Why should people care about Debian?

Posted Dec 10, 2016 2:59 UTC (Sat) by mgb (guest, #3226)
In reply to: Why should people care about Debian? by pizza
Parent article: Maintainerless Debian?

> You are arguing that adding a feature/option hinders your flexibility and freedom, while removing feature/option adds to your flexibility and freedom. It's an odd position to take, given that it directly contradicts the dictionary definitions of those words.

Not so. If one adds the option locked_in_a_small_box to pizza, pizza's flexibility and freedom is limited. Systemd's broad scope and excessive coupling hinders the development of new and better F/LOSS.

We disagree, but why does it concern you? I was unhappy when Debian started restricting my freedom. Devuan devs have kindly worked around that problem saving me the effort and I am happy again. I believe Devuan provides more flexibility for the future evolution of F/LOSS.

But why do you care about Devuan, whether I am right or wrong? You have Debian. I have Devuan. Is there some reason you need to use systemd in Devuan?

Why should people care about Debian?

Posted Dec 10, 2016 9:57 UTC (Sat) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (1 responses)

> If one adds the option locked_in_a_small_box to pizza, pizza's flexibility and freedom is limited.

Wrong. That's only if you *force* the pizza to be locked in a small box. Adding an option never limited anything.

Also, systemd is neither small nor a lock-in. You can always do your own thing, systemd or not.

> Systemd's broad scope and excessive coupling hinders the development of new and better F/LOSS.

That has been demonstrated to be wrong. What hindered the development of new+better, in the past, was the fact that all previous solutions only solved part of the problem, thus switching to them never was attractive enough to actually happen, so most developers didn't bother.

The sole exception to this was Canonical's Upstart, but that had a different set of problems (some technical, some political) which eventually prevented it from getting adopted more widely.

The mere existence of systemd doesn't hinder anything. It just raises the bar. A lot.

> I was unhappy when Debian started restricting my freedom.

You never had the "freedom" to compel a Debian developer to not include a particular feature or to not require a library in their package in the first place.

Why should people care about Debian?

Posted Dec 10, 2016 10:11 UTC (Sat) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

Please, please, PLEASE stop this systemd thread. LWN has seen enough of them in the past.