Re: Devuan

Quoting Steve Litt ([email protected]):

> I think all forks are merited. 

Please define 'merited'.

Until you do that, you're just posturing, and I find this a bit
annoying.

Here's a gedankenexperiment from my 1999 Fear of Forking essay.

  You, the reader, can fork any open source project at any time.  This is
  absolutely not cause for alarm. Let's prove it: Get a copy of the
  current Linux kernel from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/. Rename it. Call it
  Fooware OS. Send out messages to everywhere you can think of, announcing
  that Fooware OS has splintered off from Linux, and great things are
  expected of it.

  Wait for reactions. Wait some more. Listen to the clock ticking. Sort
  your lint collection. Open up the source code tree, think about what you
  might do with it, and wonder where you're going to find the time.

Just to flesh that out a bit, let's stipulate that the person doing the
fork actually has no use-case in mind, just a vague notion that a Fooware
OS kernel would be beneficial to the world if only someone were to
create one and do... something with it, but the person has no plan and
for the time being merges no patches, just sits on his or her tuchis,
wild-eyed with the intoxicating freedom of the right to fork.

That is a fork.  

Please tell me what actually meaningful and semantically content-bearing
sense of the word 'merited' applies to that outcome.