Hi Thomas,

I have to agree with Jaromil here, as I originally also asked the same
question of you with regards to whether Devuan is a Fork or Derivative.

A derivative is a project is a refactoring but remains close and relies
upon the parent. In the case of Debians derivatives it follows Debian
and intends to stay close to Debian, usually only providing a few
packages and having a repository for only it's changes and using it's own.

A fork is a project split, it doesn't need to take the whole or even the
majority of the contributors to the project, but it's distinct from a
derivative in that it has set a different direction from the parent
project and seeks to fully stand alone and is not tied to closely
tracking the parent project. It's not about numbers but intent.

Devuan is a fork as it's intent is to be fully separate from Debian and
to stand on it's own and there will be increasing differences that will
most likely reduce the commonality to such an extent that one would not
simply be able to apt-get dist-upgrade from one to the other. Our
package repositories are completely separate from Debians - although we
leverage a large proportion of packages unchanged from debians mirrors
at this point in time. Whether Devuan succeeds and gains traction and
developers does not change the intent.

I can understand people might consider Devuan to be merely a derivative
from the way it looks at the moment, because we are still very closely
aligned and tracking closely on most packages as well as the release
cycle for now, simply because it is convenient to do so. That will
likely change in the future.

With regards to debian developers, we welcome them, and we make no
demands on them to choose between Debian and Devuan, only that they
respect our fork for what it is. Of course no one knows the future but
we're not banking on a mass migration of debian developers coming across.

I know that there was a lot of anger and frothing over the Debian
decision and the decision to fork, but we're moving on from that taking
a different and positive path. Most of us respect and indeed cherish
our history in Debian, but systemd is something we can't accept and
can't see anyway to work with it in Debian, and that is the reason why
the fork was neccessary.

Your welcome to contribute, and discuss or not, but we're all part of
this greater linux community, and Devuan has a place in ensuring
diversity withing the init ecosystem. In fact my biggest concern has
always been the monoculture in the init and userspace created by
systemd's close coupling and ever growing feature creep and not it's
existence or even adoption.

Kind regards,
    Daniel.

On 15/07/16 08:54, Jaromil wrote:
>
>
> dear Thomas,
>
> As you may have noticed we went forward and not just writing words on
> the Internet :^) also we appreciate your past efforts on openrc
>
> Parazyd, in cc: , is working in his spare time for a new openrc
> package in Devuan. We have analysed together yours and decided there
> are a couple of choices we'd like to avoid, principally that of
> overriding other inits. We would like to the contrary openrc to occupy
> its own directory tree so that it can be used *besides* sysvinit. this
> approach is also adopted by Gentoo.
>
> if you are interested in teaming up on this rewrite let us know. its
> not urgent, but we'll keep hack on it,
>
> ciao!
>
>
> On Sun, 19 Oct 2014, Thomas Goirand wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Do you realize that there's already more than 150 Debian derivative?
>> Instead of doing one more, you're better off helping one of the already
>> existing derivatives. Writing "fork" is the joke part, since that would
>> only be a derivative, unless every Debian Developer follows you, which
>> will *not* happen.
>>
>> Also, instead of just writing words on the internet, wouldn't you think
>> that helping some of the systemd alternative be a lot more productive?
>>
>> FYI, I don't like systemd either. And I've been maintaining OpenRC in
>> Debian, and trying to push for it to work on as many arch as possible.
>> Though I currently don't have the time for it (for professional and
>> personal reasons), and some others are a bit taking over the work, but
>> it's not going as fast as it should. Some help would be awesome, and
>> would help a way better than writing funny text on the net.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Thomas Goirand (zigo)
>
>
>
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--
Daniel Reurich
Centurion Computer Technology (2005) Ltd.
021 797 722