Agreed. New distributions, even rehashes of others for whatever ways and means, can be an influence upon the ecosystem. New software can be developed, new ideas exchanged, etc. It isn't about the fact the distribution itself goes forward for the long term, it's the influence and contributions it makes that outlast the distribution.

Already several core pieces of software have been influenced by Devuan. Vdev is a new udev-like device management daemon that not only aims for some levels of udev compatibility, but introduces a new methodologies as well. It's pre-alpha, but already the testing has produced very promising results that could very well replace udev outright.

Devuan can pass or fail, but what it influences will outlast the distribution in all regards, but still aiming for it's success it a niceness.

Think about this much. Distributions like Yggdrasil didn't last, but Yggdrasil introduced several concepts, and so have other bygone distributions. One distribution can influence many, just as many can influence one.

When the ecosystem stagnates and software development ceases, the ecosystem starts to die off. Projects grow less and less and eventually the ecosystem collapses, and once that happens, it's over, time to move on.

@TobiSGD the issue in your conclusions is that you are giving Devuan your own interpretation of our goals.

We never sayd our goal is to provide inside Devuan all possible combinations of software, we focus, for the first devuan release, on give init freedom, and in future to give the best freedom we can.

When i say "the best we can" i mean "limited by the fact that we are a binary distribution with limited manpower and time", of course, but it's not only that.

Let me try with an example: there are 3 different project, but on the market you are able to buy only one of those. If anyone will provide the other 2, it will help the market to have full freedom as all 3 project are now available.

Devuan doesn't need to provide all choices to protect freedom, provide the choices you can't find anywhere else is enough. More, we are realist, and we know we can't provide all possible alternative choices, so, even provide a single alternative choice help in protect the freedom of choice, but we go furter, and we try to provide more than one alternative. In this way we try to do our best in protecting freedom of choice, but to reach our goal even provide one alternative is enough.


So, to repeat this another time, your statement " Devuan has the noble goal to provide *all* the options" is simply false and a misinterpretation of what is our real goal.

Also, another thing to add:

Providing freedom and alternatives is intrpreted by you and others as "provide every single combination of every piece of software". Well, for us, it's not. For us, the focus is on "provide the choice to put your hands on the system and modify it without recompiling a huge part of the core system", and to provide the choice to continue in the spirit of the "old good unix/kiss way to do things", where, of course, i mean our interpretation of the "unix/kiss" way as, it's well known, we don't agree on the interpretation on which systemd in this case, but also other piece of software, are kiss and "unix oriented".

More, provide than Debian has ever called itself "the universal OS", so, why did you bash Devuan to not provide all choices but it's ok than Debian call itself "universal" where it has less choices than devuan?

For me it seems that you are trying to find something to bash us just to do that, in italy we say "stai cercando il pelo nell'uovo", sadly i don't know how to translate it in english, but it mean that you are trying to find any little imperfection, even one that is insignificant, to criticize us.

It's like someone in the past that, when we just started to write our constitution and put it on our wiki, has started to criticize some points of our draft eavily: Well, those points they were criticizing are points that are just a copy&paste without any modification from the Debian constitution. But as we write them, they were wrong and a motivation for criticizing us

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You are welcome to scratch any itch you wish and I'm glad your doing it. When I first read about this it seemed like a group of people were having a temper tantrum and taking their toys to another sand box this thread has not changed that opinion. I do think though that you will create some SW that will be beneficial to the overall community so I do wish you success and perhaps maybe you'll force a rethink in the community much the Lennart did/is.

There' a corrupt i386 version of Debian in the virtual machine. Not yet functioning at all.