The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Nov 30, 2014 22:45 UTC (Sun) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
In reply to: The "Devuan" Debian fork by pabs
Parent article: The "Devuan" Debian fork

Yes - although a fork is not quite the same thing as a Debian derivative.

The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Dec 1, 2014 7:28 UTC (Mon) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (7 responses)

You don't actually think this is going to be a true fork do you? That's laughable. It's going to be a derivative with different defaults. There is absolutely no way they could duplicate the entire Debian project, not even Canonical can and they have a multi-millionare backer and they still pull many packages directly from Debian.

I suspect in time like most of the derivatives interest will fade and the distribution will die.

The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Dec 1, 2014 10:00 UTC (Mon) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (6 responses)

It could be a semi-fork, nominally independent but in practice pulling most package updates unchanged from Debian. It's true that for now they can purge the evil Poettering just by picking different defaults. By the time Debian does start to drop support for SysV init, a year or two from now, I do expect that interest in the fork will have died down.

The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Dec 1, 2014 10:19 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

I think it is highly unlikely that Debian as a whole will intentionally drop support for sysvinit altogether (by way of a policy mandate). This means that as long as there are people who are interested enough to volunteer the necessary work sysvinit should keep going as an alternative init system in Debian. Chances are that, like with earlier similar situations, the project will fine-tune the necessary procedures and everything will be reasonably OK for everybody.

If Debian ever gives up sysvinit altogether it will be because we have reached a point where nobody will miss it enough to do the work.

The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Dec 1, 2014 10:24 UTC (Mon) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link] (4 responses)

> By the time Debian does start to drop support for SysV init, a year or two from now,

This is *Debian*. The distribution which has support for more than one non-Linux kernel. The distribution which has support for *Hurd*.

I don't think they'll drop support for sysvinit so soon. It wouldn't surprise me if they add support for even more init systems instead. It wouldn't surprise me if they create an overengineered system to generate configurations for multiple init systems from a single text file (in the style of the Debian menu package), which no other distribution will use.

Yeah, systemd will be the default and what almost all of their users will be using. Doesn't mean they will drop the alternatives (IIRC the "alternatives" system several distributions use came from Debian, which shows how much they like alternatives).

The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Dec 1, 2014 15:22 UTC (Mon) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link] (3 responses)

> This is *Debian*. The distribution which has support for more than one non-Linux kernel.

Not any more. It just dropped one of the two because of inadequate maintenance. And had there been an insistence that alternative kernels mandate that any package which doesn't run on kFreeBSD or the Hurd be elimitated from the archive or patched until it did, Debian would look very different (worse, IMO) than it does today.

The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Dec 12, 2014 19:13 UTC (Fri) by andreasb (guest, #80258) [Link] (2 responses)

>> This is *Debian*. The distribution which has support for more than one non-Linux kernel.
>
> Not any more. It just dropped one of the two because of inadequate maintenance.

That doesn't make any sense as you wrote it. If you only count release architectures as being supported, then Debian never had support for more than one non-Linux kernel. Hurd has not made it that far.

The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Dec 12, 2014 20:36 UTC (Fri) by Zack (guest, #37335) [Link] (1 responses)

I think rodgerd was referring to GNU/kFreeBSD being dropped as a release architecture.

It was *not* dropped because of inadequate maintenance, by the way. With zero RC bugs and 90% of the archive built, it was in ship shape. The main release concern for the maintainers was in fact, that it was probably too late to ship with a FreeBSD 10 kernel.

Why it was dropped isn't 100% clear (https://release.debian.org/jessie/arch_qualify.html doesn't seem up to date), but the only reason I can surmise is that Steven Chamberlain in his role as super-human maintainer of all things kFreeBSD is a single point of failure, and as such, as a release architecture it would be prone to the malevolent whims of renegade buses.

Last thing I heard it was still going to be released, on schedule, alongside Jessie, but probably with a FreeBSD 10 kernel, since the freeze doesn't affect the architecture anymore.

The "Devuan" Debian fork

Posted Dec 13, 2014 1:20 UTC (Sat) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link]

> It was *not* dropped because of inadequate maintenance, by the way.

Probably a bad choice of word - the email I saw said it was because they were down to one maintainer (an inadequate *number* of mainters, not that the maintainer is inadequate).