. You also happen to see the sausage factory from the inside, so yeah, you see all breakages that are isolated and hidden by a vendor.