On Fri, 29 Jul 2016, Rick Moen wrote:

> Quoting Simon Walter (simon@???):

> > If you really think Devuan is wrong, then flight it harder.
>
> Um, excuse me, but I like Devuan. I look forward to using what it
> produces, either by borrowing packages from its repos or by running it.
> This is why, for example, my OpenRC Conversion page suggests access to
> Devuan's repos to solve package problems.

I think most people clashing with Rick here may want to stop for a
moment and realise Devuan does not need fan-boys, converted people or
preachers as much as critical and constructive minds that go across
all what we are doing and, besides encouraging it, also envisions
flaws and limits. This is what we always need to encourage if we don't
want to end up like Debian today. The capacity to listen to critical
postures is what makes us different from the dynamics surrounding the
systemd avalanche.

Rick is a seasoned contributor to all sorts of good developments in
gnu/linux world, he is provocative and witty, definitely not a
troll. I'm personally glad he is here. I can hardly read everything
that passes through these days, but the prose is generally pleasing
and ironical and civil.

All of us can make mistakes, lets try to avoid them by thinking how we
would act in your area of expertise: sure we get excited about things
now and then, but if we really are experts in the fields we'll always
spot some debatable flaws and put forward some intuitions, perhaps
controversial, sometimes wrong, but all helps to improve the shared
consciousness of what we are doing. What I'm trying to say is that it
would be stupid to expect people with Rick's expertise come here to
praise Devuan like a fan-boy without any articulation or
criticism. Similar frictions happened in the past with Reiner, who is
also a respectable expert in the field and quite caustic at times. We
all need to contextualise and understand this and get over
personalisation, noone excluded, more or less experts in different
fields.

In my activist experience I've never seen an expert stepping into an
occupy style assembly and being pleased of what was being
approximately shouted about his/her own area of expertise. In the
history of Devuan we may have such experts stepping in now and then
and they may well be opinionated and perhaps even dissent with the
majority. We need to understand this not as a threat to our project.

At last, I for one need to recognise my error in interpreting Rick's
article as a denigration of Devuan. I finally read it and I don't
think it was such. But also I think: Rick you may want to update it
now that the systemd-shim is falling unmaintained (see golinux mail),
since a lot of the assumptions you put forward won't be really
sustainable anymore on the long term.

ciao