[Arm-netbook] OpenPOWER virtual coffee continues every Tuesday UTC 22:00

[Hendrik Boom]

On Wed, Oct 07, 2020 at 06:59:11PM +0100, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 6:49 PM Hendrik Boom <hendrik at topoi.pooq.com> wrote:
> 
> > If you want Mate and do not want systemd, you could start with Devuan and
> > install mate as a package.
> 
> the downside of devuan is how far they diverged from debian (global
> search/replace debian on *everything*).  this means that if you want
> to use debian/testing - say you are a developer and that makes
> debian/testing absolutely essential - you're absolutely screwed
> because the small devuan team absolutely do not have the resources to
> keep the entire debian/testing repo converted and rebuilt absolutely
> every single day 24x7 with the "global/search/replace" system they
> created.
> 
> if they had done it as an "add-on" to the debian repository it would
> have been fine, but the fact that they chose a "backlash" path meant
> that they've completely isolated themselves and their community from
> the rest of debian.

Yes, it is a small team.  The way their repository works is to contain 
only packages that they had to modify because of systemd dependency.
For the rest, they do a network-level redirect (possibly an http redirect) 
to the Debian repositories.  So for those packages, Devuan is 
automatically as up-to-date as Debian.

And there are lots of mentions of Debian within the Devuan system that 
should technically be mentions of Devuan.  Nobody worries about them.

There is actually a /etc/debian_version file as well as an 
/etc/devuan_version file, for software that wants to check such things.

-- hendrik.

> 
> l.
> 
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