Hi there

[Adam Borowski]

On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 11:06:00AM +0200, KatolaZ wrote:
> Just a couple of points:
> 
> 1) as you know, at Devuan we are willing to help with/take over
> maintenance of sysvinit in Debian.

I don't think a takeover would be a good idea, help is of course always
wanted.

> I am currently reviewing the state of things (including bug reports and
> new development upstream), and will post here a report and a plan ASAP.

Sounds great.

As I see it, the main problem is that the current packaging model makes
cooperation hard and relies on a single person to do everything.  This is
unsustainable -- especially that there many many people willing to do
drive-by contributions (there are _48_ patches rotting in the BTS!) but
have no place to actually put them in.

Thus, I think there should be some kind of git workflow, be it
free-for-anyone-even-remotely-approved (all DDs, you, etc) or a more classic
open-PRs-taken-by-a-few-maintainers model.  In either case, there must be
some staging ground that can hold the work in progress.

As far as I know, there's no way to push a non-finalized package with dgit,
right?

> 2) elogind is already working in Devuan ascii, and all the desktop
> things seem to be fine with that.

This is the main part that you Devuan folks can help with!

I've been running your packages at home for several months, but never had
the tuits to put that into Debian.  This will involve some serious work
cooperating with systemd packaging, both wrt dependencies and switching
from one to another (and remember, d-i always starts with systemd so every
new install will need to switch from systemd!).

> You might have noticed that the trick is to let elogind Provides:
> libpam-systemd, and a few more hacks around that. Unfortunately,
> supporting both elogind and consolekit proved a bit tricky, and
> required to provide two sets of polkit-1-* packages (one for the
> elogind backend and one for the consolekit one). But it should be
> possible to simplify stuff there.

As there's no consolekit in Debian (kfreebsd/hurd excluded), this is not an
issue.  On the other hand, elogind really should be ABI-compatible with
systemd as polkit maintainers would be really unhappy, for a good reason.

> 3) You might also have noticed that ascii has eudev working just fine.

It's great to have as backup, but I don't think eudev should be uploaded to
Debian (except maybe into experimental?).  Current udev packages work well
enough, and making them alternatives would be a lot of pointless effort.

> 4) We are working to include as many init/supervisors choices at
> install time as possible. Currently ASCII has also openrc, but the
> idea is to add more options in Beowulf.

I'm not sure if diluting efforts is a good idea; I even haven't found any
real uses for openrc that sysv-rc already doesn't adequately.


Meow!
-- 
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ 
⣾⠁⢰⠒⠀⣿⡁ 10 people enter a bar: 1 who understands binary,
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ 1 who doesn't, D who prefer to write it as hex,
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ and 1 who narrowly avoided an off-by-one error.