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Author: Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton
Date:  
To: KatolaZ
CC: dng
Subject: Re: [Dng] recommendation for consideration: keep as close to debian as possible
On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 10:55 PM, KatolaZ <katolaz@???> wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 05:46:03PM +0000, Luke Leighton wrote:
>
> [very long cut]
>
>>
>> this is again a self-fulfilling statement of intent, where i have
>> demonstrated logically and rationally above that the grounds for the
>> conclusion that you draw are incorrect.
>>
>> is there anything that you can perceive which is incorrect about the
>> rationale i give above?
>
> Hi Luke, a very nice theory is yours, indeed, and I am not
> kidding.


thanks. occasionally i have useful insights - even more occasionally
i'm able to communicate them effectively :)

> Unfortunately, in practice we already might miss some of the
> packages of Jessie because of the systemd-nonsense, and not because of
> an explicit anti-Debian choice of Devuan developers.
>
> And things will apparently not get better anytime soon, since more and
> more packages are including dependencies on the systemd-nonsense, and
> this is totally beyond your control.


welll.... there's a difference between including dependencies on
systemd *itself* and converting code over to use the d-bus API. not
that i like d-bus (long story: in 2005 i compared the spec to DCE/RPC
and it was absolutely identical... except that d-bus only implemented
about 25% of what is in DCE/RPC... *sigh* but i digress... )

so for example here:
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/kde-plasma-5.47280/

it would seem that someone has noticed that the hard-dependency in
KDE5 is *not* on logind itself, but is on the d-bus interface *to*
logind

... therefore, as long as you can provide a re-implementation of the
other side of that service, you're good to go.

and as long as *all* the applications which use systemd do so via
d-bus interfaces, then it is really not so disruptive a proposition to
replace them all as it first seems.

... luckily, when searching "alternative logind" guess what came up?
https://git.devuan.org/pkgs-utopia-substitution/loginkit/blob/master/debian/control

hey you should talk to those guys, they might have something that
could do the job, as long as it's behind a d-bus interface :)


> For the moment I would be content to have a working Devuan (i.e., a
> Debian without the systemd-nonsense), knowing that it inherits some of
> the merits of one of the most important collaborative projects in the
> history of Free Software, wouldn't you? :)


i'm tempted to say yes - really! but i need several things:
continuity for my clients (including two desktop systems), access to
weird archaic packages at the forefront of software libre technology
(four years ago i provided *full* python bindings to over 20,000
functions and properties in webkit that are considered the exclusive
domain of javascript for example), and continuity on the (five or so)
servers that i run.

so whatever i go with, it has to be stable (or small enough for me to
maintain myself). i can't even contemplate, right now, converting to
e.g. FreeBSD even though i use fvwm2, because i am going to be in the
middle of a huge project running qemu, librecad, openscad, blender,
repsnapper and more, for several more months. i can't afford any
downtime on it for things like "convert to FreeBSD", esp. on a strange
piece of hardware as a macbook pro (UEFI boot only).

bottom line is: i *really* have to be careful, when previously i
would have been happy to just go "yippeee!" :)

l.