On Sat, 15 Aug 2015 10:02:12 +0000 Roger Leigh <rle...@codelibre.net> wrote:
> That's a considerable achievement--how many other projects have been > able to achieve an equivalent scale? Not very many and I agree with you, it is very impressive, even if Debian makes internal bickering look commonplace. I'd say it is even more impressive, that in spite of that, they still manage it. > > Now I think there may have been benefits to separating the "base" > system from "everything else", and indeed it was discussed on several > occasions in Debian, but this never happened for various reasons. In > retrospect, I think it would have been a good move. I agree. I would rather that Devuan had a smaller fixed base install that was supported for at least 5 years (or two releases) with a guaranteed ABI for the life of that base. You can say that upstream Debian already does this to some extent, and yes that is true, but there really is no divider between base and the rest of the repo. It might seem rather arbitrary at all, but giving someone a clear notion of what is going on is key in IT. Even if two products are exactly the same, the one that is presented with less hassle wins the day. Having a specifically defined base makes it easier for third parties to ensure that software is going to work without a hitch. It's much more attractive from a testing standpoint than the usual Linux hodge-podge. I think it is also one of the reasons that Google looks at Gentoo for Chrome OS and Apple to FreeBSD. It just simplifies everything: testing, development and bug hunting. Heck, I'd make a reasonable guess that if Devuan had a fixed base that Valve might even chose Devuan over Debian for future versions of SteamOS, because it would be less work for them to do. They wouldn't have to dissect as much to get the base that they need. > That said, I do think multi-binary package generation could be > automated for the common cases. It's pretty trivial to distinguish > headers, libraries, documentation, translations, source, debug > symbols from the filesystem locations they live in. This is also > something which has been discussed over the years. The tool changes > to accommodate it are not insignificant though. Gentoo proved that you can set a series of global package "flags" specifying what support to include or exclude when building a binary package. It's practical and it works for large scale package chains. It's completely automated. I see no reason why Debian or Devuan cannot incorporate the idea to build sets of the same packages with and without systemd support and then let the user choose what they want. It's just my opinion, and no one has to agree, but if Devuan ever wants to be a major distribution, systemd has to become a non-issue. It should just another piece of software, installed at user's whim. T.J. _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
