[systemd-devel] I wonder… why systemd provokes this amount of polarity and resistance

[Simon McVittie]

On 21/10/14 09:37, Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> In my long years of using Debian and also doing some packages for it in the 
> last years I never saw that any introduced changed caused a serious "we may 
> need to fork" like announcement

I've seen several instances of Debian people *actually* forking it, and
that isn't one of them (at least, not yet). There are currently 63
derivatives listed on <https://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Census>,
variously booted via all the major init systems, and there are more that
are not listed on that page.

Perhaps the most prominent example is Ubuntu, which basically started as
a fork that would iterate faster and focus on ease-of-use, wandered off
into various subsequent goals from there, and incidentally funded
development of a new init system along the way. Another interesting
derivative is Tanglu, which is desktop-focused and has adopted systemd
much more aggressively than Debian.

Fundamentally, what needs to happen, if people want a version of Debian
that boots with LSB/sysvinit scripts to remain available indefinitely,
is for someone to do the work. That is all. They can do the work in
Debian or in a fork, whichever, but if the work is not done, the goal
will not be achieved. At the moment, I'm seeing a lot of noise, and a
lot of suggestions that the people who do the work should be coerced
into doing different work (which is unlikely to succeed in a volunteer
project), but a relatively small amount of actual software development
or maintenance.

    S