Is it time to fork Debian?
The grumbles over systemd and its ramifications are well known and have even been discussed on Pipedot [links below]. But it's taken on a new urgency. The members of the Debian community are set to vote on an init system, and if by any chance the "give preference to systemd" option wins, this group of angry sysadmins is organized, willing, and prepared to fork Debian. Their argument is measured and calm, but they've got their finger on the trigger. Here is just a portion of their argument.
Kernel hacker's rant about systemd
Boycott Systemd movement takes shape
Uselessd, an alternative to systemd
Debian to vote on init system again
Who are you?!Also see:
We are Veteran Unix Admins and we are concerned about what is happening to Debian GNU/Linux to the point of considering a fork of the project.
And why would you do that?
Some of us are upstream developers, some professional sysadmins: we are all concerned peers interacting with Debian and derivatives on a daily basis.We don't want to be forced to use systemd in substitution to the traditional UNIX sysvinit init, because systemd betrays the UNIX philosophy. We contemplate adopting more recent alternatives to sysvinit, but not those undermining the basic design principles of "do one thing and do it well" with a complex collection of dozens of tightly coupled binaries and opaque logs.
Are there better solutions than forking?
Yes: vote Ian Jackson's proposal to preserve freedom of choice of init systems. Then make sure sysvinit stays the default for now, systemd can be optional. Debian leaders can go on evaluating more init systems, just not impose one that ignores the needs of most of its users.
Why is this happening in your opinion?
The current leadership of the project is heavily influenced by GNOME developers and too much inclined to consider desktop needs as crucial to the project, despite the fact that the majority of Debian users are tech-savvy system administrators.
Can you articulate your critique to systemd?
To paraphrase Eric S. Raymond on the issue, we see systemd being very prone to mission creep and bloat and likely to turn into a nasty hairball over the longer term. We like controlling the startup of the system with shell scripts that are readable, because readability grants a certain level of power and consciousness for those among us who are literate, and we believe that centralizing control services, sockets, devices, mounts, etc., all within one daemon is a slap in the face of the UNIX philosophy.
Kernel hacker's rant about systemd
Boycott Systemd movement takes shape
Uselessd, an alternative to systemd
Debian to vote on init system again
Almost every dot-com I have worked at or the past twenty-plus years listened 'WAY too much to developers, and allowed things to be rolled out, that shouldn't have been.
Almost every dot-com I've worked in the past ten years was started up by developers who called me in when things got too complicated for them to administer, and develop code, at the same time.
Almost every dot-com I have communicated with in the past two or three years seems hell-bent upon moving everything into 'The Cloud'. WHICH cloud? That changes about once every eighteen months, it seems.
Recruiters are now looking for these new-fangled 'devops' - these would be software developers, who do hardware operations - or is it hardware operators, who do software development? - to do twice the work, at half the price.
By my count, the average number of programming languages, technologies, vendor product lines, networking protocols, etc that one is now expected to master exceeds that of the average UN polyglot translator by a factor of ten.
It's pretty clear the people making up these job descriptions are only counting the money they will save by hiring one person to do two jobs and have NO CLUE what goes into either software development OR hardware operations.
We sysadmins need to start pushing back more!
And so it's great to see collective some movement against systemd.
Even if I am a BSD guy, at home, I still wrestle with Linux, at work - and so I share all of your concerns.