Welcome to Devuan Weekly News VII. Do not try to find issues V and VI, as I was
on holidays and setting up a collaborative system for upcoming issues.

On this fifth issue, corresponding to 7th week of our project (and thus named
Issue VII), I want to give a warm welcome the first collaborator of DWN:
hellekin.

This new format is thanks to him (in fact, this whole issue is his work).
Please comment.

Noel
er Envite
DWN coordinator

*** Package Submission

Diffing vs. Cloning upstream packages. Franco Lanza proposes to
maintain lightweight repositories in order to integrate changes
more easily against original packages.

Enrico Weigelt argues to mirror upstream packages as downstream
branches (not forks) which he says is what the usual
tarball+patches scheme is doing anyway.

*** Release Roadmap

[[https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/20150104.060312.cd41e777.en.html]
[Release Roadmap]] highlights: Devuan "alpha" Jessie will not include
loginkit nor eudev by default, as they're not ready yet. Systemd
and libsystemd0 dependencies will be absent as well, and xfce4
will be the default desktop. GNOME3 will be installable but
dependent on systemd-shim.

The repository will be populated by January 23, and the first ISO
installer is scheduled for January 31.

Devuan package maintainer candidates should send an email to
Franco Lanza <nextime@???> with Subject: "devuan package
maintainer" and specify which package they want to maintain, a
little description of their skills, and their account name on
git.devuan.org.    

*** vdev update and design document

https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/20150104.141649.71081c77.en.html

*** Devuan Security Wishlist

Godefridus Daalmans wants Devuan to add default support and
documentation for Secure Attention Key (SAK). Ctrl-Alt-SysRq-K can
be used to emulate SAK, killing all processes on the current
virtual console (including X and svgalib programs).

*** Wheezy

https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/20150105.185839.e3e1e9ec.en.html

t.j.duchene warns that Debian Wheezy is now installing
systemd-logind0 as Debian has been backporting packages from
Jessie. He denounced QA pitfalls and the primacy of packager
convenience over user interest. He wonders whether the
introduction of dependencies on systemd in Wheezy is a matter of
easing upgrade to Jessie, or negligence on the part of package
maintainers who see systemd as a solution to patching existing
code.

Hendrik Boom develops the thread into the genealogy of systemd in
from Squeeze on. The introduction route of systemd seems to come
from backports, dbus, and X11. Oliver Schwank got Debian packagers
to explain their logic in introducing dependencies on libsystemd0:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=773924
("systemd-free" means "not using systemd as init", nop code is ok)

Aldemir Akpinar jokingly suggests to rename systemd meta package
in Devuan to systemd-innocence.

*** Jessie without systemd

https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/20150108.222844.f83bac6d.en.html

The TRIOS team introduces their semi-rolling Debian Jessie based
OS that aims to work without Systemd. It still uses udev at this
point. It looks very similar to Devuan, using OpenRC as the
default init system and XFCE4 as the desktop. It targets ordinary
users.

Martinx - ジェームズ introduces them to eudev so that they can
remove the last systemd-udev dependency on the systemd food chain.

*** Devuan Weekly News

The weekly news dispatch is not disappearing. We're trying to
make it a team's work, so if you're interested, please drop by
#devuan-news and brainstorm along.