Re: Bits from the DPL (August 2019)
Hi Sam!
I took long time to write this even on still recovering from a pace in
my life that feels too quick for me. But I intended this to be carefully
worded in order to not hurt anyone. I hope I succeeded. My invitation:
Before taking anything personal and making the choice to feel hurt about
it, please talk to me so we can see to resolve this. I have written this
with the best intentions as best I can.
Sam Hartman - 18.09.19, 22:46:14 CEST:
> And yet the systemd maintainers and to a lesser extent release team
> face conduct that is frankly unacceptable. And in some cases that
> conduct is the frustrated reaction to years of interactions complex
> enough that we'll never untangle them. No matter how unfortunate the
> conduct is, the frustrations, anger and hurt are real.
>
> I want to stress that I can understand both sides here. If I were
> maintaining systemd I know I'd be absolutely done dealing with some
> people who have been involved in this discussion. If I were trying to
> get an alternate init system to continue to work, I'd be really
> frustrated. I'm not in either of those roles, and I do not fully
> understand either side's needs or feelings, but I can understand how
> we got here as a project.
As someone who engaged with the Devuan project people after a longer
time of observing whether they are serious about it, as someone who made
friends with them and as someone who helped to facilitate a peaceful and
friendly cooperation between Devuan and Debian people, a cooperation
that has been so very much fruitful and filled with the best intentions,
and after seeing all the wonderful work of the people from the Debian
init diversity sub project that started as a result of the decision to
cooperate, I feel really sad after reading your above comment.
Cause it already contains a deep designation in "years of interactions
complex enough that we will never untangle them". I see it here and
elsewhere that the running away from moving through conflicts in a
beneficial way for everyone involved for whatever good and understandable
reason hurts freedom in how to use free software and more importantly
harms communities. In conflicts there are often two, maybe three patterns
involved:
1) Attacking and be aggressive.
2) Running away,
3) Freeze.
Silent or not so silent resignation may be between 2 and 3.
Yet all of them stem from a time where conflicts often meant survival or
death for a living human being. However… here is no physical survival in
danger. *Not at all*. And conflict with all the confusion that comes with
it is part of facilitating and creating something new and better for all
involved. Humankind needs this in a much, much, much broader scope also
when it comes to climate change, diversity of animals and plants and in
general in how we treat other other and the planet.
I feel sad about giving up to use this chance to mature in how we
interact with one another in order bring forth an even better Debian
universal operating system than before.
I feel also sad cause I wonder whether all my meditation efforts back
then have been in vain – all those long, carefully written mails in
order ensure to not hurt anyone, for nothing?
Well, I bet they haven't, whatever will happen now, there will be a
benefit. And I feel sad cause I see the running away from moving through
conflict in a beneficial way is hurting the free software community in a
much much greater scale in other communities as well. I was happy to see
user space and kernel space developers talking to one another again
about the intricacies of entropy in Linux and computers in general.
Maybe one of my mails in that thread on LKML and other Linux kernel
related mailing lists helped to encourage and facilitate that.
I also feel sad cause I saw the enormous efforts of Devuan and Debian
people as well as the new Sysvinit upstream maintainer to improve the
quality of sysvinit, startpart, insserv, runit, openrc you name them
packages and to actually introduce elogind to Debian. The great care,
the willingness to cooperate, the willing to step over own shadows into
light… all of this in vain?
Again, I believe there will be a benefit, what ever the outcome of the
discussion or decision making process you just started, Sam, will be.
And to me, most of it, is not a technical issue. It is a people talking
with each other soft skill related issue. I am so happy to see that in
KDE community there have been teachings about non violent communications
recently.
It is not just technical. It never was just technical.
No amount of technical excellence which there is many to find with the
people involved, is going to resolve this.
Talking to, talking *with* each other can.
And if hurt can be created, healing of hurt can be created as well.
All can heal.
That is my conviction. I even have a lot of constructive ideas, but
ultimately they all require willingness to engage.
We have enough technical excellence, we do not seem to have enough
willingness to engage and to work with emotions in a transforming and
beneficial way.
Without willingness to engage, a clear decision to drop sysvinit support
in Debian might be better and especially more honest for everyone. More
honest than nurturing any more hope that a cooperation between Devuan
and Debian people can be allowed to be fruitful in the long term. It
would be a sign of respect to all the people who brought in their
willingness to step past old wounds to make init diversity withing
Debian a reality again, to all people who engaged with all their heart
*and* technical excellence.
But, it would also deepen the split between Debian and Devuan. A split
that with time I'd rather see mended and healed again.
I engaged with both communities. I maintain two Debian packages, I
wondered about becoming at least a Debian maintainer, but then again and
again I have felt scared about getting "bruises" from doing so. "Bruises
from Debian" as I saw Mark writing in one of the mails to the devuan-dev
mailing list. I have engaged with Devuan people and felt the excitement
of a small, yet very determined and wonderful community.
The work on the packages in Debian also helped Devuan along, so the work
is not wasted, so, no, nothing has been in vain. But the part in me who
prefers harmony and unity over separation and resignation still wants to
mend the hurt.
Still I see why you brought forward to question of whether to make a
clear decision.
On such split, however, I may switch over my last two Debian systems to
Devuan. And somehow find a way to still work together with the Debian
community and to maintain the two packages I maintain. With pbuilder /
cowbuilder or sbuild I can still have a Debian chroot to build the
packages and Debian VMs to test them. But reportbug on Devuan systems
talks to Devuan infrastructure and already I liked it to report to
Debian infrastructure when it is clearly not a Devuan issue¹. Or to
continue to engage with the wonderful small Debian/Kubuntu Qt/KDE
packaging team. All of this may more challenging and difficult than just
keeping my main system with Debian, using elogind and sysvinit just
wonderfully fine with the KDE Plasma desktop.
However, after using my main laptop with elogind and sysvinit for quite
while I do not like to step back to Systemd for reasons that can be all
my own for now – I see no benefit in discussing advantages and
disadvantages of Systems once again here. So eventually I'd make the
switch if this becomes impossible to do with Debian, if Debian would not
be universal enough an operating system to allow for it anymore.
Again, like in other situations recently, I feel myself between the
chairs. Someone I usually manage to resolve conflicts and… I do not hold
personal grudges over a longer time. I even had an respectful mail
exchange with Lennart again and can appreciate that Systemd / sysvinit
is not even about right and wrong or worse and better anymore, but they
are just different. I learned tools for doing that. I navigate between
communities or groups that sometimes to not talk to each other. But it
challenging for me as well.
Yet I see others not resolving them and carrying forth wounds of the
past for years to come. And I know from my own personal experience that
I can do nothing to make someone let go of old wounds or transform them
as long as they are unwilling to do so.
I truly get wanting to avoid conflict. I seen this with myself often
enough. Evading conflict yet does not resolve it and make it pop up
again, and again and yet again.
However I know from my own personal experience that it is not necessary
to untangle "years of interactions complex enough that we will never
untangle them" in order to heal wounds. All those stories are in the
past now. There are not here right now. And they can be transformed and
let go of. I experienced this myself personally often enough that I am
sure of that. The mind cannot resolve the issues the mind created. But
the heart can.
Yet, after all for me it is all about mutuality and harmlessness in any
relation ship. So I am more than willing to let anyone hold on grudges
over what has happened in the past for as long as they'd like to. Even
when have the idea that it is not really serving them. For it is about
the freedom to allow everyone to have the experience they have without
imposing anything what I would deem to be helpful to them upon them.
This freedom for me is at the core of mutuality and harmlessness.
[1] quassel-core: no permission to open certificate file, cannot write
quasselcore configuration
https://bugs.devuan.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=340
I still did not report this to the Debian maintainers.
> Honestly, I'm not entirely sure how to move forward. Perhaps it's
> just that I haven't talked to someone I need to. Perhaps someone
> will read this, and let me know that if I'd included them, we could
> get the right skills and authority engaged. I'll feel embarrassed
> and we'll all move on if that's the case. But I think we may be
> approaching a point where we need to poll the project--to have a GR
> and ask ourselves how committed we are to the different parts of this
> init diversity discussion. Reaffirming our support for sysvinit and
> elogind would be one of the options in any such GR. If that option
> passed, we'd expect all the maintainers involved to work together or
> to appoint and empower people who could work on this issue. It would
> be fine for maintainers not to be involved so long as they did not
> block progress. And of course we would hold the discussions to the
> highest standards of respect.
>
> Things may have changed since our last GR on the issue. There are
> 1033 non-overridden instances of lintian detecting a service unit
> without an init.d script [7]. The false positive rate seems high
> especially for packages that break their systemd integration.
> There's been discussion on debian-devel about moving to using service
> units as the default rather than init scripts [8].
Interestingly both of my server VMs work on Devuan with Sysvinit or the
other one Sysvinit + OpenRC *just* fine. With all services involved like
Postfix, Dovecot, rspamd and so on. And on my Debian laptops with
Sysvinit and elogind all services and this nice KDE Plasma desktop
still work fine as well. Yes, for the servers I chose unbound over knot-
resolver as that was one with just a Systemd config file and honestly I
did not bother enough to go through providing an init script and
suggesting it to the maintainer, partly due to fearing any heat or
conflict arising from this. Again, I know this tendency to avoid conflict
very well myself.
> So perhaps sysvinit and init scripts have had their chance and it is
> time to move on. We could move away from init scripts as the default
> representation. We could stop caring about sysvinit (which isn't
> quite the same thing but is related). That would leave non-linux
> ports in an unfortunate position. But right now there are no
> non-linux ports in the main archive. So perhaps we don't even care
> about that. Again, a change, but a change that we can ask ourselves
> if we are ready to make.
There has been discussions about some kind of systemd unit / service file
parser. And init-d-script (see manpage in section 5) might just be an
approach that could be adapted to do that.
On the inability to use the init system of my choice, even knowing that
sysvinit is far from perfect and I still like to see a better
alternative, I may just opt in to switch my last systems to Devuan.
Unless there would be another init system like runit I'd like to use
that I could use with Debian. That freedom of choice matters to me.
Ideally there might be a standard between all those init systems, but
then again that would require talking *with* one another.
> None of that answers the question of Elogind. In some ways dropping
> Elogind is a bigger decision. If we ever want to try something
> different than Systemd, we'll need something like Elogind. Even many
> people who believe systemd is a step forward have concerns about it.
> Do we really want all of the things systemd does in one place? We've
> seen a lot of advantages, but are we sure we don't want to experiment
> with alternatives. For large classes of experimentation, Elogind or
> something like it will be essential. It seems like adding elogind
> later after it has been removed will be harder than keeping it
> working. I'm concerned that removing Elogind commits us to
> Systemd-based solutions with a very high cost to try new things or
> change direction. For me that's a step we should be very careful
> before taking.
I am concerned about this as well.
For me free software always have been about alternatives. The
competition of different approaches, competition in the sense of "running
together". Granted, I felt overwhelmed by it at times as well and in
some areas I though "why just another media player" instead of picking
up and abandoned one for example.
> I don't know what the answers are. I do know we need to respect our
> contributors. In my mind that means either working with the elogind
> proponents or politely telling them we're no longer interested. It
> does not mean as some have suggested hoping that sysvinit will just
> die over time. I think it may be time for the project to focus on
> this issue again.
I don't know them either.
At the moment I am just really sad, hoping that somehow a good outcome
for everyone involved can be achieved.
Best,
--
Martin
Reply to: