On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 02:39:06PM +0100, Didier Kryn wrote:
>
> Le 23/02/2015 14:04, Nuno Magalhães a écrit :
> >On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 2:38 PM, Ста Деюс <sthu.deus@???> wrote:
> >>But, at the first, what is planned to perform to protect «Devuan» from
> >>the guys, that got hold of the fantastic project «Debian»? In other
> >>words, if the guys come to «Devuan» and by their cruelty will start
> >>to «help» some of developers to corrupt the project, do abnormal,
> >>unnatural for the project things -- similar like constitution of
> >>«Debian» appeared, finnaly the «systemd» was forcibly set up: how we
> >>will protect our project?
> >Very good question.
> >_______________________________________________
> >

>     I think this question goes together with the badge or logo
> question. It must go beyond "sans-systemd";
> it is more about principles. Let's list some:

>
> - freedom of choice,
> - interchangealility of solutions to a given need,
> - reduce inter-dependencies to the strict minimum
>

Surely, it is all about principles, and the ones you listed are good
ones indeed.

But we have to be realistic here: in the last 15 years the
requirements for a "minimal" install of a GNU/Linux system have
enormously expanded in size, number and variety of packages. No distro
can currently install a working system for less than about 1 GB, even
without X, and this is not a small footprint, at least to those of us
who were fans of micro-distributions (muLinux, tomsrtbt, bbc, and the
like).

If it is true that "freedom of choice" sounds like a cool flagship, on
the other hand we effectively have no freedom at all about the choice
of the large majority of the core components of a GNU/Linux system,
starting with the libc and continuing with the authentication system
(pam), most of the basic libraries, system tools and so forth. And if
you want a GUI, you don't have any alternative to X-servers and
X-clients (I know, wayland promises to change this, but not for the
better IMHO). And if you are not content of juxt X + twm and you want
a working GUI + a DM, you are bound to install tons of dependencies,
for most of which there are no replacements at all. In most of the
cases, 99.5% of the user don't even know exactly what is installed in
their hard disks, and they don't care, as long as it *works*.

In a word: the principle "freedom of choice" is a good one, but
extendig this to the width and bredth of the whole OS is not just
dangerous but impossible, IMHO.

Let's keep with the good old "Do One Thing And Do It Well", and just
try for the moment to give to the users an alternative to the
systemd-nonsense. This is the most important bit right now. If we
fail, there will be a pretty small space remaining to fight for
"freedom of choice", if any...

My2Cents

KatolaZ

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[ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ --- GLUG Catania -- Freaknet Medialab ]
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