One thing that has always bugged me was that Debian was supposed to be
*the* distro that runs on just about anything from an embedded system
to a supercomputer, from an old dumb terminal or mainframe to a fairly
recent laptop (well kinda, drivers etc). It was even one of the
reasons the default installer is text-based: it should run over a
serial console, etc. Debian supported the most architectures, not just
x86 (unfortunately it dropped a few recently). Does systemd even
support all this? And what will happen to the ISS[1]?

It's saddening. Oh well, heeeere's Devuan!

[1] http://phys.org/news/2013-05-international-space-station-laptop-migration.html

On Sat, Apr 4, 2015 at 9:36 PM, Steve Litt <slitt@???> wrote:
> 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

>
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