T.J. Duchene <t.j.duchene@???> wrote:

> I used Debian Sid recently, with the apparent ability to boot
> using either System 5 or Systemd via Grub. The choice seems clear to me
> that Devuan could minimize upsteam maintenance by looking at that.

The problem is not which init system to use - SystemD is not just an init system. Even if you use Sys5 init, there are a lot of packages that require parts of SystemD to install/work - so being able to boot with Sys5 init is a bit of a red herring really.


On 15 Aug 2015, at 01:26, Steve Litt <slitt@???> wrote:

> Oh, you wouldn't want to do that. Contrary to what I wrote in another
> thread about "the perfect is the enemy of the good", if *I* were in
> charge of decontamination, I'd throw out whole subsystems. Gnome gone.
> KDE gone. Xfce gone. Networkmanager gone. Gimp gone if it gets all
> systemd on us.

Which really leads on to one of the "hard choices" facing Devuan.
If you don't have the packages people need to run, then they can't run Devuan. And if those needed packages have been modified to need SystemD then it needs work to re-convert them. I guess a look at Debian PopCon might give some ideas which packages are being used - and hence where to spend limited dev resources.
Though I suppose you could decide to ignore the GUI packages to stat with - there's a large user base (like myself) who run headless servers and so really don't care about any of the packages in that list !

Long term, you could try and get the GUI stuff in - but I suspect that's going to get harder and harder over time as the Japanese Knotweed of the software world gets a deeper hold.