Congrats for following through on Devuan. I'm guessing it took a lot of resolve to make this happen.
Should we be worried about the fact that it took over two years to untangle systemd from Debian with respect to Linux in general?
In case someone from the Devuan project is around,
what alternate init system should maintainers be targetting now for Devuan? OpenRC, classic SysV init, or something else?
> Should we be worried about the fact that it took over two years to untangle systemd from Debian with respect to Linux in general?
The time it took says nothing about the difficulty of the task. It could be very hard with the best hackers working on it full time. It could be the time it takes committees to reach a consensus.
Even if it was that hard, is it because systemd is so entangled with the system? Or because it makes maintaining a distro so much easier ?
> Or because it makes maintaining a distro so much easier ?
In my experience, such a general statement is not true of any init system. I had to maintain a systemd-based system (albeit not a general-purpose one) and I was moderately happy. The profiling tools are great and units are easy to write even by people with no Linux development experience (hint: easy to outsource to cheap consultancy firms). On the other hand, it's extremely complex; if you get into trouble with systemd itself, you've got a lot of code reading to do. systemd upstream itself is a pretty volatile target, so you regularly end up with things that used to work three versions ago but now bork.
Maybe for a general-purpose distribution like Debian, or for a special-purpose, but server-/cloud-oriented distribution, it makes life easier, but at the other end of the spectrum I wouldn't say it made my life any easier than other init system (albeit not much harder, either).
you're point is well-taken, but I think it says something. It just doesn't necessarily mean that it's a messy, entagled system which is deeply integrated and hard to isolate.
but it does point, circumstantially, in that direction.
It might also point into the direction that the people behind Devuan have never worked on a distribution before and needed quite a bit of time to figure out how stuff works.
Good question. The proof will be in how rapidly they track their upstream going forward. If it was a mostly one-time transitional task, then future releases should come more quickly. They may also have taken extra time to polish because the quality of the 1.0 release will have a huge impact on how many people decide to dive in and support future development. If there are major problems, they could sour a bunch of fence-sitters. But if it works great, they may gain momentum.
From https://devuan.org/os/ it seems they use sysvinit by default, but they 'offer' runit, openrc and sinit. Dunno what the latter means for maintainers...
Should we be worried about the fact that it took over two years to untangle systemd from Debian with respect to Linux in general?
In case someone from the Devuan project is around, what alternate init system should maintainers be targetting now for Devuan? OpenRC, classic SysV init, or something else?