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Comment by ckastner | Hacker News Reader

I never understood why the Devuan developers could not just contribute their work to Debian directly. Yes, systemd had become the default init system, but the idea that other developers would oppose contributions that would do nothing but improve interoperability is just absurd.

To me, this whole "we're forking Debian" thing just feels like a strongly emotional opposition to systemd, not rational solution to the init system problem.

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They were told to by debian. They argued for as long as they could while debian was still 'their' distribution to change the direction systemd would take it. It was clean that wasn't going to happen. Final response; "If you don't like it you can always fork. But you'll never release anything."

So now they have forked and they have released. So now their splitters. Cake and eat it types, what can you do?

> They were told to by debian.

I don't follow. Are you saying that representatives of the Debian project refused to collaborate with the Devuan developers with regards to improving init system interoperability?

I mean, I think the comment was pretty clear, and that sounds like exactly what they said.

What did "Debian" say exactly? Can you link it?

Or are you just stating what you imagine "they" might have said? :)

I'm just saying I think that's what the parent comment is saying. As for whether Debian actually said that...well that's anybody's guess.

This[0] PCWorld article quotes two Debian list email posts which may clarify what "Debian" said.

From one of the email[1]:

  So, this vote effectively gives systemd the win

And the other[2] shows the result of Debian voting on the topic.

0 - http://www.pcworld.com/article/2854717/meet-devuan-the-debia...

1 - https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00338.html

2 - https://vote.debian.org/~secretary/gr_initcoupling/results.t...

So, to quote the subject of [1]: "call for votes on default Linux init system for jessie" Note that it says "default", not "only".

Where does that support the claim that Debian would oppose people working on sysvinit support?

  Where does that support the claim that
  Debian would oppose people working on
  sysvinit support?

In the body of the other[2] email where 'Option 2 "Support for other init systems is recommended, but not mandatory"' was selected by the Debian community. Once this path was chosen, while it theoretically isn't opposition, in practice it was only a matter of time before non-systemd init systems would become increasingly difficult to use in a systemd-leaning distribution (sysvinit or otherwise).

As Manfred Eigen said:

  In theory, there is no difference
  between theory and practice. But,
  in practice, there is.

(source: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/manfredeig211444...)

Bullshit.

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2014/08/msg00...

  For the record, the TC expects maintainers to continue to support
  the multiple available init systems in Debian.  That includes
  merging reasonable contributions, and not reverting existing
  support without a compelling reason.

Debian can already run various init systems. E.g. you can run GNOME under sysvinit. Within Devuan they just removed GNOME.

If you want init system choice, run Debian (or e.g. Gentoo). Devuan seems more about hating systemd than any actual choice.

As far as i know, systemd is creeping in as a dependency of a lot of unrelated packages - even UI packages. So you can have a Debian that doesn't run systemd, perhaps, but not a Debian that doesn't depend on bits of pieces of the systemd OS any more.

You have a tiny systemd library which does little more than checking if systemd is running. It's a helper library for doing that check. Within Devuan they didn't want this dependency, but that's unrelated from being able to use software under another init system.

There's a huge difference between not accepting any dependency with systemd in the name vs being able to use another init system.

That some software has a dependency does NOT mean that the software is restricted to only run under systemd.

But these are hard deps not just recommends so will pull in systemd dependencies regardless of it using them or not. If it were a recomends type dep, again no one would have a problem. It used to be considered bad packaging to hard dep when recommends or suggests would suffice.

7.2 states: "When selecting which level of dependency to use you should consider how important the depended-on package is to the functionality of the one declaring the dependency"

You say "being able to use software under another init system." Looks like the level of dependency should be adjusted to fit your point.

You might want to learn how shared libraries work under Linux. Then you might be able to understand why packages have a Depends: libsystemd0 (which btw. doesn't depend on systemd itself).

the entire point of devuan (iiuc) is to have a clean separation of function. if systemd is a wide dependency, then the separation of the init system is a bit superficial and isn't what the distro cares about.

Systemd is a lot more than just init. It also manages user auth, udev, time, syslog, and a few other things.

That is the main complaint.

My point is more that systemd makes less sense if you think of it as just init. "Why does init need to manage -foo-?" is a valid question. But "Why does a general 'system daemon' need to manage -foo-?" tends to be self-answering.

One possible reason: They are making a philosophical stand/statement against systemd.

Another is that they can see where the systemd bus is going and it's not somewhere they choose to follow.

Yes it would have made better sense to create some kind of process to switch mainline Debian from systemd to runit, openrc etc.

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