Left out another major chunk: the conflict that arose over the eventual systemd adoption. To me that conflict altered the concept of ''What is Debian'' permanently, for better or worse (depending on who you listen to).
From my interpretation of smhenderson's post, one of Debian values was a very slow pace of change and old but well known pieces. In this light, systemd still seems too controversial. Fedora adopted it because it was an in-house project, archlinux tries to use cutting edge as much as possible, so it's irrelevant for that interpretation.
I only read part of the Debian voting process, it's wasn't years but I admit not knowing how long systemd was discussed in Debian's ML before that. On archlinux board's, adoption was quickly reached (without too much user troubles).
systemd was just a symptom. Multiple developers that had been working on Debian for many years, left the project in that period for various of reasons.
Regardless of whether one likes or dislikes systemd itself, I think that unfortunate debacle can only be seen as causing harm to the entire Debian project.
The politics of it certainly generated a lot of distrust and resentment among the users and contributors. The project's reputation was undoubtedly hurt.
Perhaps most importantly where the technological impacts. It's one thing when a user can generally ignore the politics surrounding a Linux distro, and the software still does what it needs to do. It's another matter when one routine update after another causes their computer(s) to no longer boot, among other serious problems, all thanks to systemd. Users definitely notice incidents like that, and it decreases, or even eliminates, their trust.
So much hard-earned and invaluable goodwill was unnecessarily lost during and after that period of time.
If any good did arise from that situation, it was that more people became aware of the BSDs, or tried them again if they'd used them in the past. FreeBSD and OpenBSD saved users who needed the reliability and trustworthiness that Debian used to offer, before systemd negatively affected the quality of Debian.
There was a heavy influence from the GNOME camp, both upstream and within Debian, by mandating the use of systemd with GNOME. At the time, I wasn't particularly happy at the disproportionate influence for a specific desktop use case at the expense of other use cases e.g. embedded, server and others.
Debian did _not_ choose to use Systemd. Debian was forced to choose between adopting Systemd despite going against the very principals of Debian, or loosing Gnome. They were put it a very difficult position.
Ubuntu did _not_ choose to use Systemd. Ubuntu, using Debian upstream, decided not to break from Debian. Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, has a very sublime message about it at the time.
I'm personally of the opinion that when forced into a corner, do not side with whoever pushed you into that corner. The Debian technical committee did not have that resolve, they took the easy way out. Lots of Debian-derived distros followed suit out of necessity.
At least as far as Debian is concerned, you will find that the people with skin-in-the-game (administrators) were massively against systemd. The Devuan fork/split happened exactly because of that.
I think the the controversy is the other way around, systemd does a lot of things the others didn't. People wanted all those responsibilitys modularized.
Well that's a good question, I'd like to have an answer to that.
debian adoption of systemd was a bumpy ride to say the least, it caused a few long time contributors to resign and others to fork debian to remove systemd in a new distro called devuan.
Then again systemd gobbled other critical components such as udev, there's also gnome that made it a strict requirement, like a cancer it grows and takes over other components.
I don't even know what planet you're living on. In particular, Russ Allbery of the Debian technical committee gave some of the most detailed evaluation of systemd vs alternatives that I've seen from anyone from a user and maintainer POV. (He noticeably said, beforehand, he didn't think it would be a huge deal at first, but it turned out it was a big difference.) Many people did not like their decision, but suggesting that the Debian committee in particular didn't take the issue seriously and were strong-armed by Red Hat -- makes me think you have no idea what you're talking about, honestly.
I'd like to read this part about RHEL throwing their weight around on the Debian lists. Given your implication is that Debian was clearly "forced" to adopting it, I imagine the relevant evidence shouldn't be hard to find.
(Alternatively, you could actually ask other Debian maintainers yourself, like Josh, in this thread how it went. But you already did that and it didn't seem his narrative aligned with yours, so...)
I think it was why they got on the systemD train. It was the init system they thought they could maintain well.
Sounds like there were lots of hurt feeling in the whole situation. Did some major Debian maintainers actually leave Debian for Devuan? If Devuan’s contributors were originally just Debian users, it seems like no loss for Debian and a win for the community (more developers).
I think the biggest issue of SystemD was not only the controversial development process, but the dependencies of other projects like udev into SystemD's repo and packaging.
One of the main problems was the speed with which systemd was rolled out on all the major Linux distros, despite it being relatively immature and very controversial at that.
The second major issue is it growing way out of the bounds of being just an init replacement, thereby violating the so-called Unix Philosophy of doing one-thing well. For a user app to do that is one thing, but for a core OS component to do that just smells way too much like forcing Linux to be more like Windows, which a lot of hard-core Linux users are ideologically opposed to.
The third major issue is that on most major Linux distros, users are not given an easy way to avoid using systemd, no matter how much they hate it or oppose it.
The fourth issue is the apparent arrogance of the people responsible for systemd, and their off-hand dismissal of mature and widely respected unix conventions.
All of this adds up to a storm of controversy that the systemd people mostly brought upon themselves. Had they just been more humble about their creation and waited until it was mature and well-tested and did all the wonderful things they claim it could and should do instead of stuffing what was widely seen as a broken-by-design piece of garbage down everybody's throat, maybe much of the Linux community wouldn't have been nearly so outraged by it.
But debian has chosen to adopt systemd, so at least some substantial part of Debian developers preferred going with it to keeping the status quo with sysvinit. Maybe they were badly influence by Redhat/Poettering, but it was their call.
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