On Fri, 03 Apr 2015 19:56:48 -0300
hellekin <hellekin@???> wrote:

> Hello dears,
>
> one of the current tasks of the Devuan Editors is to gather facts
> about the Debian fork in order to write a compelling story to be told
> on debianfork.org.
>
> This domain will hopefully be the place to deflect and defuse any
> troll about the Debian fork and systemd, in order to focus devuan.org
> on the actual distro work.
>
> Any help is welcome to gather original emails, timelines, witness
> accounts, key people and facts. The objective, I repeat, is to gather
> facts, not gossip, and not opinions or feelings about systemd.
>
> What I want to do is reply to the question: "why did Devuan fork
> Debian?" in the most sensible way possible. (Incidentally, "how" it
> happened may also be relevant ;o)
>
> If you'd like to get involved in the writing process, please idle on
> #devuan-www on Freenode IRC. Thank you for your attention and for
> your help.

Hi hellekin,

Of course, the Debian-User
(https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2014/). Here you can see what's
often called the Debian systemd wars, from about 7/1/2014 through the
rest of the year. You can get a feel for why people continued to try to
force Debian to provide choice, and the feeling of helplessness.


The Debian-devel list
(https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/) shows the systemd discussions
from the start.

The CTTE deliberations, which I consider the original crime (but you
asked for facts, not opinions), is
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=727708

At https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2014/09/msg01367.html , you see
Don Armstrong boasting about voting for systemd, and pointing to his
vote and explanation.

In September 2014, Joel Roth had created a mailing list called
"Modular-Debian", whose archives are at
https://www.freelists.org/archive/modular-debian.

Modular-Debian served first as a place where anti-systemd former
Debianistas could vent, and then as a design facility for sans-systemd
solutions, perhaps a Jessie Without Systemd. By years end
Modular-Debian was superceded by Dng, and you'll find a lot of former
Modular-Debian people on the Dng list. If anyone knows where to find
the Modular-Debian archives, please post it.

Throughout late 2014, I (Steve Litt) posted the Manjaro Experiments,
proving that systemd could be short circuited by other inits such as
runit and Epoch and OpenRC. You can see it at
http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/init/manjaro_experiments.htm .

The Dng mailing list started in early November, 2014, and quickly
replaced Modular-Debian as the Go To place for former Debianistas. Note
the famous and historical "Don't panic and keep forking Debian™!" post
(https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/20141127.212941.f55acc3a.en.html)
to reassure everyone after Ian Jackson's GR rubber stamped systemd.
That was the post that got things rolling!

Running parallel to all of this was the activity going on in the
various non-traditional init mailing lists:

* supervision@???

* several more

These people are moving toward making easy to install and admin inits
based on daemontools, such as s6, runit, perp, and nosh. They are
moving toward a user-easy init script language across several or all of
them. Every one of them has a brain the size of Texas.

The preceding is what I know/remember about the evolution of
Debian-Fork, sans-systemd Debian, etc.

SteveT

Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance