[libre-riscv-dev] Tedious systemd bunfight.

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Sat, Feb 15, 2020 at 3:41 PM Hendrik Boom <hendrik at topoi.pooq.com> wrote:

> But it's not necessary to be this extreme to use Devuan.  Or to develop it.

i appreciate that: that's not my point.  my point is that due to the
extremism, there is a wasted opportunity: that of *merging* devuan
into debian.


> It's OK to let those who prefer to use systemd to be free to do so.
> But it would be a waste of effort to support systemd in Devuan.

... not if the additional goal is to have devuan *become* part of
debian, as is the "normal" and "intended" way of doing debian "forks".

debian forks are an extremely bad idea.  look at ubuntu as the
worst-case example.


> > the lead developer is a radical feminist and is also
> > against "men in general" (i.e. is "against men" rather than "for
> > collaboration and to work out and accept and appreciate the
> > differences between men and women").
>
> The redical feminism is interesting.  But off topic.

it explains why they chose what they chose, if, just as lennart
pottering does, their key developer is psychologically...
"non-normal".

> > this approach makes it completely impossible to consider merging
> > devuan into debian, because the changes that have been made are so
> > radical and diametric that it is impossible to include any of the
> > devuan packages into debian without a fundamental rewrite.
>
> Most devuan packages are in fact just the debian packages.

... they're debian packages *recompiled* and heavily modified.

those that are not are passed through with an "HTTP Proxy Redirect",
through the devuan mirror.

it's effectively an HTTP version of "unionfs".

> The rest have had to be changed to work properly in the absence of systemd
> because they were originally changed by Debian to work with systemd.

the actual modifications *should* have been extremely small.  i
inspected angband.pl's modifications: they're tiny.  they're basically
"remove --with-systemd" from the debian/rules, add back in the
occasional (stupidly-removed) /etc/init.d script, and hit "recompile"
(dpkg-buildpackage).

what devuan actually did - which was very stupid and causes massive
problems - is a global search/replace "debian" with "devuan".

this causes packages that expect to find "/etc/debian" to be entirely
missing, for example.

it's extremely problematic when you actually investigate fully and
in-depth, and consequently many people simply cannot use devuan.

l.