Quoting Jaromil (jaromil@???):

> yes I recall your help facing that meshuggah guy aggressing me and the
> whole drama and the wikipedia cancelation and all that at the
> beginning of Devuan. and I really appreciated your words of
> encouragement, advice and experience :^)

You are entirely welcome.

> Now I must admit having commented on the thread without even reading
> the page. But on the pinning plan solidity we've done our homework
> and together with Nextime at the very beginning of this adventure and
> with the help of other VUAs we understood we cannot rely on the long
> term on this solution.

It's entirely possible that I've missed something -- and, of course,
also there are many _other_ use-cases people care about with Linux
distributions, that I do not. I have even been known to concede that
people who like GNOME are human and it might be nice to help them. ;->

There are good reasons for Devuan. There might have been compelling
reasons for its particular implementation, that haven't yet occurred to
me. (When all is said and done, I'm just an easily confused sysadmin
who hasn't yet had his coffee. ;-> )

There might even be dire and insidious consequences to the presence
on one's server-role host of libsystemd0. If good solutions to making
it go away (and I _would_ like it to go away), those solutions are more
likely to come from the Devuan project than anywhere else.

> I have no time now to recall all the analysis :^( plus for other
> reasons I'm typing approx 2000 words per day and its becoming sort of
> taxing on my hands.

I deeply sympathise -- and you're doing good work that I don't wish to
distract you from.

> But you did well following your own path and I personally applaud all
> efforts going into the direction of liberating us from all the systemd
> nonsense that has been going down in the past years.

Thank you indeed.


> so my proposal, since we have two approaches and a gentlemen
> disagreement which can only be proven in the future, is that we wait
> until August, give me time to look better into your documentation,
> with the intention to take up your bet. Then we can agree on a
> reformulation. Approximately, it should be about running a production
> system with pinning, updating it through the life of Jessie and see if
> it holds the few services we agree it should run. For something like
> that, I am ready to place 1 BTC starting from 1:1 odds, that the
> system will not resist the updates and break (aka want to install
> systemd) before Debian 9. However lets nail down the details later if
> you want, this can be a funny bet :^)

Seems feasible, and I'm more than glad to state that you may be
completely justified in such a bet.

For completeness, I'll mention that, if a Debian 8 'Jessie' or Debian 9
'Stretch' system does end up suffering packager-caused intrusion of
systemd into important packages (for some value of 'important' ;-> ),
then I can confidently predict that alternative packages in third-party
repos will become wildly popular among Debian admins.