The officially official Devuan Forum!

ffp

Member

Registered: 2024-02-23

Posts: 12  

Devuan Excalibur + Shepherd

Hi everyone, I noticed that Shepherd has been added to trixie's packages:
https://packages.debian.org/trixie/shepherd
And, the Init Freedom page on Devuan lists Shepherd as one of the init systems that are either available or being considered for inclusion in Devuan
Is there even the smallest chance that we could see the option to use Shepherd in Devuan Excalibur?
By that I mean to pick it as one of the available init systems during the system installation.
Thank you for your reply and consideration!

Last edited by ffp (2025-08-11 14:00:22)

fsmithred

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 2,698  

Re: Devuan Excalibur + Shepherd

apt policy shepherd
shepherd:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 1.0.3-1
  Version table:
     1.0.6-2 10
         10 http://deb.devuan.org/merged ceres/main amd64 Packages
     1.0.3-1 500
        500 http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur/main amd64 Packages

ffp

Member

Registered: 2024-02-23

Posts: 12  

Re: Devuan Excalibur + Shepherd

Hi fsmithred, thank you very much for replying to my message!
Yes, I understand that now the package is included in Devuan as well, but, in my understanding, Shepherd is not a drop-in replacement init system like SysVinit is to systemd, it requires more work to get daemons and services running.
I tried to find more information about this and in my search I stumbled upon this post for Bookworm that talks about how to get Shepherd running.
I wonder if this user's scripts can be used to implement official out of the box Shepherd support for Excalibur?
https://www.opopop.net/Debian_Bookworm_ … it_system/

fsmithred

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 2,698  

Re: Devuan Excalibur + Shepherd

I don't see scripts on that page, just deb packages. And they aren't the same ones that are in debian/devuan. The versions of guile don't match the current versions in bookworm/daedalus. You're probably better off installing the packages from the repo.

ffp

Member

Registered: 2024-02-23

Posts: 12  

Re: Devuan Excalibur + Shepherd

I don't see scripts on that page, just deb packages. And they aren't the same ones that are in debian/devuan. The versions of guile don't match the current versions in bookworm/daedalus. You're probably better off installing the packages from the repo.

If you extract the shepherd-debian 1.5-2 amd64.deb package on the blog I linked to, you'll see that it consists of scripts that are installed in /etc/shepherd.d and a shepherd configuration file which can run said scripts and deal with shutting down or rebooting the system among other things.
I did not say you need to install the init from this blog, what I said was the scripts this user created could potentially work for Excalibur as well. They are just scripts after all.
That said, I am not a developer so take my words with a pinch of salt. Would love to hear more thoughts on the viability of implementing shepherd in Devuan.

Last edited by ffp (Yesterday 09:10:29)