Re: Devuan

On 07/11/2016 12:06 AM, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Ivan Sergio Borgonovo ([email protected]):
>
>> That's why I find valuable that the work made by devuan will get
>> integrated into Debian and that's why I really don't think what happened
>> can't be changed and deserve a flamewar.

> Nor did it merit a fork, IMO.  But the freedom to fork is, of course,
> the foundation of open source, so it's quintessentially their choice.

Agree.

> Quite.  I would never adopt local software maintenance work without good
> cause or past the degree of involvement necessary, because Larry Wall is
> my Jedi master (in the 'laziness is a virtue' area, anyway).

> As I said, http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Debian/openrc-conversion.html owes
> _so_ much to laziness on this part that I didn't even write the shell

Then in the infinite shades of gray laziness comes, I'm the lazier tone.
For me the process is far more complicated than it should be.
But yeah I've different priorities and I don't even want to get into an 
argument to discuss which one are right. And yeah I think that not all 
priorities are equally good and that they aren't absolute.

And that's because I value simplicity much more than what it seems.
I'm just aware that there is a mismatch between what I can manage and 
reality. The problem arise when people pretend the truth is simple just 
because simple things are the only one they can/are willing to understand.
Politicians love this. Find an enemy, find a cause, it can't get simpler 
than this.

The world is complex and the more complexity you can digest the better, 
research for simplicity is just a necessity to swallow the whole at 
small bites.
Well known software engineering techniques like delegation, 
encapsulation, design patterns... don't simplify reality, simplify 
implementation of the model of reality. They are not even meant to 
simplify the model even if they may be helpful to do so. You may have a 
more complicated model you're not able to implement due to other 
constraints.
And this is not peculiar of CS.

>> The time to be Leonardo Da Vinci is over and there is no chance to
>> escape complexity.

> To the contrary, improved system simplicity is the only hope.

See above.

> I'm invoking here by reference my standard 'This is the Age of Snowden'
> speech.  Avoidable system complexity, not to mention core components with
> huge code churn and unsettled software interfaces (all the
> Freedesktop.org stuff we server sysadmins used to ignore because it was
> just a desktop-computing nightmare for GNOME victims, e.g., PolKit,
> udisks2, systemd-logind, and like that) are the enemy of security and
> reliability -- and of deterministic behaviour and understanding one's
> own systems.

> You do not 'manage' that by crowdsourcing it.

You do.

Because a big thick wall is a single point of failure.
Too simple things may not be flexible enough. You make them more 
complicated, you increase attack surface.
If you don't come to compromises people will try to circumvent your 
defenses etc...
Value and complexity go together. You may argue that they may not 
increase with the same law, but when you've finished to explore the 
boundaries, if you've to increase value, you'll have to increase complexity.
Deterministic behavior is just one of the many proprieties you may want 
from a system.
The most current theories say you've to be pretty careful about what you 
could expect from determinism ;)

Once you face the inevitable complexity you'll need resources and right 
now the most valuable resource to manage complexity are people.

>> If you get out of the herd and not enough people follow you, you're
>> doomed.
>
> Nope.

> Let me tell you a story about mej (Michael E. Jennings).

[...]

> I got mej in touch with a friend named Greg Kurtzner (sp?) who was
> maintaining a different RHL derivative for Lawrence Berkeley National
> Lab, and said they needed to join forces.  I am reasonably certain that
> that was part of the foundation (or at least rise to prominence) of
> CentOS, thereafter, because that's what then emerged.

> A little thing like throwing away udev on a Debian headless server (no
> X11) and substituting mdev or a static /dev tree -- for example -- is
> so much less work that it's hardly worth mentioning by comparison, and
> 'people following me' plus $2.25 will, as the old saying goes, get you a
> ride on San Francisco Muni, i.e., isn't actually worth anything.

And your point is? To me the point is that if they didn't merge their 
resources they wouldn't have been successful.
If we want to be relevant, even more than before, we all have to stand 
on the shoulders of many others, because now even the shoulders of 
giants are too small.
People like superheroes because they simplify their vision of the world 
and make them dream to be special.
Human evolution didn't have enough time to keep up with our scientific 
progress in the last centuries. That's a blessing, evolution works 
because it kills.
We may even have to overcome our biological unfitness to the social 
environment needed for sustained progress.
I find more probable and possibly less scary a future where we will 
share the weight of complexity rather than a science fiction elite cyber 
mutant future.
But that's me, skynet at google may think differently ;)

>> Once upon a time "specialized" distribution had a larger share....

> I come from a community that rejects appeals to the allegedly vital
> importance of market share.  You may have heard of us.  We're called the
> Linux community.  ;->

Oh so let's talk about Plan9. Surely there will be early adopter but then...

>> 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.

> That would be constructive.

> The whole forking thing seemed like gratuitous drama, really.  Just my
> opinion.

We will see. I think that a stable release will mainly constitute a 
proof that things can be done and there is work ready and people willing 
to maintain it but if no further action is taken to encourage adoption 
of those changes back in to Debian the whole experiment could end up in 
complete oblivion.

And that would be a pity no matter if you like systemd or not.

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