[Dng] Devuan Weekly News VIII

From: Noel Torres - Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 23:57:47 +0000

 [Devuan Weekly News][1] Issue VIII

Volume 02, Week 3, Devuan Week 8 https://git.devuan.org/Envite/devuan- weekly-news/wikis/past-issues/volume-02/issue-008

# Editorial

Welcome to Devuan Weekly News issue VIII. After two months has passed from the start of the project (or better, from the start of the DNG">https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/list/dng.en.html'>DNG mailing list), it seems that trolls have mostly disappeared and the list concentrates on discussing technical issues and solutions in a collaborative environment.

‘Collaborative’ is a very beautiful meaning, and we have used it for DWN">https://git.devuan.org/Envite/devuan-weekly-news/wikis/current-issue'>DWN as well. This Issue VIII comes from the collaboration of hellekin, to which DWN">https://git.devuan.org/Envite/devuan-weekly-news/wikis/current-issue'>DWN is in debt for setting up the processes to make this happen. He has also helped me sleep better with his reading and resuming effort.

Besides, it seems that the week can be resumed with a sentence from karl:

if desktop users wants their usb-disks to be automatically mounted, let them, but don’t force me.

It seems to be the true spirit of Devuan: freedom to choose.

# Last Week on Devuan

## [Jessie Without Systemd][2]

The exploration of TRIOS continues. Dragan warns the LiveCD does not allow removing the CD upon shutdown, leading to unexpected reboot on the TRIOS system. Renaud OLGIATI advises to tell the BIOS to boot on HDD and override the boot sequence to boot on the CD.

karl announces his intention to publish http://turkos.aspodata.se/computing/nonudev/' title='non-udev packages'>udev-independent packages to address the fact that some “packages depend on udev for wrong reasons.”

## [Use/Misuse of Depends][4]

cyteen wonders about the dependency policy in Devuan for using Depends or Recommends when upstream is adding support for, but not reliance on, some other package. Recently the Debian policy changed to pull in Recommends by default. The consensus in this thread is that Recommends should not be installed by default, and metapackages should be used instead to satisfy all use cases. Noel remembers the exact definitions of the current Debian policy.

That way both novices and experts would be satisfied: novices will use metapackages and Tasks that pull in Recommends, and experts will be able to choose for themselves. Joel Roth suggests the --no-install-{recommends,suggests} could have their counterparts, e.g., apt-get install pkgname --install-recommends, to ramp up dependencies.

## [Minimal Init][5]

Karl Hammar reports his experiments on choosing init on-the-fly, inspired by Manjaro">http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/init/manjaro_experiments.htm'>Manjaro experiments. Isaac Dunham notes that such a script would require running as PID 1 (and then exec(1P) to the relevant executable). Karl concludes it might be easier to use the kernel’s init= command line argument.

## [Itches and Scratches][7]

Gordon Haverland: “The reason Devuan exists, is an itch named systemd. Should we be looking for other itches?” He wonders what if someone scratch makes others itch, and how itches and scratches pass from a distro to the next. He discovered that using debootstrap on Gentoo does not work as expected, and points to dpkg.

Adam Borowski answers that dpkg is rock stable and its files are almost uncorruptible due to all the care dpkg exercises on them. Gordon then clarified dpkg did not corrupt the files, but that he was trying to use debootstrap on Gentoo.

## [What to do with udev? Some ideas...][9]

Karl Hammar reactivates this thread with some experiments he made building">http://turkos.aspodata.se/computing/sketchy_notes_on_X_install'>building X without udev support.

## [Purpose of all this complicated device management?][11]

Karl Hammar comes back on the alleged superiority of a dynamic device manager and argues for freedom of choice: “if desktop users wants their usb-disks to be automatically mounted, let them, but don’t force me.”

Gravis and Jude Nelson argue in favor of vdev: it won’t touch static devices, it may even create detected devices and exit. Isaac Dunham notes that busybox mdev does the latter. Karl and Isaac discuss scanning and mapping devices to kernel modules.

The thread evolved">https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/20150119.190115.cb63c930.en.html'>evolved into a discussion about libsysdev, a library to substitute udev’s libsysfs which is being created by Isaac Dunham.

## [Wiki Spam][8]

Go Linux warns the VUA that spam should be prevented instead of erased on the without-systemd.org wiki.

## [UEFI and GPT][12]

Robert Storey wonders if Devuan will support UEFI boot and GPT partition tables. It seems Debian does not boot properly with those parameters, and Devuan should. Gravis notes that Devuan’s first release will be almost the same as Debian Jessie but without systemd, and remembers hardware may be necessary for testing afterwards.

# Devuan's Not Gnome

DNG is the discussion list of the Devuan Project.

No sleepless Monday night this week, thanks to the collaboration of hellekin.

You can collaborate too! Devuan Weekly News is made by your peers: you’re welcome to contribute wiki">https://git.devuan.org/Envite/devuan-weekly-news/wikis/home'>wiki!

Thanks for reading so far. Read you next week!

DWN Team

“Current Issue”

“Jessie Without Systemd”

“Use and misuse of Depends”

“Minimal Init”

“Manjaro Experiments”

“Itches and Scratches”

“Wiki Spam”

“What to do with udev? Some ideas…”

less X”

“Purpose of all this complicated device management?”

“UEFI and GPT”

“libsysdev preview”

https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/20150117.174913.1017259a.en.html “Don’t force me”

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