Re: Bug#684396: ITP: openrc -- alternative boot mechanism that manages the services, startup and shutdown of a host

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>]

On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 08:28:27PM +0300, Serge wrote:
> 
> It's often someone says something similar about many ITPs. I believe noone
> should say things like that, unless he wants to scare everybody away and
> have Debian forgotten and dead. Saying that you not only reduce the number
> of bugs in Debian, but you also reduce the number of people working on
> Debian, because when they hear that they just turn around and go away.

I don't see how these people help Debian if they start pushing their
own solution instead of helping to improve what is already there.

> If I was an employee of Debian Inc, and I was paid to spend my 40 hours/week
> to my company, then you could tell me "don't mess around openrc, focus on
> upstart, that's a chief's order" (that may work for RedHat). But Debian
> does not pay me, and noone can tell me what to do.

Well, yes. Debian has it's policy, a social contract and the DFSG. You
are certainly not allowed to do anything you want unless you start
your own blend of Debian by forking it.

> When I come and say "Hey, I want to work on openrc in debian" (replace
> "openrc" with any other package), I mean what I say. Most probably I just
> like this particular software for some reason. And it usually never means
> that I also want to work on upstart/systemd/sysvinit/etc. So when you tell
> me "don't mess around it", I won't drop openrc, I'll just drop debian.

If that was really the case, how come there are so many orphaned
packages in Debian? I'm not saying I wouldn't trust your words, but
you cannot seriously promise you will always be there to take care of
OpenRC if you're the only maintainer.

> You can only politely ask "Please, before continuing to work on openrc,
> look at other init systems, maybe you will find there what you need, or
> maybe it would be easier for you to implement the features you need in
> those systems instead of maintaining a new init system on your own". But
> you can't say me what should I do, because I'll just go to Arch/Gentoo,
> that are not as hostile.

I don't understand your rage. Debian has always been strict about its
policies, this isn't really new. As Josselin already pointed out,
there are rules and you are not allowed to do what you want. If you
don't agree with that, it's fine. But please don't force this onto Debian.

> If we want debian to be a successful and popular distribution, we should
> welcome everybody, does not matter what they want to work on. That should
> bring more people to debian. And we want more people to work on debian,
> don't we? We must help them to work on it, and just hope, that some day
> they will also help us to work on our projects too. That's IMHO, of course.

Debian is already very popular and successful and I don't see how
OpenRC would help Debian gain more popularity.

> > 95% of the users don't ever interact with the init system directly, so
> > there is no point in being able to have a choice
> 
> Bad argument. :) 95% of the users don't even know what Linux is (it's just
> a kernel, you know) and they certainly don't interact with it directly.
> But it does not mean that we can forget about linux and never allow
> people to choose it. :)

I was actually talking about Linux users, I was not referring to all
people using computers in the world.

My point is, 95% of the people who install a Debian or Ubuntu nowadays
simply don't care what init system they are using as long as the code
is mature and reliable.

Your arguments aren't - at least - convincing me why we should have
OpenRC in Debian. If you really want to convince me and others being
sceptical about OpenRC, then you should list a number of arguments why
OpenRC is actually a good alternative to the existing init systems in
Debian.

There should be at least some compelling technical arguments for
OpenRC. Saying that you don't like systemd or its upstream author
doesn't count, because this isn't something which affects end users.

A valid argument in favor of OpenRC and against systemd is certainly
that the former is platform-agnostic. But I think that the non-Linux
ports of Debian aren't (yet) important enough to weigh strong enough
in such decisions.

Cheers,

Adrian