[kwlug-disc] Devuan, a distro without systemd

[Hubert Chathi]

On Sat, 29 Jul 2017 13:09:50 -0400, Khalid Baheyeldin <kb at 2bits.com> said:

[...]

> Even if systemd was the default it should be fully replaceable from
> the start, not 3 years after.

In fact, it was fully intended to be replaceable from the start of the
switch to systemd-as-default.  For example, see
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=746715, in which the
Debian Technical Committee resolved that:

"For the record, the TC expects maintainers to continue to support
the multiple available init systems in Debian.  That includes
merging reasonable contributions, and not reverting existing
support without a compelling reason."

(This was about 6 months after their original resolution deciding that
systemd would be the default.)

>> Some Debian Developers, in fact, have done work on implementing
>> things to allow those desktops to work without systemd, though I
>> haven't tried it out myself, so I don't know how well it works.

> The thread you linked to was from last May. Are other desktops
> non-systemd capable since then?

The work on making the desktops runnable without systemd was done quite
a while ago -- it wasn't started recently.  There's a package in Debian
called systemd-shim, which has been in Debian since jessie, to implement
some of the required systemd functionality for non-systemd systems. You
should be able to install GNOME, KDE, or XFCE in Debian without
systemd-sysv (i.e. without running systemd as init).  On my system,
which has XFCE, some GNOME components, and some KDE components, and
which is somewhere between jessie and stretch (I'm part-way through
upgrading), if I do "apt remove systemd-sysv", then it just says that it
will remove systemd-sysv, and install systemd-shim and sysvinit-core,
while leaving everything else untouched.  Though I haven't actually
tried it to see how well it works in practice.

In any case, as I said, it's mostly an issue of the desktops having
chosen to use systemd, and not an issue of Debian choosing systemd as
the default.  I think that Debian has done about as much as it can to
make running a non-systemd possible, because it can't make decisions for
upstream, and there's only so much additional work that Debian
Developers can be expected to do to make things compatible.

>>> And I tried checking on Ubuntu 16.04, and neither sysvinit-core nor
>>> runit-systemd exist.
>> 
>> I don't pay much attention to Ubuntu, but those packages are present
>> in Debian stretch.

> Ubuntu had its own init system which worked well. It suffered from the
> non obvious error messages when things did not work, but one had to
> check in /var/log/mysql* (or whatever package that failed to start).

> When Debian said they are going systemd wholesale, Ubuntu just
> followed along. They could have said, we will wait and see, or make it
> an option, but instead they too decided to go all in on
> systemd. Another bad decision.

If you want to complain about Ubuntu not offering a choice, I have no
objection there.  They seem to have gone further than Debian in making
systemd their default in that they seem to not allow the option for
running sysv as init even though Debian allows for that.  But Ubuntu
seems to be diverging from Debian in some ways.  Although Ubuntu is
derived from Debian, they are quite separate, and what is true for one
is not necessarily true for the other.

Hubert