Up to Main Index                         Up to Journal for September, 2023

                  JOURNAL FOR SATURDAY 30TH SEPTEMBER, 2023
______________________________________________________________________________

SUBJECT: Goodbye Debian?
   DATE: Sat 30 Sep 21:04:11 BST 2023

I have been a Linux user for decades. I started with Yggdrasil back in 1993
with a Linux 0.99.5 kernel. Sometime in 1997 I switched to RedHat 4.2. At the
end of 2000 I switched to Debian 2.2 “potato” after not being very happy with
the direction RedHat was taking. Since then I have been a very happy Debian
user and all my systems run Debian or Raspberry Pi OS, which is Debian under
the hood. Until recently that is…

None of my systems run systemd. This is a personal choice as I believe in the
Unix philosophy:

  • Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
  • Write programs to work together.
  • Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal
    interface.

This is in stark contrast to systemd’s philosophy of including “everything and
the kitchen sink” and using binary file formats. You may not agree with this,
you may love systemd. That is fine, it’s your choice. This is just about me
and my choice.

A long time ago, after much debate, Debian committed to supporting multiple
init systems. This was good for users as it gave them the choice of what to
use. However, more and more packages are no longer providing sysvinit scripts.
Some of this has been mitigated by the orphan-sysvinit-scripts package.

Recently mdadm version 4.2+20230227-1, used for software RAID, removed all of
the sysvinit scripts in favour of systemd. This is a major package. How can
they decide to go systemd only and abandon users of other init systems? I hope
the init scripts are picked up by orphan-sysvinit-scripts but it hasn’t
happened yet. For now I’m stuck at version 4.2-5 of mdadm :(

Today I updated my system, first thing I do every day, and a lot of services
needed restarting — including getty, well actually agetty. The getty processes
have been a problem for a long time as they don’t restart properly and hang,
so I reboot when they need to be restarted.

I rebooted and the system didn’t work. No keyboard, no mouse, nothing was
working. Seems the update from udev 254.1-3 to 254.4-1 caused all of the
update-rc.d symlinks to be removed. This breaks booting on non-systemd
systems. Over an hour of diagnosis and fixing later I had the system working
again. If this happens to you, run “dpkg-reconfigure initscripts” to get the
symlinks back.

So what now? I really like Debian but it seems to no longer likes me. I can
keep patching and fixing, but over time I can see things just getting worse.

One possible solution is switching to Devuan. Devuan is a fork of Debian with
systemd stripped out. The only thing that makes me edgy is that they run their
own package repositories. I’d be happier if they had their modified packages
in their repositories and deferred to Debian for unmodified packages — this is
how Raspberry Pi OS works for the 64-bit distribution.

For now Debian is still working for me, but I’m still doing my research. So
far it looks like I can just upgrade from Debian to Devuan. Devuan also seems
to run on Raspberry Pi as well.

If you are curious about Devuan here are a few links:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devuan

    https://www.devuan.org/

--
Diddymus


  Up to Main Index                         Up to Journal for September, 2023