"Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult" <enrico.weigelt@???> wrote:

> We don't need to fight anything. Just concentrate on the stuff *we*
> need (seriously, does anybobdy here need gnome3 ?) and patch out the
> crap when neccessary.
>
> And just not caring about that lennartware crap at all. Not even wasting
> time w/ debates about that crap, over and over again. (and yes: that's
> really annying me)
>
> Why do you waste your precious lifetime w/ lennartware at all ?

There are (IMO) three things needed :

1) Have an alternative - ie Devuan. In that, I salute those who are actually doing the hard stuff I wouldn't know where to start with.

2) Make people aware that there is an alternative.

3) Explain (in rational, technical, non-political) terms why people should care that there is a choice - and why we think they would be wise to take it.

Without 2 and 3, there won't be large scale adoption of the alternatives - and without that, there is distinctly less incentive for the upstream devs to keep support for the alternatives.

As has been mentioned before, part of the "battle plan" for systemd seems to be to keep taking more and more "standard stuff", deprecate it, and introduce new systemd versions with a new API. Thus, a package they needs to run on a systemd infested system has to support the "new improved" API.
This means that the dev now faces a choice - do they keep support for the old API ? To do so means more work - effectively they have to maintain two bits of code everywhere they use that function, and that means more work. If they perceive that "hardly anyone" still needs the old API - then there's a temptation to drop the old code, or stop maintaining it. If that happens, then the job of maintaining that package in a non-systemd distro becomes harder.

Ideally, projects like Devuan need to get enough users that they can entice package maintainers over from Debian. Wouldn't it be wonderful if Devuan were able to take the lead, and Debian end up having to port packages from it - yes that's pie in the sky thinking at the moment, but if you don't have ambition then ...


So yes, I agree that "discussing" it time and time again (especially in a "preaching to the converted" forum) isn't helpful - but just ignoring it isn't going to work either.