[Bradford] Debian will fork to Devuan

[David Spencer]

> Thanks David, very helpful. The banter lent me the impression the walls were
> about to fall down. I'll take your advice.

Glad it helps.
Stick with Wheezy until 2016 :-)

To be fair, the walls *are* about to fall down. Zero, one, or two of
the forks are heading for disaster. But we don't know which fork is
doomed (maybe they will both thrive), and it also depends on your
needs as a user. And even then, it only affects future releases. For
now you are ok, but some time in 2016 you will need answers to these
questions:

(1) How successful will each fork eventually be in meeting its own
goals? Will Devuan have enough competent people? Will it collapse due
to creative differences? Will the next-but-one Debian become a
systemd-compulsory distro, de facto, due to a lack of people willing
to maintain compatibility with other inits, because they've all left
and gone to Devuan?

(2) What are your own requirements and attitudes to disruptive change?
Which fork will deliver you more benefits at less cost? Which one will
'just work' best for what you want it to do?

Meanwhile (as I have written elsewhere) Slackware releases are
maintained for at least five years. It is pretty obvious that the next
Slackware will *not* have systemd and will come out some time in 2015.
That means there will still be an actively maintained old-style
Slackware in the year 2020.

Sadly Debian with its thousands of developers, mountains of
infrastructure and bulletproof procedures for everything can only
manage "about one year" after the next one comes out (wtf? srsly?),
but even that gets you well into 2016 before you have to move up from
Wheezy, which will help enormously.

Yeah, it's hard to write about all this in an unbiased way. Sorry.

-D.