> 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.
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 ?