Re: Devuan

Quoting Steve Litt ([email protected]):

> To me, a vendor's behavior matters. 

See, this is where we parse the world differently.  To me, Debian is not
a vendor.  Debian is a malleable system architecture that is blessedly
in the hands of its users.  Which means Debian is, in part, me.

Debian has no millionaire-businessman Benevolent Dictator for Life
(***COUGH*** Mark Shuttleworth ***COUGH***), and is not in the
community-overriding stranglehold grip of a for-profit corporation
 (***COUGH*** Canonical, Ltd. ***COUGH***) headquartered in the Isle of
Man for tax-dodging purposes because the founder/owner is a tight-ass
manipulator of gullible volunteers, who goes around poor-mouthing the
Linux community and attempts to special-plead and con the for-profit
corporation's way into proprietary favours usable for
proprietary-software side-deals like an infamous so-called Contributor
Licence Agreements that is actually a legal handover of copyright
ownership under a deceptive name.

Because Debian is, in part, me, and is a malleable system architecture
that *I* control, it is not the debian-user mailing list and the
comic-opera petty politics of getting participant distro-users thrown
off it for too much complaining about systemd.  (I've never even been
near that place, and looked at the archives only because I heard about
the soap opera.)

Because Debian is, in part, me, and is a malleable system architecture 
that *I* control, it is not any short-sighted decision of the Debian
Technical Committee, it is not any of Debian's General Resolutions, and
it is not the opinion of any of the ~1000 official Debian package
maintainers.

On occasions where any of those people do things I don't care to do,
they can kiss my Scandinavian ass, because Debian is a malleable system
architecture that is blessedly in the hands of its users.  Which means
Debian is, in part, me.

You getting trebucheted off the debian-user mailing list wasn't you
being 'thrown out of the Debian world'.  If you prefer nonetheless to 
storm off melodramatically from a malleable system architecture that is
blessedly in the hands of its users and is, in part, me, as far as I'm
concerned that's your loss.

http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Debian/openrc-conversion.html explicitly (and
with humble gratitude) acknowledges and credits you by name for valuable
help.  _But_, in a way, the entire document is a polite indictment of
you and other noted systemd critics.  

Why do I say that?  Two things.  (1) Instead of complaining about
systemd in Debian, demanding maintainers do things the way you want,
protesting Technical Committee decisions, demanding a new General
Resolution, and generally making a pest of yourself to officialdom, I
sat down for an afternoon and fixed the problem for all use-cases that
don't require NetworkManager or the entire kitchen sink of GNOME, MATE,
Cinnamon, KDE, and Razor-qt.

And then I wrote a Web-page documenting all of that for posterity.  A
couple of hours in one afternoon to do the basic work, and then one
additional day writing text to refute with objective data all the
inevitable claims that it cannot work because package dependency chains
are the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse and have already resulted in
Lennart Poettering being permanently ensconsced in my guest bedroom.

Two days including full documentation.  That, in contrast to you
spending -- what, months? a year? -- agitating on debian-user and
succeeding only in heaping fuel on a stupid mailing list flamewar.

(2) It accomplishes easily what you (IIRC) and parties on both sides of
the systemd so-called debate claimed was not possible on Debian 8
'Jessie'.

I actually suggest less advocacy, more malleable system architecture
that is blessedly in the hands of its users.  But if tantrums work for
you, have fun.