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

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On 10/7/20, Hendrik Boom <hendrik at topoi.pooq.com> wrote:
> 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.

this is really neat... except they fail to keep up-to-date with
testing, unstable, experimental and volatile packages in the bits that
they do not "redirect".

>  So for those packages, Devuan is
> automatically as up-to-date as Debian.

try adding debian/testing on a spare devuan machine with a huge amount
of software packages including qt5-dev, xlibs-dev, python-dev and many
more which are perfectly normal for an experienced developer to have,
and do an apt-get dist-upgrade.

you will immediately see the extent of the problem that devuan have
created for themselves.

l.