Hello,

after a long break I'm back hacking (Linux-)devices and almost instantly
have been reminded why there is Devuan.

On Tuesday, June 27, 2023, altoid via Dng <dng@???> wrote:

> On 26 Jun 2023 at 22:16, Steve Litt wrote:
>
> > ... didn't see any motivation for Debian's ...
> > replacement of sysvinit ...
>
> > The people involved seemed very motivated, and it makes me wonder.
> There's a vey old saying: follow the money.
>
> Never noticed that systemd is practically a twin (form, function,
> etc.) of the Window's regustry?
>
> And who does Poettering work for *today*, after systemd is firmly
> enroached within the Linux ecosystem?
>

Interesting - and it links to a prominent topic these days. Wikipedia
quotes Lennart Poetering as having "advocated speeding up Linux development
at the expense of breaking compatibility with POSIX
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX> and other Unix-like
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix-like> operating systems
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system> such as the BSDs
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution>."
The Titan disaster shows where you are heading when you break rules to
speed up things.

Now back to my current Linux experience. I was upgrading a sytem installed
from a vendor provided Debian buster to bullseye. All went well except for
two things. Aptitude got a bit sluggish in current Debian I was used to it
reacting instantly to keystroke, at least givinng some indiation it was
doing omething. Not today. Secondly the update was filibustered by - guess
- a systemd component tasked to ask for passwords but never doing so.

I didn't try to figure out what is going wrong as time is better spend on a
sustainable solution, i.e. installing Devuan, and temorarily I could work
around the problem by killing the process which invoked
systemd-ask-password as soon as the update got stuck.