> I did empathize with people who didn’t like it for whatever reason
This is a pretty clear indicator right here that influential people weren't listening on the issue. Any time you state "for whatever reason" is a clear sign you don't care for their reasons.
I've heard quite a lot of these reasons. In my opinion, most of them either come from a place where the person is missing some key piece of information, or their use case was already better served by other tools anyway. So the reasons seem to be not particularly important. If you know something that you think everyone else missed, then you can mention it.
> So the reasons seem to be not particularly important. If you know something that you think everyone else missed, then you can mention it.
Is the existence of Devuan not a good example of a conglomeration of reasons so that I don’t have to spend time doing research for this request you probably don’t want answered? You’re still pushing the reasoning aside and saying “those reasons weren’t good enough so we put them in the whatever catgory”. I understand it’s often easier to hand-wave away well after the fact and the damage has been done. The Debian community didn’t move on from it, it split.
Well no, it's still not entirely clear to me what Devuan does process-wise that is actually different from Debian. I understand that they have a different set of base packages but so does every other modified version of Debian, of which there are several, it's not like Devuan was the first group to split off. What makes this one special? Why are these reasons any more important than any other time somebody shipped a Debian derivative for niche purposes? I honestly don't want to hand wave it away but I've never received good answers for this from Devuan people that themselves weren't hand-wavey, and you don't seem to want to discuss it either so... I guess that answers my question? I don't know, you tell me.
What's funny is that some of these technical details are irrelevant now (some bugs have been fixed, some components decoupled etc.). But at that particular point in time, you had a very strange situation where one crucial system component was being completely replaced by another without supporting both for an extended period of time. Normally it takes years like with Xorg and Wayland etc. Once the new kid on the block gets mature, everybody is switching anyway. All that drama was totally avoidable with some imagination.
I don't really see how that's the case, systemd was always intentionally backwards compatible with sysvinit scripts. I'm not sure what other issues you're referring to but in most cases it seems one could probably just fall back to a shell script to implement a workaround like it would have been done previously anyway.
> I understand that they have a different set of base packages but so does every other modified version of Debian, of which there are several, it's not like Devuan was the first group to split off.
So does every other version of Linux. If this enough to dissuade that there is no difference of opinion or difference in values and process handling and isolation then I cannot help you on this topic.
You are misunderstanding, I'm asking what those differences of opinion or values are. That part has not been explained to me. It doesn't appear to be about init systems anymore, because Debian also has sysvinit and openrc and all that stuff.
Edit: Also, the proliferation of Linux distributions is illustrative of the same problem I think. There are a lot of distros out there that seemingly cannot really justify themselves, I've been using Linux for 20 years and for some of these distros it's still really hard for me to figure out what the difference is or why anybody would use it without spending days digging around and analyzing patchsets in random git repositories somewhere. Now just imagine how utterly incomprehensible this is to a non-technical person who doesn't have a clue what an init system is...
TLDR; Debian chose to make room for systemd which broke the Unix compatibility. This decision created a precedent that Unix compatibility was no longer important. Devuan is distro that maintains the init daemon and tooling Unix compatibility promise and freedom as their philosophy titled Init Freedom. You got me to do the research.
From the homepage:
> Devuan GNU+Linux is a fork of Debian without systemd that allows users to reclaim control over their system by avoiding unnecessary entanglements and ensuring Init Freedom.
From the Init Freedom page:
> Init Freedom is about restoring a sane approach to PID1 that respects portability, diversity and freedom of choice.
> Other Free Unices Without systemd
> One of the critical arguments against systemd is the lack of portability to other Unices and the possibility that Linux-based systems using systemd would detach from the UNIX world. OpenBSD, FreeBSD and other BSD OSes are de facto incompatible with systemd or rather, systemd is incompatible with Unices not running Linux.
Sorry I should have been clear. I've already seen all that, I know what the home page says, and I've used Devuan on and off since it was released. That doesn't really do a good job explaining and only seems to confuse the issue because, like I said before, Debian also supports operating without systemd. So it's not obvious what is actually being provided here.
For me, in general it just seems really difficult to justify creating an entirely new Linux distribution because you're waiting for somebody to port a few packages to BSD. That logic doesn't really follow. That's what I meant before, even the Devuan home page has some really hand-wavey and confusing statements.
Sure but the bigger issue was that the actions taken had set precedent that portability can be broken. Once precedent is set, you open up a hole for everybody with reasons to become incompatible. People felt that this precedent was bad for a distro that prides itself on compatibility so they forked.
Whether the results are the same is irrelevant to the difference in approach.
I'm really not sure what you mean, that precedent has existed since the very beginning of BSD when it was forked off from Version 6 Unix and they decided to change some things. There are a ton of other upstream Linux/Solaris/MacOS/whatever packages that don't work well or at all on BSD unless they are ported. That's why every BSD has a "ports" tree...
Edit: I am also even more confused as to what that has to do with init systems because BSD never used a system V style init, whereas Linux distros typically did for that period before systemd. So this stuff wasn't portable anyway. See what I mean that the logic doesn't follow? I really can't understand what someone meant when they wrote that.
I guess just consider it this way: A group broke away, for whatever reasons beyond your understanding and because they broke away and don’t seem to still agree or seem to enjoy being a subset Debian, they continue to exist. Some people find value in this.
Yeah I get that but that's just restating the question. If you just want to look at it from that perspective then they would have found some other reason to break away and find value and there is nothing upstream could have done about it, so complaining about them seems pointless. I'm not saying there's anything morally wrong with it, clearly they can do whatever they like with the open source code that they find on the net. But if it can't be explained simply and easily, maybe it seems there is some value elsewhere that was missed or misunderstood.
To answer this question. This is about base compatibility so ports don’t apply. The ports collection has to be installed separately, hence incompatibility.
I don't understand what you mean base compatibility, a port doesn't happen until some interested party does it. It doesn't actually matter if it's in the ports tree or not, that's just a convenient place for BSD people to put things. Truly "portable" software is a myth, either you are using some abstraction layer that somebody else built, or you put in the work to do a port.
Base compatibility about what’s included in the system when you install it. Since Unix systems have a Unix philosophy they will not use systemd. Ports aren’t included in the base system, there for systemd would not be compatible with a base system that doesn’t include it.
I don't understand what this has to do with the "unix philosophy" or what that is supposed to mean, and the base systems between Devuan and BSD are not compatible anyway. I mentioned that earlier, BSD doesn't use sysvinit...
This is a pretty clear indicator right here that influential people weren't listening on the issue. Any time you state "for whatever reason" is a clear sign you don't care for their reasons.