On 17/11/18 at 23:24, Simon Hobson wrote:
> Alessandro Selli <alessandroselli@???> wrote:
>
>> If Devuan is going to have a brilliant future it is going to disenfranchise itself from Debian. Being forever a Debian without systemd will keep it in the backseat, vulnerable to all the odd decisions and arguable development directions that Devuan/FD are going to take.
> In the long term, Devuan is likely to slowly diverge from Debian - and hopefully will gather support from Debian devs/package maintainers fed up with the Debian shenanigans. it's even possible to foresee a time when Devuan overtakes Debian and Debian ends up as a derivative of Devuan - but a long time off I think.
> In the meantime, there simply are not enough Devuan devs to simply dump Debian as an upstream. At the moment, most packages available in Devuan are unmodified Debian packages - there simply is no justification for re-inventing loads of stuff that doesn't need re-inventing, it would be a waste of effort. In the meantime, the devs the Devuan project does have can tackle those packages that need work - mostly de-systemdising broken packages and making substitutes for some bits.


  I'm well aware of the present limitations that make it impossible to
let Devuan be an indipendent distribution: too little manpower behind it
and too llittle corporate/VC support for it.  It could well be that
Devuan will never be anything more than a systemd-less-Debian, always
behind it's parent distribution and always trying to catch up to their
design implementations.  Of course I wouldn't call this success.  I was
just stating the obvious: a distribution that succeeds is one that sets
the path, not one that keeps trailing the trend-setters.

  Devuan was born to remedy a wrong turn taken by Debian's Technical
Committee, the VUAs who launched the project decided to take into their
hands the burden of reinstating to the fullest user's freedom of
choice.  Now there's another pending decision that might erode again
this freedom.  It could well be that Devuan will have to give in given
it's manpower and budget constrains.  Shall this happen it will mean
Devuan failed to show the world it's principles and directions were
sounder than Debian's, but I think that trying to achieve the success I
deem it deserves implies sticking with taking the brave decision to keep
undoing the wrong turns Debian's TC takes.

  Shall the market consider Devuan, decades after the split from Debian,
still nothing more that a copy of Debian with some minor changes, it
will likely fail to impress enough to be seriously considered and
alternative in critical installations and deployments.


"the Devuan project does have can tackle those packages that need work -
mostly de-systemdising broken packages"


  Of course you understand that the / -> /usr merge fits systemd/FD's
design goals, flattening all GNU/Linux distributions into the same mold,
making alternative designs very hard to implement and maintain and
letting the few FD's blessed distributions stand out as the Most Perfect
ones and the only one deserving any consideration from CTOs and
corporate decision-makers.  Shall you agree with this, you should
understand that the reasons to want to de-systemdise "broken packages"
apply to the de-unmerging / and /usr as well.

  Devuan could fail to do this, of course.  I hope it will not.  Shall
it not fail it will necessarily rise into prominence among the crowd of
the alternative Linux distributions.  Again, I think I'm stating the
obvious here.


--
Alessandro Selli <alessandroselli@???>
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