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@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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