:: Re: [Dng] Aims and leadership
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Author: Peter
Date:  
To: dng
Subject: Re: [Dng] Aims and leadership
On 11/30/2014 01:14 AM, niarnholf wrote:
> On Sat, 29 Nov 2014 17:58:03 -0500, Ruben Safir <ruben@???>
> wrote:
>>> On 11/29/2014 08:34 AM, Florian Lohoff wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, Nov 28, 2014 at 08:58:19PM +0000, chris wrote:
>>>>> Aside from fixing Debian(!) and other than being anti - systemd, it
>>>>> seems unclear to me what the aims and goals are for the project.
>>>> For me its not anti-systemd - but pro-choice.
>>>>
>>>> I want to have the ability to install a Debian without touching
>>>> systemd. You cant right now. You can choose to run sysvinit as
>>>> pid1 but only by purging systemd and reinstalling sysvinit. But still
>>>> then you are left with a whole lot of the systemd ecosystem.
>>>>
>>>> Have a look at the rdepends of libsystemd0 and other elements
>>>> of the systemd ecosystem.
>>> Right.
>>>
>>> Or more generically: We must base our goals on principles rather than
>>> particular software packages we disagree with.
>>>
>> What is wrong with that? Despite what is being said, systemd is a very
>> bad piece of software and written by individuals who can not be trusted.
>> Is that cruel to say? I don't care. I only care how my systems work
>> and how much innovation and usage I can get out of them. Most
>> importantly, I expect them to behave as I demand.
>>
>> What I don't want to do is to spend the last part of they life hating
>> systemd, DingoOS and Lennart.

@Ruben
It's always a mistake to pick something narrow and focus on it, and then
your enemies do the old "bait and switch" and attack you another way.
You need to understand why each of these things is flawed, and describe
rules that outlaw both of them, and hopefully any other future idea.
This sort of mistake is why the USA's constitution is a total failure today.

And here our leadership has written something good but probably incomplete:

"Devuan will do its best to *stay minimal* and abide to the UNIX
philosophy of "*doing one thing and doing it well*". Devuan perceives
itself not as an end product, but a *starting point for developers*, *a
viable base for sysadmins* and a *stable tool for people who have
experience of Debian*. Devuan will never compromise for more efficiency
at the cost of the the freedom of its users, rather than leave such
concerns to the independent choices made by downstream developers."
https://devuan.org/



>>
>>> We should not hate systemd, or Lennart,
>> That is one opinion. Its been considered and rejected. Systemd really
>> is a bad piece of software that wraps itself around every aspect of the
>> operating system and demands conformity with its usage and design.
>> At the same time it bottlenecks all future development through it.

Which opinion is rejected? I certainly have not said that systemd is
good. I mean it is absolute complete crap, and nobody could adopt it
without deserving ridicule and a huge amount of criticism (and
suspicion). But what I should have said was: We should not be *blinded*
by our hate for systemd and its creators (and personally, I tend not to
be hateful... just let it motivate but not drive decision making). They
are genius and idiots at the same time... *they have some fine ideas*,
genius even, but they are *clueless* so they need guidance, not
widespread adoption; this just makes them arrogant and more stupid (if
we stopped him back at pulseaudio, maybe systemd would never have
happened). They have apparently abandoned sensible design principles.
They don't even understand the UNIX philosophy... how can they hate it
if they don't understand it. Basically what I'm saying is *their ideas
are wasted, but we can use some of them*. (and the fact that RedHat, a
huge corporation, can't seem to give them a clue is highly suspicious;
maybe they like the wider control they have now so much that that they
don't care about the consequences, or they never liked freedom anyway)
>> I do not want to use an operating system like that. Even if it was all
>> perfect in all its code and it functioned flawlessly, and if the coding
>> team was grander than the Wizard of Oz himself, and more benevolent than
>> King David, I still don't want systemd. Its goals and design are
>> dis-empower the user and to make the system dependent of systemd.

And also if they change whatever they want without any discussion or
accepting user input, it may as well be proprietary... we can't control
it any more than we can reverse engineer Windows and customize it, and
keep patching from upstream.
>>
>>
>> I'm not convinced that this group can pull this off a fork. This will
>> require a true fork of debian because all future development in the general
>> GNU/Linux infrastructure is going to have to pass through systemd as
>> long as systemd is at the core of the new OS. Systemd is NOT an init and
>> it is not designed as one.


I suppose you are referring to this from the website " first package of
Devuan is |devuan-baseconf|: a Debian installer with preseed of
|sysvinit-core| and a couple of devuan packages containing a keyring,
repository list files and pinnings. Once installed and updated this
package avoids the requirement of systemd as PID 1 and adopts
|systemd-shim| when strictly needed."

I am hoping it is just a short term plan to do this quickly. I think it
will end up being a more complete fork in the end. Debian/Poettering
have no intention of giving us a chance otherwise. They call systemd
"the future of Linux", meaning that having no alternative is by design.


>>
>> It is an operating system wrapper in the light of svchost.exe, or maybe
>> it is simple not like anything ever done before.
>>
>> Regardless, having all services run and controlled by a single user
>> space application that audits and dished out resources from the kernel
>> to all other applications is not how I wish my computer to function, and
>> is in fact the problem that needs addressing. Systemd is desinged to
>> reduce the degrees of freedom a user and developer has. Freedom of Init
>> Usage is pretty lame and without value. It is likely undoable.
>>
>> The GNU/Linux needs to return to a simple init system that just is confined
>> to initialization services and to keep its paws off users and their
>> applications. If I kill httpd I expect to to die and stay dead.
>>
>> systemd has crossed two lines.
>>
>> First, it is not an init system... It is a OS Kernel wrapper. I have
>> coined the term "Dingo OS" because it is not GNU and it is only Linux in
>> that it used the Linux Kernel.
>>
>> Secondly, it has gone from enabling and empowering users to hindering
>> them and caging them.
>>
>> If you would like help in forking off of systemd and creating a
>> GNU/Linux branch that is not depending on either systemd or its
>> development team, I would be willing to help. Actually, I don't care
>> if it is a debian fork or an arch fork or even a suse fork....as long as
>> it forks.
>>
>> I doubt that any other venture can succeed, aside from a complete fork.
>> Honestly, the Manjaro group has a good first step forward. You are not
>> likely going to be able to support Debian packages for a forked disto
>> without systemd. GNU/Linux and DingoOS are fundamentally incompatible
>> software designs, moving forward. Or maybe GNU/Linux is dead?
>>
>> This will not be like Umbuntu, if that is what you have in mind.
>>
>> Ruben
>>
>>
>>
>>> but the way it has been handled
>>> in hijacking the system we knew and loved. And I think we can learn some
>>> things from systemd too, but we would have to create something
>>> consistent with the unix philosophy and common sense before we can use
>>> it, not because it is impossible to do it otherwise, but because it
>>> would be inefficient and dangerous.
>>>
> You hit the nail on the head pretty hard. Since the advent of systemd,
> it has unexpectedly permuated the GNU/Linux distibution world without
> much thought given to the implications it brings. I don't want systemd
> the same reason I don't want Windows on my computer. It's framework
> brings undefined behaviour on my well defined system and I don't like
> it one bit.
>
> You are right that someday, a project like Devuan, which is determined
> on being anti-systemd, is eventually going to have to dismiss packages
> that can only function with systemd installed. I suspect the first of
> those packages will be Gnome. Systemd is causing a great divide of the
> Linux software world and the implications are pretty grave. The
> people standing in the ruins are wondering how it all came to this.
>
> Why did 99% of the linux distribution market adopt systemd? I suspect
> there are many undiscovered bugs and attack surfaces of systemd left to
> be discovered.
>
> I can only hope that our effort will help make developers realize the
> need for an vendor-independent API's so that every software can
> function with or without systemd.

I also see that as one of the worst things about systemd... the lack of
any vendor-independent and stable API, so we could ever swap parts of it
(starting with the init of course) with other things (making their "but
it is modular" claim pretty much BS in practice). And it's why I'm not
sure the "systemd-shim" solution will work in the long term. If gnome,
systemd, etc. teams want to break our shims, they will be able to. And
since we compete with them, they will likely try. (sorry if that sounds
cynical)
>
> Best regards, niarnholf