On Sat, Mar 21, 2015 at 03:56:01PM -0400, Jude Nelson wrote:
> I think what we're after is a way to accept/reject software based on a
> well-defined set of acceptance criteria. It sounds like we're trying to
> say that the mission statement of Devuan is something like "Devuan
> prioritizes the inclusion of Free Software that follows the Unix software
> design philosophy," where "Unix software design philosophy" minimally means:
> 0. A program is a file that contains executable data (e.g. a binary, a
> script, or a library).
> 1. Each program has a single well-defined responsibility.
> 2. If two programs have orthogonal responsibilities, then they are
> logically independent of one another's implementation (i.e. programs with
> orthogonal responsibilities are not coupled to each other's
> implementations).
> 3. Functionality encompassing multiple responsibilities is obtained by
> composing two or more programs (such as through piping, I/O redirection,
> dynamic linking, and so on).
>
> By expressing our social desire to preserve the freedom of choice as a set
> of technical software design points, we'll have an unambiguous way of
> prioritizing programs for inclusion. For example, we can say "systemd does
> not meet criterion #2, whereas the programs it replaces do; thus we will
> not prioritize its inclusion over them."

That is, prioritizing rather than excluding. So we can still, for
example, keep the linux kernel. :)

-- hendrik