On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 01:56:02PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:

[cut]

Wait :) First of all, I might have been unclear in the previous email,
but I really appreciate your work, and that of others who are making
an effort to contain systemd. So there is no reason to start a fight:
that's not my intention at all, and would be counterproductive and
useless beyound measure :)

Second, sorry but I just replied to some of your points (which were
too many :)). I hope I have not forgotten anything important for the
discussion.

>
> What you call 'a minimal window manager and xterm', I see as absolutely
> free access to around 20,000 packages including the richest variety of
> graphical desktop applications on the planet including (if I cared)
> about a dozen graphical file-managers.
>

I was referring to what *I* need, namely a minimal window manager
(that also in my case is Window Maker, you see, we agree on much more
than it looks at a first sight...) and a terminal.

I might be mistaken on this, but my understanding is that already in
the current Jessie if you don't have systemd and polkit installed you
can't shutdown your system from GNOME, and from other WMs and DMs, for
that matter. I don't use GNOME, and I never shutdown or reboot my
machines unless a cataclysm has struck, so I could safely ignore the
problem, but I know that pinning systemd does not solve it. It just
"contains" the avalanche, in some cases, and postpones the search for
a solution to an undetermined point in the future, but does not
*solve* the problem.

[cut]

>
> You say that is not 'a viable long-term solution for the Linux
> community'? Fine, OK, whatever in Gehenna that means. But that wasn't
> what I set out to do. I set out to scratch my own itch and then to give
> correct, useful information to anyone with a use-case similar to my own.
> Judging from feedback, some actually read the page with context and
> found it useful. Others _claim_ to have read the page with context and
> want to argue, but raise non-sequitur objections because they didn't pay
> attention.


Good. Nice. Perfect. I care about a solution that goes beyond my needs
of today, while that is not your first priority. I think we can safely
disagree on this point and continue :)


>
> And of course, there are probably errors on that page. But erroneous
> critiques and vague ideological appeals won't find them.
>

I am pretty sure I have never raised any critique to your work. I have
just stressed that I *believe* that, given the current attitude of
systemd & co., that consists into eating as much as they can of almost
anything in the low-level userspace, breaking things in the process
without saying "sorry", there is probably not much time left until
everything down there will depend on systemd. Hence, pinning is not,
IMHO, a viable long-term solution. And yes, I am very interested in a
viable long-term solution, for my personal, egoistic reasons.

[cut]

> > That's why, although I appreciate efforts like yours and those of a
> > dozen more who have been experimenting with pinning (we have done that
> > as well, for months), I remain convinced that maintaining a
> > systemd-free fork of a distributition, and of a fundamental one like
> > Debian, is a more sustainable way of dealing with the problem. It's
> > not easy, but nothing is easy :)
>
> I agree -- of course -- than nothing is devoid of difficulties.
>
> All I said was that, as far as I can see, lesser measures than forking
> the distribution, with less effort, would have sufficed to enforce a
> no-system policy on Debian-stable indefinitely. My small experiment was
> a de-minimus effort without bothering to have a third-party repo of
> packages (daisy-player, etc.) recompiled and repackaged without the
> --with-system build option or other corrective steps. My speculation is
> that such a repo would be very feasible and a successful way to
> perpetuate a no-system Debian-variant community -- and as an example of
> communities doing exactly that for other enforced policies applied to
> Debian, cited (on the SVLUG mailing list) the Siduction and Aptosid
> Debian-variant communities, successfully maintained for many years by
> just a few developers as a variant on Debian-unstable, using nothing
> more than third-party repos and package preferences ('pinning').
>

See above. I genuinely appreciate your effort, which is scientific and
sound, and I know that *so far* it is still possible to find
appropriate workarounds around systemd, remaining in Debian and
accepting a few compromises.

But I know that two years ago we had a very nice brand-new toy, which
was working perfectly, and for which such workarounds were not needed.
So I don't want to give up, go down with a lot of duct tape and just
"let it go". Duct tape is a wonderful and perfectly sensible temporary
solution. It might even be a long-lasting and reliable temporary
solution. But remains a temporary solution.

You are optimistic, and think that a small amount of duct tape will be
enough to fix the toy, now and in the future. I really hope that you
will not be proven wrong. My pessimism forces me to believe that more
and more duct tape will be needed, to the point that the mended toy
will become a basically useless Frankestein.

I am firmly convinced that both pinning and forking experiments should
continue anyway. At least, if one approach fails at some point, we
still have the other one available as a plan B :)

HND

KatolaZ

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