Re: Censorship in Debian
Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net> writes:
> I was watching the discussion on systemd fairly closely. I could be
> wrong, but very little of the discussions over systemd seemed to reflect
> folks who managed production servers, or kernel developers, or developers
> of key backend software (Apache, MySQL, Postfix, Sympa, ...).
Well, for whatever it's worth, I was managing Debian production servers
during the entire period of that debate (and for about ten years previous
to that). I was the primary advocate for Stanford running its central
infrastructure on Debian, so I'm familiar with the problems and arguments
for and against using Debian in that sort of environment. Some of the
other major voices in that debate manage far large production deployments
than I did.
My current employer uses Ubuntu in production, not Debian, for many of the
typical reasons why people use Ubuntu over Debian, but from the
perspective of systemd that's basically the same thing. Ubuntu went
through essentially the same transition that we did.
I do think distributions have some interesting challenges in the future,
and what our users are asking from us is shifting. Containers and deep
dependency programming ecosystems are both becoming more common, Go and
Rust take a far different attitude towards how to assemble system
components than C and C++ projects have historically, and cloud
deployments are becoming far more common than hardware deployments for
many of our users. One of the simultaneously fun and frustrating thing
about this field is that problems are constantly shifting, and new ideas
and new ways of doing things are constantly arising. Debian certainly
will need to change and explore new and different corners of that, and
feedback from day-to-day users of Debian both inside and outside the
project will be very important to understand how to change.
But, if anything, I think being *more* agile, not less, is where we can
improve the most. And, of course, always trying to find ways in which we
can have it all at once, where we can: provide a broad and inclusive
platform for making a lot of different choices, so that we don't have to
pick the best choices in advance and over-commit to one way of doing
things. Which, among other things, calls for init system diversity, and
I'm very glad to see that work continuing (although I personally still
hope that someone will come up with a great init system that has the
highly decoupled properties that people want but that isn't sysvinit with
all of its well-known problems).
I'll stop talking about this here since several folks are saying that we
should keep init systems out of this conversation, and I'm not really
helping. You just raised some points about the social impact of hard
disagreements, and about how decision-making works in general in Debian,
about which I have strong opinions and really wanted to reply.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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