Quoting russell@coker.com.au (russell@coker.com.au):
Yes, you can do that. It's much easier than creating a new web site for a new "distribution" which seems to be Debian with a few packages changed.
Indeed, some of the Devuan people were rather upset with me. ;-> (A bunch of them had quite a fit over my expressed view that the desired objective could have been achieved without a distribution fork. Refreshingly, the project leader was not among those, and recognised that I merely politely hold an opinion differing from that of their project.) (I note with appreciation your having addressed this very point in your blog post: 'The sensible option would be to just maintain a separate repository of modified packages as has been done many times before.' I entirely agree.) You'll note that I carefully document on my page what _cannot_ be easily achieved with my approach, at least without supplementing Debian 8 using third-party package repos. The main thing is, of course, GNOME as a whole (but the lion's share of GNOME apps are within easy reach).
It's what I see.
Nothing wrong with your saying so. (I don't like flamers, misogynists, and homophobes, either.) I merely note that this entirely fails to to address the technical substance -- and acts as if there were nothing to discuss about that. And it seems more than a little suspicious that you spent pretty much all your time viewing with alarm the aforementioned deplorable people, with nothing I recall about other non-systemd people with dramatically different attitudes. You know some of those, of course, and did when you wrote your blog post. Their absence from your wall of anti-deplorables text seems... convenient.
I am happy for people to document how to not use systemd and I don't flame anyone for doing so. Why do they flame me and others for describing how to use systemd?
Because the existence of 7.2 billion homo saps guarantees a significant number of very odd people on the Internet? And because of John Gabriel's 'Greater Internet F***wad Theory'? ;-> (Warning: crude language, but in context not gratuitous) https://photos.smugmug.com/photos/i-mHzvgPv/2/O/i-mHzvgPv.jpg
I'm sure you're aware that this variety of rhetoric suffers a rather serious 'if so, so what?' problem (residing somewhere among the
It's "if so don't deal with those people" as so many people have done.
I think you're (probably) missing the point. Your blog post flogs the point that some bunch of unidentified (except for one notorious example) bunch of people expressing anti-systemd views behaved badly. But if so, so what? This not only says absolutely nothing about the software (to be fair, your blog intro says it won't really address the software), but also nothing about non-systemd users who aren't going around screaming and shouting, aren't cursing D-Ds in bug reports, and otherwise aren't abusing volunteers or spewing ugly antisocial behaviour. It pretends as if those (including yr. humble servant, I hope) don't exist. Worse, it attempts to slur us by association, e.g.: 'Decent people don’t want to be associated with people like MikeeUSA, the fact that the anti-systemd people seem happy to associate with him isn’t going to help their cause.'
There are more than a few DDs who have nothing to do with SysVInit because of the people who they have to deal with if they choose to do so. Why go to the effort of supporting software if there is a better alternative that has the added benefit of avoiding assholes?
_Again_ with the comparison to _just_ SysVInit, as if OpenRC, Runit, and Upstart weren't also maintained packages in Debian-main, and as if nosh weren't available in a compatible .deb from a third-party repo, and as if s6, perp, nosh, ninit, sinit, minit, finit, Epoch, and uinit were not available in source and easy to build. Anyway, I have a difficult time believing DDs are helpless to use killfiles.
There's nothing wrong with being a bit "conservative" in the dictionary sense (IE not the Trump or Abbott sense). Being conservative in such ways is why we have had SysVInit for so long.
This is of course changing the subject, as this is not what I meant by 'mere conservatism'.
Upstart is no longer the default for Ubuntu, I guess it's future isn't that good.
I've never liked Upstart myself -- but it's open source and able to be maintained if anyone continues to care.
If you want a tiny minimal init then having one that is linked with cp, mv, etc probably isn't the way to go.
Busybox isn't exactly 'linked with' those. The code in the Busybox binary able to fulfill those functions isn't used when invoked as /sbin/init, I'm pretty sure. However, yes, it's certainly not ideal. The likes of the s6 PID1 init are probably a lot better.
The PID1 program could reap processes and then inform the supervision process about it.
Yes, but this introduces complexity that's just not really worth the benefit. Supervisors work just fine without coordinating with PID1. At $WORK, a large Internet business, we use supervisord with great success, and the theoretical holes in it from lack of coordination with PID1 really don't matter in the real world.
And socket activation is actually a big dumb bad idea as we know from initd/xinetd, but available with sundry toolkits if you actually want it.
Why? inetd always worked well for what it did.
And you might have noticed that it was used only for trivial services and for those unable to open sockets without help. It turned out, the alleged benefit of socket activation really didn't buy you anything. 'You save having a process until the daemon's needed.' Um, are we running out of process identifiers? 'You save RAM by not having the daemon loaded until it's needed.' Um, are we suddenly unable to have inactive processes swapped out? If the process was significant, people found over time that they were better off having the process running and inactive so that it has markedly better startup time, if nothing else. That's why inetd/xinetd got relegated to the likes of in.fingerd, chargen, and svnserve. If you actually need a superserver, there are much better ones, one per service, such as s6-tcpserver (s6 suite) or tcpsvd (Gerrit Pape's tools). Starting those superservers in parallel, as any supervision suite can, will end up being just as fast as trying to open every possible socket early on in process 1. There is really no reason at all why a superserver should be tied to an init system.
(And if I'm a misogynist, you'll need to account for my N.O.W. card, http://now.org/ , being older than you are. Do you want to start claiming I'm not a feminist, again? Because that was really funny the last time, so I'd love to do it again.)
https://lists.luv.asn.au/pipermail/luv-talk/2014-April/002582.html
Above is the post by Tim Josling that started the discussion you reference.
Indeed, people who link to returnofkings.com are IMO either trolling, deeply nasty, or both. But the point was that *I* am not a misogynist (and have been a member of the largest feminist organisation for 40 years).
Whenever I see a man claiming to be a feminist it usually seems to be in the context of criticising women or protecting men who do misogynistic things (like Tim Josling posting the Return of Kings article to the luv-talk list).
You want me to send you a copy of my N.O.W. card, and my cancelled cheque from 1976? ;-> I'm hardly 'desperate' to call myself a feminist. It's just something I've been unofficially pretty much my entire conscious life, and officially since I was a teenager -- just a basic attitudinal fact of my existence from an early age. And when some guy in Australia, who at that point had not even met me, tried to tell me I'm not a feminist, I found that deeply amusing. Hardly desperate, then. Satisfied to have been on the right side of history, and to have occasionally done a few small parts for that. And there are also the personal reasons. If your Mum had been suddenly widowed when you were 10, I imagine you'd have become an avowed feminist at age 10, as well. Simple loyalty applies.