Hi all,

I'm going to state an unpopular opinion after seeing several threads
about Devuan's dropping of sysvinit init scripts...

It's not the end of the world. I know a lot of you are saying "this
stevelitt guy has a love affair with runit and can't see the forest
through the trees", but I still maintain that the way forward, and it's
easy, is using a sysvinit PID1 with a runit process supervisor.
Seriously, the end of sysvinit init scripts is no threat to Devuan, at
least in my opinion.

If Devuan switched over to the runit process supervisor tomorrow, these
mythical "I am not a programmer" people, who seem to have been the
justification for keeping sysvinit to the very bitter end, wouldn't
even notice. They'd just have to use the sv command instead of whatever
sysvinit uses to start, stop and restart daemons. Well, sv is easier. I
know this because I exclusively used sysvinit 1998-2005 or thereabouts,
before Upstart and Daemontools.

The next issue is "but we don't have enough Devuan Developers to write
all the run scripts!" You don't have to: It's been done for us already,
by Gerrit Pape (http://smarden.org/runit/runscripts.html) and by the
Void Linux project.

At this point of the discussion somebody stands up and says "but we
can't get the daemon authors or their maintainers to write runit run
scripts!" This is true, but it implies the false choice that the only
way to get daemons to run is for the daemon to come with its own run
script. Well, that's not the only way, it's not the best way, and it's
not even a good way. People who understand runit should be the people
curating the run script collection, and given that you can pick up run
scripts like fallen fruit from Gerrit Pape and Void Linux, this is no
challenge at all.

I use Void Linux on a daily basis, so if anybody wants a run script for
a particular daemon, I'll be glad to install that daemon and send you
the runit and finish scripts and the logging run script if applicable.
All I ask is that something be set up so I don't need to keep sending
the same scripts over and over again: This stuff should be curated.

I'm not writing this email to start trouble. I would never do that to
Devuan. I'm writing this because, on this mailing list, lately I've seen
a lot of doom and gloom posts of people thinking of bailing from Devuan
because of this sysvinit init script thing. Well I'm here to tell you
that Debian's sabotage of removing init scripts is the weakest
imaginable sabotage: Devuan has a perfectly doable and frankly easy way
forward: sysvinit PID1 plus runit process supervisor.

Devuan's too good a project to give up on just because init scripts
become unavailable.

SteveT

Steve Litt

Autumn 2023 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21