hellekin <hellekin <at> dyne.org> writes: > > On 02/14/2015 10:16 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: > > On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 8:12 AM, KatolaZ <katolaz <at> freaknet.org> wrote: > >> On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 04:01:58PM +0000, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote: > > > >>> is it the intent of the devuan team to: > >>> > >>> (a) create a "fork" which will always, at all times, without fail, > >>> require that a debian repo be placed in /etc/apt/sources.list > >>> > >>> or > >>> > >>> (b) create a "fork" of the *entire debian package repository*, such > >>> that it will end up over time to be as completely incompatible with > >>> debian as ubuntu is today. > > > *** From > https://git.devuan.org/devuan/devuan-project/wikis/ProjectDescription > > "Devuan is born for a simple goal: having a systemd-free debian jessie > to preserve freedom choice on init and decoupling between init and the > rest of the system ... initially, it will NOT be a complete fork, but > just a complete infrastructure to distribute a personalized version of > debian jessie, testing and unstable where some packages from us will be > pinned up on top of the debian repositories..."
ok, great. whilst it's close, it still doesn't clearly answer the question, though, and i notice, also, that the above is not made clear on the web site. in other words, there are a lot of words on the main http://devuan.org web site but nothing that's definitive. a lot of position statements and aims, but nothing concrete. to illustrate the difference, let's rewrite the above: "Devuan has a simple goal: to make it easy for Debian users to entirely remove systemd yet to keep their Debian systems fully functional, up-to-date and fully compatible with Debian. The initial method to achieve this will be to add one extra line to sources.list (in a similar fashion to deb-multimedia), where key strategic packages can then be replaced with systemd-free equivalents by simply running 'apt-get upgrade' Our immediate goal is to provide automated transition scripts integrated into the replacement packages for debian jessie, testing and unstable, and to maintain them indefinitely. Whilst it may prove unavoidable, we seek to actively avoid a complete fork of Debian (learning the lessons from Ubuntu), not least because we wish to make it easy for users to transition between Devuan and Debian (with and without systemd) and we appreciate that a complete fork would make that much more challenging." hellenkin: can you see the difference between that and what's on the wiki (and on the web site)? what i wrote makes the following things very clear: 1) your debian system will not be screwed up or compromised by using devuan. you will also not lose any functionality or packages. 2) we understand the difficulty of maintaining an entire distro. we implicitly understand that we will not get to 1,000 maintainers in the immediate future, so we are being realistic and will not be doing a complete fork. it's too much effort for us, and we recognise that you probably wouldn't trust us (i.e. wouldn't even want to *try* upgrading to devuan) if we created one. 3) we're restricting the scope of what we're doing to a few key strategic packages, and we're going to make it easy for you to remove systemd. that's our core focus. and a few more things, besides. if you recall, i said that my initial concern was that devuan was giving serious consideration to including TDE and many other things besides. i've tried TDE: it works... but because it has to replace one of the key packages (which they haven't kept up-to-date because they don't have enough resources) i am now in "package dependency hell" even though i have specified to use the debian/testing version of TDE. this is a common problem that anyone who has regularly upgraded a debian/testing system that uses deb-multimedia will be familiar with: packages from two disparate repositories are *NOT* properly kept in sync: it's simply not possible. at one point back when ffmpeg was depending on versions 0.49 of libav and friends, my system went into complete melt-down due to broken package dependencies. i couldn't upgrade *anything* because of it. in the end i had to remove deb-multimedia entirely, compile some of the packages from source (!) to do what i needed to do, and i waited about 6 months for things to stabilise before beginning again. [note: with deb-multimedia i was lucky because it was not key strategic packages, i *could* remove them. if it had been anything in the core packages - the essential ones - i would have been *really* screwed. and that's really the whole point of why i seek clarity on what it is that you are doing, here]. with a small (busy) team, you are stuck in the middle between a rock and a hard place. on one hand you need to keep the alternative packages fully up-to-date: even *one day* late means that people will have a system which becomes unuseable due to version-bumps from debian. and on the other hand you have to consider doing a complete total fork of debian, with all that that implies (and it's one HELL of a lot of work to replace 1,000 debian maintainers with however many people you have), *and* you have to have decent mirror infrastructure - i think 160 Gb was the last estimate of the amount of disk space that i heard phil was using for free.hands.com's debian mirrors (a couple years back). and free.hands.com i believe also flat-lines a 100mbit/sec ethernet connection at 100% capacity. so. can i recommend that you discuss amongst yourselves within the devuan team as to precisely and exactly what the direction is? can we have a consensus from the team as to whether everyone understands fully the scope of the project, outlines a clear roadmap (and agrees to it), and so on? and once that is agreed can i suggest updating the web site to make that consensus absolutely clear? tia, l. _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list [email protected] https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
