dear Ben,

On Tue, 16 Jun 2015, Ben Dibell wrote:

> I've been following DNG's discussion of my init system Epoch, and I'd
> be happy to provide any required information to aid its addition to
> Devuan.

good to have you here! welcome. I've been following myself your
development on Epoch, had a look already last year, looked good to me.
I now see the slashdot post
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/06/13/198222/ask-slashdot-feature-requests-for-epoch-init-system-130
well deserved visibility, hoping you can use the feedback received, /.
is usually very good for that in my experience.

our plan for Devuan 1.0 is certainly that of keeping sysvinit as
default, but as our own mission states we'll do our best to leave or
even improve support for using other init systems on Devuan.

Ideally we can provide you with a sort of devops environment that helps
you testing Epoch on a very minimal base system, just like Devuan is
serving Jude's development on vdev (an excellent ally for you IMHO!),
especially when it comes to live virtual machine images. These are
already available on http://files.devuan.org as daily builds, including
our latest activity on gitlab.

Packaging Epoch in Devuan would basically facilitate users to test it,
if that is what you want. I recommend starting with a very basic package
to make an idea how that works. the full guide Debian offers on making
packages is this https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/

however equivs is also good for a start, to understand how it works
https://packages.debian.org/jessie/equivs (apt-get install equivs)
provides a very easy way to create a very simple package for you to
distribute by direct link. Following the KISS logic, equivs always ended
up satisfying most of my hacking needs, with some additional hand
scripting into debian/rules. However if we go to produce an Epoch
package for wide distribution then the maint-guide should be the
reference, aiming at quilt 3.0 and git as package protocols (the latter
integrates nicely in our CI, Daniel and Nextime know more about that).

Once you have a debian/ package, made by you or other volunteers, you
are welcome to mirror your git repository into git.devuan.org
packages-utopia section, then the rest is automatised via our CI and
built for all target platforms and made available on our repository.

At last consider that Roger Leigh is among us: long standing maintainer
of sysvinit in Debian and probably the best person alive to know what
does it means to maintain a widely used init system spread across a very
diverse ecosystem of scripts and purpose-driven approaches. I think his
wisdom can really benefit the progress of your project.

ciao