Monday, April 15, 2013

The Other Shoe Drops: Founder Announces Retirement, Fuduntu End of Life

by Dietrich Schmitz

It was only last evening that I posted my story Developer Dissatisfaction Looms with Systemd.

Sadly, following on the heels of that story, Founder +Andrew Wyatt made a formal announcement this morning regarding his planned retirement from active work on and end of life for the Fuduntu project.

It is regretful to see this happen and I hope it is not a trend for other smaller Distros to close camp in similar fashion.

The struggle to keep Linux on an even keel continues in spite of systemic infrastructural changes.

Add to the mix that Gnome has coded a forced dependency on systemd complicates the situation further insofar as non-systemd Distros that may wish to use Gnome and also obstructs the ability of continued use of Gnome on BSD platforms by virtue of the fact that systemd does not support BSD interfacing.

I ask you: Is this good programming or 'lazy' programming?  You tell me.

-- Dietrich

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7 comments:

  1. In regards to Fuduntu EOL. Yes, Fuduntu is going away as we know it. But most of the team is moving on to a new project, based on the same principles of ease of use and stability, on a core with more long term viability. We don't have anything "official" to announce yet, but we will let everybody know when we have things nailed down a little better.

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  2. Thats sad news indeed, and i sincerely hope its not a catalyst, upstream dont seem to give a hoot about the lower echelons of the food chain, i was somewhat suprised to see Debian with all their developers and with all the time in the world have decided to switch to systemd, i understand why it would upset a lot of their loyal followers & spin maintainers, Arch had the same shitstorm back in October, the mailing lists were a joy to behold back then.

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  3. GNOME has not hard coded systemd as a dependency yet. All you had to do was read the follow up to the message you linked to.
    https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2012-November/msg00043.html

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  4. Michael thank you for your information. I am not interested in generating disinformation. And I did correct a previous misstatement to which you were kind enough to provide technical clarification.


    But the intent is clear here, even if the commit was solo and not by concensus. Programmers will be programmers and will at times take what they consider the most expedient path in problem solving.


    This is a good case in point. Gnome really should be loosely coupled with no direct extern dependencies.


    Thank you again. Dietrich

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  5. jon_downfromthetreesApril 16, 2013 at 9:57 AM

    As a user who has run Fuduntu, I have to say this is a bit unexpected, but not, after I think about it, really surprising. Maintaining a distribution with current applications on a Gnome 2 base seems a recipe for frustration.


    But, also as a user, I'm pretty indifferent to issues like systemd that concern developers. I don't want to need to deal with the internals of my OS. I just want it to work, reliably and transparently. The alleged Gnome-systemd dependency doesn't matter much to me, since I choose my interface first and then go looking for the distribution that runs it best.

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  6. When you resist to change in the Linux ecosystem as a whole (regardless if said change is good or bad), you'll eventually get burned. Fuduntu was nice, but personally I think that it is a very bad idea to stubbornly cling to components of which you KNOW that they'll eventually be so outdated that it'll be difficult to use them. It's not as if the writing wasn't on the wall WRT to GTK2 and other things.

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