On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 02:44:04PM +0100, Didier Kryn wrote:
>

>     1) It is clear, by reading this list that part of us are mostly
> concerned with servers.

>

>     2) I also read that there are people who want to truely own their
> desktop. Some call them sentimentalists, but they are the people from and
> for wich free software arised.

>

>     To summarize, I see two populations in the audience of Devuan, with
> slightly different motivations (I find myself in both):
>         1) Servers' admins, who have professionnal concerns about security
> and productivity and don't necessary care of the desktop,
>         2) DIY (and FIY ;-) ) addicts who want whole control on their
> desktop.

I suppose I fit in #2; I've used Linux since 2006, which is by now over
a third of my life, with my first Linux system being a secondhand
Thinkpad running Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake.
Getting that to work nicely in 64 megabytes of RAM took a bit of work,
but it paid off: it ran more nicely than the DEs I've tried on my
current netbook.
Since that point, I've built an LFS-ish system with an alternate libc.

I can knock out a sysv-style init script (apart from the LSB headers)
in a matter of minutes, without looking at the documentation.
Yes, I know C well enough to write smallish tools, and if I wanted to
I could probably get an overview of how systemd works internally--
after spending several weeks reading through it. ;)

But shell scripts can be written well, and writing a shell script to
solve a problem beats writing a custom config to handle how one tool
does it, and then not being able to apply that to another platform...
or an older version of the same distro.

And so I would rather use something that *expects* shell scripts than
something that tolerates them for "backwards compatability".

And I'm certainly not interested in using a custom config because
RedHat's employees can't understand how to write fast shell scripts.
Why should I expect them to write efficient and safe C if they can't
manage efficient and safe sh?
"The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity."

Thanks,
Isaac Dunham