On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 3:40 PM, KatolaZ <katolaz@???> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 03:24:54PM +0000, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
>
> [cut]
>
>>
>> so i just wanted to put that thought into people's minds to consider,
>> as i see quite a lot of potential "scope creep" in the past two weekly
>> summary debates that (fortunately!) has been sensibly debated and put
>> to bed, but it would be nice to have a debate about whether there
>> should be a clear unequivocable statement - directly and clearly
>> placed on the web site - about if devuan should be an *indefinite*
>> fork or whether it is planned (right from the start) to be *solely* a
>> temporary one.
>>
>
> Just my usual 0.02 on this: Devuan was born from the necessity to
> remove the systemd nonsense from Debian, and I think this initial goal
> should be its main mission.

hurrah.

> Having said that, and besides the fact
> that I don't understand what you mean by a "temporary fork"

it's possible via a quirk of the nature of debian packaging, by
virtue of the fact that you may place more than one entry into
/etc/apt/sources.list.

anyone may - and i do actually know people who have done this,
including myself - create "temporary forks" of entire groups of
packages, whilst waiting for debian to merge them into the main
repository.

deb-multimedia is an example of such, but is different because it
contains non-free material that will be merged into the main debian
repository "when Hell Freezes Over (tm)." :)


> (a fork is
> a fork, it happens at a point in time and unless you can travel back
> in the past, a fork has to be *permanent* by definition), nobody can
> decide now whether in the long run Devuan will drift apart from Debian
> only a bit or substantually.

well, they can: that's my point. you *can* decide. right now,
whilst there's still time.

5 years ago i heard there's a venezuelan government dept who picked
"debian" precisely because it has no ties to governments: it's run by
principled individuals. they also "forked" debian... by creating a
repository that merely provided replacements for key strategic
packages, whilst *requiring* that there be a debian repo in
/etc/apt/sources.list.

that is *different* from going the [insane] ubuntu way, of forking
the *entire repository*, and making a dog's dinner irredemably
un-mergable mess in the process.

so. to clarify:

is it the intent of the devuan team to:

(a) create a "fork" which will always, at all times, without fail,
require that a debian repo be placed in /etc/apt/sources.list

or

(b) create a "fork" of the *entire debian package repository*, such
that it will end up over time to be as completely incompatible with
debian as ubuntu is today.

this is very very important to make absolutely and unambiguously
clear on the web site, as well as to developers who may wish to get
involved, _and_ to end-users.

to illustrate this, whilst i am sure that you have the confidence and
the desire to continue this project - and i say this *entirely without
prejudice* - it is perfectly reasonable and rational and logical to
surmise that at some point the devuan project _could_ conceivably
fail, forcing people to reconsider what they are doing, *or*, much
more benignly, end-users may, for reasons which are entirely their
choice, *choose* to return to debian.

now, if it has not been made clear that an end-user, once they are on
devuan, may *NEVER* return to debian because there is no transition
path, they're going to be pissed. i feel that, this, therefore,
should be something that is discussed and made absolutely clear.

l.