Re: Devuan

On 07/10/2016 11:09 AM, Rick Moen wrote:

>> The problem is that to make everything run smoothly unless you're an
>> ubergeek with some special requirements you need adoption.

> I do not concur.  Or, at least, I see shades of grey that I'm not sure
> you acknowledge.

I agree with the shades of grey. But shades of grey don't come as 
isolated spectral lines.
In most of my time I'm not that different from Greg K-H's daughter, 
sometimes I am.
Most of the time is cheaper to be suboptimal and the cost of taking care 
of small details to be optimal adds up.

The time to be Leonardo Da Vinci is over and there is no chance to 
escape complexity. Managing complexity is a team work. If you get out of 
the herd and not enough people follow you, you're doomed.
Your solution has costs you can't afford alone and it's not enough 
valuable to share them.
For any given problem space, sweet spot is always oscillating in time.
You could repeat a similar reasoning for eg. dedicated hardware vs 
generic CPU.

It is debatable if planning distributions with a good DE support is a 
good choice now. Because "optimal" has many dimensions.
Think about the consequences of people programming Linux servers from 
their Apple... brrrr. I think you don't even have to use your 
imagination and you surely have direct experience of the effects (eg. 
now everything comes into a container <g>).
And in this case too things will oscillate between specialized and "meet 
all needs" distributions.
Once upon a time "specialized" distribution had a larger share, now that 
it is getting easier and easier to build your own distribution (build 
systems are getting more and more sophisticated), there are many, but 
their user base has a lower share.
Possibly we could see a resurgence of specialized distributions built 
with a small set of "standard" build systems.


Meanwhile I had an exchange of emails with nextime (Franco Lanza) who 
said that some of the modification they made are percolating to upstream 
(not Debian but up-upstream).
He said the civil war is not completely over so they are not sending bug 
reports to Debian, but I insisted it could be a good idea.
He said the first Devuan stable will be in September and we will see if 
this is going to help integration of the work they made in Debian.

*Maybe* it could be a good idea if Debian users that would like more 
support to alternative init system and have a reasonable understanding 
of the problem could submit bug reports to the appropriate packages and 
point to the corresponding devuan package as a solution.

I'm not really sure if it is a good idea right now.


-- 
Ivan Sergio Borgonovo
http://www.webthatworks.it