On Thu, Jul 14, 2016 at 02:24:31AM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:

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>
> There are numerous ways to enforce a local (or limited-interest) policy
> on a distribution's offerings. That is one of them. I list in my
> OpenRC conversion page a number of ways to overcome dependency problems:
> find a third-party repo's package that's built better, rebuild the
> package locally using dpkg-buildpackage or debuild (i.e., using
> different build options), make a new package using debhelper and
> upstream source code. The results of any of those can then be
> republished as part of a package repo.
>

And again, this is more or less what Devuan is doing :) We are still
using 99.5% of the packages directly from Debian. All the packages
developed for Devuan work with little or no effort at all in other
Debian-based environments. We are probably just saying the same thing,
in two different ways :)

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>
> > Reality is a bit more complicated than that, and ways more colorful :)
>
> I was actually curious which of the packages I list -- or any I might
> have missed through error -- you saw as constituting 'a few compromises'.
>
> My page was clear about my use-case, and the ones that the page does and
> doesn't hit. I have absolutely no problem with others considering any
> of the unavailable packages important, but I'm curious about which one
> you did, and why.
>

Me? No package at all. My computing is so simple and archaic that
systemd cannot *currently* affect it in any meaningful way. But
unfortunately I profoundly hate (and I am sure you will appreciate
that this is the first time I use this word in our discussion) the
change-for-change-sake attitude. I hate being forced to use by default
a software developed to solve a non-existing problem in a so intricate
way that you barely recognise it as a solution to any problem at all.

I am convinced that it is still possible to do things in 2016 (and in
2017, and in 2018, and until early 2038, fot that matter) avoiding the
massive bloatware that they want to convince us to accept. And I am
here to prove it, as you are. Maybe with different means.

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>
> > Or you will be forced to make your own distro (which is something that
> > almost anybody with a basic understanding of Linux should be capable
> > of doing).
>
> I was co-maintainer of a Red Hat Linux variant around 1997-8 written
> for a cybercafe I helped build, and so I probably _could_ do it again,
> but would not do so without a very good reason that I can't offhand
> imagine having. (We needed much better NFS/NIS than RHL furnished.)
>
> More to the point, it would almost certainly be smarter to use measures
> such as I've highlighted above (again).
>

That's your opinion, and I respect it. My opinion is different, and
probably won't change, so I am sure you will respect it in turn. Do
you think all the guys and ladies here are just a bunch of assholes
who didn't think about the possibility of pinning, and dpkg-buil-ding,
and mixing repos, and duct-taping the oddities introduced by systemd
one after the other? :)

You are a smart guy, and I am am sure you don't mean that. And even if
you do, you are not alone in the club, since this is a quite common
opinion these days, with which we are getting used to live anyway.

We don't need to prove here who is better than whom. We need to
provide as many alternatives as possible to the incumbent madness. All
efforts are welcome.

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>
> Percentage of Debian 8 packages you can use of you don't want systemd
> around (again, unless I've missed any) is thus:
>
> (43671 - 97) / 43671 * 100 = 99.77%
>
> (FWIW, current Debian-unstable, comprising as above main + contrib +
> non-free, has 52750 packages. I just checked.)
>

Again, I don't use GNOME, but if I can't shutdown from GNOME this is a
little daily PITA. I don't need hplip, but if I do (and, just to
mention, if I admin a couple dozens machines which do), then hacking
around a solution at each dist-upgrade is a PITA. If the systemd-lot
wants to push "sessions" to the point of asking screen and tmux to
change their code base in order to adhere to the systemd-lot view of
the world, this is not just a PITA, but an insult to the way free
software is normally developed, i.e. to cooperate with more free
software.

Is this attitude that I don't like, and that I wish to contain, more
that the technicalities and issues related to systemd, or the number
of packages that are currently affected by this cancer. I concluded
that hacking around technical issues is not the way to deal with what
I percieve as a very dangerous attitude, because this precise attitude
is bound to cause more and more of these technical nuisances, to the
point that nuiances is more or less the only thing you get.

I really hope Devuan will be proven wrong by a strong community effort
able to force reason back in the Debian quarters. But I can't see any
concrete sign of that happening anytime soon. I mostly see
systemd-fanboys.

HND

KatolaZ

-- 
[ ~.,_  Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ - GLUGCT -- Freaknet Medialab  ]  
[     "+.  katolaz [at] freaknet.org --- katolaz [at] yahoo.it  ]
[       @)   http://kalos.mine.nu ---  Devuan GNU + Linux User  ]
[     @@)  http://maths.qmul.ac.uk/~vnicosia --  GPG: 0B5F062F  ] 
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