Still here. Silence isn't always a bad thing. I think the issues
discussed rather burned themselves out for a bit. Trolling only goes
on as long as anyone bothers to listen and respond.

The rest of this is basically a long rant, so feel welcome to disregard
it, or comment as you see fit. It's basically discussion material to
keep entertained, and as such is random thoughts.


As for positive contributions to Devuan, the ball is basically in the
corner of the development team to tell us what is going on. In the
meantime, we can only speculate. I would feel more comfortable with
knowing what is going on - but one must be patient I suppose. I want
to know if Devuan is planning to go in a direction that I want to
contribute to over the long term.

I don't want to spend time based solely on a dislike of systemd,
because that burns itself out rather quickly after people realize that
in order to accomplish that there is actual work involved. A good
percentage of Linux mailing lists talk a lot, but don't back it up with
actual skills and time.

What I would like to discuss and what I personally want to see as a goal
is that Devuan will correct Debian's mistakes. To be blunt, I believe
that the apt package manager is hopelessly flawed and the source of the
whole problem. I realize that I am likely never to convince the rest of
Devuan of this, and that if I am going to help, I will probably have to
accept that. The whole systemd debacle would never have happened if
Debian had a mechanism for providing multiple binary packages for the
same software, allowing people who do not want systemd to avoid it.

I think was a mistake of Debian's packaging the install scripts and
configuration data with the binary files in a DEB. The bundling
approach might seem sensible, but with the two bundled together,
management options and installation become a severe PITA. You have to
take apt, there are no options. Setting that aside, at least 30% of
the time, I'd have to change, divert or replace the default config
files anyway, because the packager didn't set sensible defaults. By
separating the two, you can guarantee an update is clean without
worrying about the possibility of hosing your config files. If the new
version requires changes, you'd probably have to do them by hand
anyway. The only time that config files should be "replaced" is when
you are doing a dist-upgrade, even then they should be diverted, not
replaced. The only exceptions should be things the OS needs to get to
the prompt.

Lastly, I think that writing system management tools in Python is a
terrible idea.  Python is a language with "duck tying", which means that
a lot of errors are only detectable when the software is being run on
your setup. One sight change and "klabooey" - errors to STDOUT. I can
certainly think of other reasons to dislike systemd, but the fact that
the management tools are written in Python pretty much tops that
list. It's not an anti-Python rant, anymore than I hate Perl. I
just do not feel that Python is the right tool for the system jobs,
given that it: a) is duck-typed, b) has no fixed standard, and c)
versions of Python are incompatible.