[_flux]

It seems though not having systemd in it would be against "init freedom": https://www.devuan.org/os/init-freedom . Or is there some particular criteria an init system needs to satisfy to be included, that systemd doesn't satisfy but the others do?

[mdlxxv]

Their criterion for an init system to qualify for this so-called "init freedom" seems to be "not being systemd".

[Calzifer]

> Or is there some particular criteria an init system needs to satisfy to be included, that systemd doesn't satisfy but the others do?

Reading the first sentence on that page was to much?

"Init Freedom is about restoring a sane approach to PID1 that respects portability, diversity and freedom of choice."

systemd fails on the portability criteria.

Apart from that, why should they invest there limited time to include systemd? Devuan is Debian without systemd. If you want systemd install Debian.

[PunchyHamster]

they could've just cut out other systemd components (ntp, dns management etc) and use systemd

The point of devuan is "we really do not like systemd". That's entire feature list

[t43562]

Why provide systemd if devuan is just debian with systemd alternatives? What would be the point - if you want systemd use debian?

[direwolf20]

A systemd distro tends to be locked to systemd, with many pieces of software requiring systemd to be running. An init–freedom distro avoids such dependencies. Presumably, you can still install systemd if you really want to.

[imp0cat]

Yep, no "unnecessary entanglements" evidently (their words, not mine).

[LooseMarmoset]

> Unnecessary entanglements

The problems with systemd are:

  * that once it was adopted, every single package started requiring it
  * which meant that packages that previously could run everywhere, now could only run on systemd-based systems
  * binary logs - a solution that solved nothing but created problems 
  * which locked out any system that wasn't linux
  * which locked out any linux system that didn't want to use it
  * which led to abominations like systemd-resolved
  * "bUt yOu DoNt hAVe tO uSE it" - tell that to the remote attestation crowd, of which Poettering is a founding member of. see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572 - soon you'll have to use systemD because nothing else *can* be used.

literally everything the systemD crowd has done leads to lockout and loss of choice. All ramrodded through by IBM/RedHat.

The systemD developers don't care about any of this, of course. They've got a long history of breaking user space and poor dev practices because they're systemD. I mean, their attitude was so bad they got one of their principal devs kicked from the kernel because they overloaded the use of the kernel boot parameter "debug", which flooded the console, and refused to modify the debug option to something compatible like "systemd.debug", broke literally every other system, and then told everybody else "hey we're not wrong, the rest of the world is wrong." And this has been their attitude since then.

Look, if people want to use systemD, that's just fine. But it is a fact that the entire development process for systemD is predicated on making Linux incompatible with anything else, which is an entire inversion of how Linux and Free Software works.

I actually like unit files. But if systemD was just an init system, it would stop there.