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steve_v

Member

Registered: 2018-01-11

Posts: 621  

Re: Kde and Systemd - In the News

Here is the difference between Debian and Devuan, why not to improve init?

Indeed, and that's a question that has bamboozled me for years.

As far as I can tell, Devuan 100% reactive, rather than proactive. Upstreams leaning on user-services has been a known problem for years, other distros have been developing solutions and exploring alternatives.
Devuan just waits. Waits to see what Debian does, waits to find out what the next Debian release breaks, waits to see what packages will be "banned" rather than fixed.

We could have openrc user-services, but we don't, "because Debian". Because this isn't really a distribution in it's own right, it's a Debian "respin" and 99.99% of packages are verbatim pulls from the Debian repos.
That's fine when you stick to the Debian way of doing things, but deviating on something as foundational as systemd and then refusing to deviate on potential fixes and replacements... Mark my words: when KDE depends on systemd, Devuan will just "ban" it, loose yet another major package, and slide further into irrelevance.

Pretty much every patch or alternative implementation that has found it's way into Devuan came from another distro (usually Gentoo, e.g. elogind, eudev, opentmpfiles), I'm probably missing some minor tweaks, but the fact I can't name a single significant systemd-free solution invented by this systemd-free distro is concerning to say the least.

Devuan isn't about finding alternatives to systemd, it's about clinging stubbornly to systems long abandoned by everyone else, then shouting at the weather like senile old fools when the rest of the world moves on. Compare the post-count for "here's a cool new feature in Devuan" to "bastards at $outgroup changed something again, the world is going to shit, bah humbug" and the direction is pretty clear - wilful fossilisation.

Last edited by steve_v (Today 00:29:04)

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Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. Four times is Official GNOME Policy.

RedGreen925

Member

Registered: 2024-12-07

Posts: 288  

Re: Kde and Systemd - In the News

Devuan follows Debian. It's OK,  the idea is clear. But why does Devuan follows obsolet versions of inits that are not inits in Debian?

Yo do not understand what you talk about the openrc IS in Debian, Devuan follows the packages as they are in Debian except where changes are required to remove the systemd garbage.

https://packages.debian.org/search?keyw … ection=all

That is the version you will get for the lifetime of the stable distribution.

steve_v

Member

Registered: 2018-01-11

Posts: 621  

Re: Kde and Systemd - In the News

Devuan follows the packages as they are in Debian except where changes are required to remove the systemd garbage

But not when new packages or more extensive changes are needed to have things actually work properly without systemd. It's always "remove garbage" or "sanitise", never "fix", "improve" or "add alternative".
So long as this attitude persists, every Devuan release will have less stuff that works, less functionality, and less user choice.
That's not progress, it's regression. It's the surgeon whose answer to every problem is "amputate", because that's what worked in 1856 and administering even over-the-counter treatments might require more effort.

OpenRC gets little attention in Debian, because it solves problems Debian doesn't have. They don't need a recent version with user-services, they have systemd. We don't.
There is nothing whatsoever preventing Devuan from backporting a newer openrc release or including one of the many other available solutions to user-services, besides this ridiculous "we just follow Debian" policy... Which for some reason only appears to apply in a subtractive sense - changes are always removing something from upstream Debian, never adding, never improving.

Any time anyone suggests something be added to make Devuan better, the response is the same - "get it accepted into Debian first"... Even when the thing in question has bugger-all chance of being packaged in Debian because it's completely irrelevant to a systemd-based distribution.

This is essentially just stonewalling, and it's no surprise nobody is volunteering for anything when it's the default response to Devuan-specific RFPs and ITPs.

Last edited by steve_v (Today 03:51:50)

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Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. Four times is Official GNOME Policy.