forks, derivatives, other distros - what are you thinking/doing

[Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net>]

Specifically addressed to those of you who are responding to systemd, 
etc., by considering:
- finding ways to make it easier to install/configure Debian without (or 
with minimal) systemd dependencies (certainly not in PID1)
- migrating to another distro or platform
- forking, deriving, or otherwise building a version of Debian that 
avoids systemd dependencies (or at least systemd in PID1 by default)
- developing a new distro entirely
[If you're happy with systemd, and not considering a change - please 
stay out of this discussion.  If you object to the very nature of the 
discussion, hit your delete key and kill file this thread now.]

Rather than have this topic keep showing up in various threads, with 
various uninformative names, what say I just pose the question directly.

If you're unhappy with systemd (and it's associated ecosystem), and/or 
with the directions that it's taking Debian (and/or large portions of 
the Linux ecosystem):
1. What are your issues, reasons for doing so - general and/or specific?
2. What are you considering, evaluating, or otherwise thinking about?
3. What other options/initiatives are you aware of that you've discarded 
or otherwise are not considering, and why?

To start, I'll answer these myself:

Re. 1:
- I'm specifically concerned about the impacts of upgrading to Jessie, 
in terms of having to re-wire collections of packages, configuration, 
initialization scripts, etc. that are supporting several production 
systems.  All reports I've seen suggest that I'll end up with servers 
out of commission for a while, and more than a few sleepless nights.  I 
simply don't have the time available to fix stuff that isn't broken.
- I have a general concern about systemd as an init system - I'm 
uncomfortable with having it manage dependencies among the 
initialization of inter-twined services.  (Possibly as a result of 
several sleepless nights caused by udev doing the wrong thing, or at 
least something unexpected.)
- On a more general note, I have serious concerns about the monolithic 
nature of the systemd ecosystem (the term "hairball comes to mind"), the 
diversion from well established design philosophies ("The UNIX way" for 
want of a better term), and what seems to be a focus on desktops at the 
expense of servers.
- I also have some serious concerns about the the motivations, 
approaches, and work quality of the primary developers behind the 
systemd ecosystem - concerns shared by no less than Linux Torvalds.
- I've been becoming more troubled by the nature of decision making in 
the Debian community and recent directions in overall philosophy.

Re: 2:
- I've been looking most seriously at sticking with Wheezy as long as 
possible, and hoping things will settle out in a favorable way, though 
I'm less and less comfortable that things will do so.
- Gentoo and Funtoo are the obvious places to migrate to - but compiling 
everything from source is such a pain.  Since I'm basically running a 
limited number of services, LFS  + some rundeck scripts to install 
directly from upstream, might be the most direct way to manage our 
boxes.  I'm not completely convinced that a distro adds that much value 
for our purposes.
- I really like apt- as a packaging system; it all just works - so a 
Debian fork or derivative is attractive; but I'm not sure how much I can 
bring to the table to make it happen (all my coding experience is in 
languages other than C, and I'm a bit rusty at that - systems 
architecture, sys admin, infrastructure, documentation - that I can 
contributed, but you don't want me coding) -- so, in this regard I'd be 
interested in supporting/contributing to an effort, but somebody else 
has to be the next Ian Murdock or Daniel Robbins).
- I'm starting to keep my eye on the GNU crowd, and GUIX
- BSD has always been attractive as a stable server platform - lack of 
Xen support has been the killer for me
- the Open Solaris, now illumos world seems to be where a lot of the 
action is, in terms of real innovation (SmartOS seems very attractive) - 
again, lack of Xen support, and lack of anything like DRBD holds things 
up -- I'm seriously looking at was to achieve high-availability failover 
without having to migrate to a SAN (mirroring mail ques and such, with 
DRBD, just works so nicely)
- for some of our future development work, which involves protocol 
stacks - I'm seriously looking at Erlang-on-Xen, and avoiding *nix 
entirely.  Unikernals really do look like the future.

Re: 3:
- OpenSUSE is attractive as a server-oriented distro, and they are at 
least making attempts to dis-aggregate the systemd hairball (e.g., 
they're not shipping journald as default) - but... systemd in PID1 and 
no real alternatives is a show-stopper.
- All the distros that are desktop oriented (which seems to be the 
majority these days).
- In general, distros with packaging systems other than apt-, unless 
they offer a clear win re. systemd-avoidance and a server-side 
orientation.  Other than as noted above, I haven't seen any of interest.

Ok... who else is out there?  What are you thinking/doing?

Miles Fidelman


--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In 
practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra