On Sat, 15 Aug 2015 10:02:12 +0000
Roger Leigh <rleigh@???> wrote:

> That's a considerable achievement--how many other projects have been
> able to achieve an equivalent scale?

Not very many and I agree with you, it is very impressive, even if
Debian makes internal bickering look commonplace. I'd say it is even
more impressive, that in spite of that, they still manage it.

>
> Now I think there may have been benefits to separating the "base"
> system from "everything else", and indeed it was discussed on several
> occasions in Debian, but this never happened for various reasons. In
> retrospect, I think it would have been a good move.

I agree.

I would rather that Devuan had a smaller fixed base install that was
supported for at least 5 years (or two releases) with a guaranteed ABI
for the life of that base. You can say that upstream Debian already
does this to some extent, and yes that is true, but there really is no
divider between base and the rest of the repo.


It might seem rather arbitrary at all, but giving someone a clear
notion of what is going on is key in IT. Even if two products are
exactly the same, the one that is presented with less hassle wins
the day.

Having a specifically defined base makes it easier for third parties to
ensure that software is going to work without a hitch. It's much more
attractive from a testing standpoint than the usual Linux hodge-podge. I
think it is also one of the reasons that Google looks at Gentoo for
Chrome OS and Apple to FreeBSD. It just simplifies everything:
testing, development and bug hunting.

Heck, I'd make a reasonable guess that if Devuan had a fixed
base that Valve might even chose Devuan over Debian for future versions
of SteamOS, because it would be less work for them to do. They wouldn't
have to dissect as much to get the base that they need.


> That said, I do think multi-binary package generation could be
> automated for the common cases. It's pretty trivial to distinguish
> headers, libraries, documentation, translations, source, debug
> symbols from the filesystem locations they live in. This is also
> something which has been discussed over the years. The tool changes
> to accommodate it are not insignificant though.

Gentoo proved that you can set a series of global package "flags"
specifying what support to include or exclude when building a binary
package. It's practical and it works for large scale package chains.
It's completely automated. I see no reason why Debian or Devuan cannot
incorporate the idea to build sets of the same packages with and
without systemd support and then let the user choose what they want.

It's just my opinion, and no one has to agree, but if Devuan ever wants
to be a major distribution, systemd has to become a non-issue. It
should just another piece of software, installed at user's whim.

T.J.