On Tue, 17 May 2016, Adam Borowski wrote:

> On Mon, May 16, 2016 at 09:27:43PM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:

> > > I sincerely wish the remedy of installing openrc and pinning
> > > systemd would work, but I'm sure it won't on the mid-long term.
> > It obviously can't. The same Debian leadership who voted "no" (or
> > was it "we don't need no steenkin GR") on supporting multiple
> > inits now determines whether the OpenRC package is maintained or
> > not. That's no foundation on which to build init choice freedom.

[...]

> Openrc is undermaintained in Debian not because of some cabal, but
> because of manpower issues: no one does real work on it currently,
> and its listed maintainers are hardly active.

I agree. Most of Debian is made by volunteers whose reliability will
be limited on the long-term. They are often students on their path to
find a job and disappear from Debian, or professionals on their way to
switch to OSX as soon as they get a laptop for free at work.

I'm sincerely not trying to offend anyone. Among those students and
professionals are also people I respect and believe have good reasons
to move on, lacking time to attend Debian, which is not slavery nor is
paid work.

But how long can it go that way? and can such a project withstand an
avalanche like systemd? as a matter of fact, I think it didn't.

> The "Debian leadership" has pretty little power: the DPL manages
> finances, public relations and delegations (in practice). The CTTE
> is hardly ever invoked, and their rulings on the systemd issue can't
> be considered evil:

first and foremost: a leader must take care of *everyone*, not just
the majority. and if the majority and the minority split 50%/50% as
they did, should mediate and make sure noone gets hurt, ultimately
also that the project doesn't gets hurt. a leader shall love everyone,
without condition, even his/her own enemies, or at least try to
understand them and well.

This is exactly the opposite that the Debian elected leaders have done
in the past years. The reasons why these bullies did what they did are
too complex and perhaps even too personal to debate here.

The term leader may even disgust some of us, me included. Because to
the contrary of how it is most often practiced, leadership is not made
for the glory of elected individuals. true leaders should give all
their energies in such a situation to mediate, keep together the
community. In the systemd row a true leader would have made sure there
was no split and not even a vote: if the community is split so much
then its up to the leader to find a third way, finally use that power
in a really useful way, instead of shopping around a talking head for
the press.

> The source of evil is the near-absolute power maintainers have on
> their packages. Other than the really unwieldy stick of complaining
> to CTTE, there's no real way to fix issues directly.

I absolutely agree to this analysis. We need to make sure this doesn't
happens again in Devuan. I've been trapped myself in more than one
ridicolous situations, as upstream developer.

> The DDs are a diverse group, there's no "their mistake".

This is also true. Some DDs are also part of our community at Dyne.org
and may disagree both ways. There is a lot of differentiation. And
despite some people like to think of Debian as a Cathedral, it is not.


ciao

-- 
Denis Roio aka Jaromil   http://Dyne.org think &do tank
  CTO and co-founder      free/open source developers
加密  6113 D89C A825 C5CE DD02 C872 73B3 5DA5 4ACB 7D10