On Tue, Dec 08, 2020 at 09:22:03PM -0500, Mason Loring Bliss wrote:

> On Wed, Dec 09, 2020 at 09:33:16AM +0900, Simon Walter wrote:
>
> > We were talking about libsystemd0 being a stub.
>
> It's not a stub. There's a bunch of functionality in there. A ton of it.
> The elogind porters (who are distinct from Devuan/Debian maintainers) have
> ifdef'd out a large amount of stuff, leaving a result that's pretty well
> unreadable if you want to actually see what functionality is left. It's
> doubtless easier for them to track upstream systemd this way, but it's an
> awful mess, beyond the mess that systemd presents on its own, and even for
> someone who does code analysis as part of his paid work, it's

...it's a mess, painful to trace, and painful to debug. Source code is
meant for human programmers. Look at the elogind source code and tell me
it's suitable for human consumption.

I fear it's going to take a bunch of forked packages for Devuan to win free
of it, given how Debian seems to be drinking the Kool-Aid. It wouldn't even
be a problem if libsystemd0 actually presented functionality broken into
logical units, packaged as distinct libraries. It's this whole "here, you
have to take all of it at once to use any of it" lock-in strategy that
makes it unacceptable.

Here's a fairly recent EFF podcast with Cory Doctorow talking about user
lock-in. It applies fairly directly, even if the users in this case are
distribution packagers and not service end-users:

    https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/podcast-episode-control-over-users-competitors-and-critics

-- 
Mason Loring Bliss   ((  "In the drowsy dark cave of the mind dreams
mason@???     ))  build  their nest  with fragments  dropped
http://blisses.org/  ((   from day's caravan." - Rabindranath Tagore