On Thu, Jul 27, 2023 at 10:47 PM Hendrik Boom <hendrik@???>
wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 21, 2023 at 11:40:15AM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
> > capercally.bleery670@??? said on Thu, 20 Jul 2023 18:13:29 -0700
> >
> > >https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/15336.html
> > >
> > Why is this being discussed on the DeVUan mailing list? If you want
> > Debian without systemd, use Devuan.
>
> To the extent that Debian does work without systemd, the Devuan developers
> will have an easier time.
>


That's one point but IMHO the most important point is that with his blog
post Ian Jackson insinuates Devuan would be worthless and it's vital for
Devuan to show he uses unfair and deceptive measures to achieve his goal. I
already pointed out he uses the popular tactics of drawing conclusions from
false assumptions, relying on casual readers not recognizing the initial
if-statement is not necessarily true (and in fact isn't) and thus assume
the trailing statement also would be.
Other elements of his strategy are the (sublimally) pejorative remarks
about Devuan(-Developers):
"*lovely people, but overworked*",
"*Devuan Chimaera had some problems with hardware support on the laptop in
question, so wasn't a good option*" -- oh, really? sounds a bit like "I
checked that used car offering but the ashtray was full".

And then the final statement in his comment:
'You mention "the work of keeping sysv-init". Of course much of that work
has been done *by Devuan folks* but *within Debian'*
I think that needs to be clarified by the "Devuan folks" involved.

Furthermore I just checked his rather complicated procedure tweaking the
installation process isn't necessary as his statement "*systemd refuses to
allow itself to be deinstalled, if it is already running, so if you boot
into the systemd system you can’t then switch init system*" *IS WRONG*,
because you can work around that much easier in a running system than is
shown in the diziet blog post.
You just have to remove a single, empty directory to disable the check in
the systemd package's pre-remove script -- and Ian Jackson, who somewhat
understatingly self-describes as "*very much a Debian insider*" -- must
know that. Of course you have to make sure there is an appropriate init
package (sysvinit-core|runit-init|...) properly installed before rebooting
and you'll have to "mount -a -o remount,ro" and then powercycle the system
as the standard shutdown options won't work when systemd is deinstalled but
still running as pid 1.

The check obviously has been placed there just to keep Debian users from
replacing systemd and together with similar things that needs be
communicated to Debian users in order for more of them to recognize how
hostile Debian is for non-systemd setups, like the classical SysV-Init and
modern replacements which are much leaner and (thus) safer than systemd.
Otherwise many will fall for the FUD represented in Ian Jackson's post and
that would be bad for the future of Devuan IMHO.