*sigh* apologies for the length. It was not what I intended.. tldr: "Go devuan! Debian 8 pinning does not work for me"
I don't have the thread anymore, but there was something posted within the past couple days which led me to this link -- I think it was something Steve posted; something about a mailing list thread: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Debian/openrc-conversion.html Someone on the linked thread made a lot of arguments about how Devuan was "an operative overreaction" in response to Systemd; about how the same thing could be done with Debian 8 and the apt pinning workaround. There are two reasons why this will never work, and the logistics behind those two reasons are what makes the work being done on Devuan all the more relevant: 1) Hacking up a distribution which has committed to a systemd hinge-pin is a nice way to find yourself in a headlock someday. You can pin all you want, and force-remove all you want, but one day there will be a package you need (let's pretend it's linux-libc-dev-xxx.x.x) which will have the hinge-pin baked-in. You can no longer update libc. By consequence, you can no longer update anything which depends on libc. Which is like everything. 2) Obviously, some packages are already at that point and already have dependencies baked into some of the fundamental linux packages everyone runs on Linux. Devuan *is* relevant because any systemd bloat which makes it's way into future packages can be delt with by the Devuan community. Which is the fundamental idea Linux was built on. The same fundamental idea which systemd adoption kills. Systemd is vendor lock-in and there is no other way to explain it when "apache2-common" cannot be installed due to libsystemd0 dependency. I mention all this becuase I took the "deb 8" pinning challenge today and it failed miserably. After following all the pinning directions, and removing all systemd related software, my deb 8 system boots fine on openrc, but I cannot use a2enmod as it requires apache2-common which requires libsystemd0. uh whut??... I put the console session on patsebin for brevity here: http://pastebin.com/raw/wZkuskuv I have around 40 Ubuntu 12.04 LTS machines in production. They all need to be upgraded before April of 2017 when security patches become deprecated. I don't know if Devuan will be 1.0 stable by then but completely understand the complexity of the task at hand considering the tentacular and insidious reach of systemd. Our current plan is to go to 14.04 LTS where there is hopefully a minimum of systemd invasion, but any hope for a "Debian" pinning solution is certainly lost. As anxious as I am to install Devuan on everything, my users would not understand the decision to run beta software in production when/if something goes wrong. Here's hoping for a Devuan 1.0 sometime soon <crosses-fingers> and thanks go to those working hard to make that happen. Do not let BS comments like "an operative overreaction" discourage your efforts. _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng