Raphaël Hertzog

Perhaps my framing of the situation was a little simplistic. To provide more facts, let me point out that the question of which init system should be default in Debian was first asked[0] to the tech ctte in October of 2013, however it was already clear the previous month that the GNOME packagers were trying to make systemd the required init system[1] in Debian (which had GNOME as its default graphical environment already):

"Debian GNOME packagers are planning the same AFAIK; they rather just rely on systemd (as init system, not just some dependencies). In the end, the number of distributions not having systemd decreases."

That was written by Olav Vitters, of the GNOME Release Team, who later admitted[2] "Personally I’m totally biased and think the only realistic choice is systemd."

You could argue that any blame for this dependency therefore lies with the Debian packagers, rather than Red Hat employees, but actually, if you look into the history, there was already a push for making GNOME dependent on systemd three years earlier by none other than Lennart Poettering.[3]

Even at that time, Josselin Mouette, founder of the Debian GNOME team, obsequiously replied "I don’t have anything against requiring systemd, since it is definitely the best init system out there currently" and later acknowledged the influence Red Hat had over the direction of GNOME, saying "Red Hat being the company spending the most on GNOME, it is obvious that their employees work on making things work…

Exim4 as an MTA, and Dovecot as an IMAP Server.

I particularly like Exim4's configuration on Debian. It provides IMHO very reasonable defaults, but allows overriding of most of these defaults using a mechanism similar to hooks. In that sense, the configuration is more like a framework.

This allows me to easily add my own configuration, while also not touching the default configuration as shipped by the Maintainer (and thereby avoiding nagging about a changed conffile [1]).

If using the split config format (ie, /etc/exim4/conf.d), it's not that complicated figuring out how to to a particular thing.

For example, [2] is the folder that contains Exim's ACL configuration. [3] is the file pertaining to SMTP's RCPT TO command. The individual features, and how to enable/disable/modify them, are well documented and the steps are usually trivial.

I don't use it anymore, but I remember that in order to set up a mail system with purely virtual users backed by a PostgresSQL database, I only needed to add a half-dozen or so of files, each containing small configuration snippets.

(Exim configuration is still complicated of course, to say the least. Debian just makes it a lot simpler.)

[1] https://raphaelhertzog.com/2010/09/21/debian-conffile-configuration-file-managed-by-dpkg/

[2] https://sources.debian.net/src/exim4/4.87-3/debian/debconf/conf.d/acl/

[3] https://sources.debian.net/src/exim4/4.87-3/debian/debconf/conf.d/acl/30_exim4-config_check_rcpt/

There is a discussion that will be happening soon within Debian that you might like to participate in.

The discussion was announced in a blog post, but hasn't happened yet, some of the related blog posts are worth reading:

https://sunweavers.net/blog/node/129
https://raphaelhertzog.com/2021/03/30/challenging-times-for-freexian-1/
https://raphaelhertzog.com/2021/03/31/challenging-times-for-freexian-2/
https://raphaelhertzog.com/2021/04/01/challenging-times-for-freexian-3/
https://raphaelhertzog.com/2021/04/02/challenging-times-for-freexian-4/

To participate you'll need to subscribe to the (currently very inactive) debian-enterprise mailing list:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-enterprise/

On your points about Debian & the enterprise;

The private ELTS offering by Freexian makes it slightly longer, but indeed less than RH.

https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Extended

I don't think Ubuntu LTS is able to compete with RH support periods either.

There are some organisations/groups which seem to be effective in actually paying people.

There is a group of Debian developers that collect funding and pay Debian developers/maintainers to maintain LTS for Debian releases:

https://www.freexian.com/en/services/debian-lts.html

https://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/Freexian+LTS/

The FreeBSD Foundation also hires developers to do actual work:

https://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2016-04-2016-06.html#The-FreeBSD-Foundation

https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/what-we-do/projects/#current-projects

However, I think such initiatives are typically highly underfunded. Like OpenSSH/{Open,Libre}SSL/GnuPG, everyone uses the software, few companies/individuals chip in in a significant way.

> Granted, my experience with DEB has mostly been limited to Ubuntu - so it could be that/Canonical.

It is not a Canonical specificity, but it is overridable behavior.

For the dpkg prompting on configuration file changes:

https://raphaelhertzog.com/2010/09/21/debian-conffile-configuration-file-managed-by-dpkg/

> You can also make those options permanent by creating /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/local:

> Dpkg::Options
{
> "--force-confdef";
> "--force-confold";
> }

Along with invoking apt with -y (assume yes) will get you close to the behavior you seek. Or as a permanent setting:

APT::Get::Assume-Yes "true";

For those that might be confused, the actual vote page is http://www.debian.org/vote/2012/vote_002 and goes into detail about what is being voted on.

I don't think Debian has a problem with diversity; as an example, the Debian Women group has been around since 2004: http://women.debian.org/home/ Maybe this is more about getting non-programmer/sysadmin types involved in Debian. (There's an interesting interview with the proposer, Francesca Ciceri, here: http://raphaelhertzog.com/2012/04/06/people-behind-debian-francesca-ciceri-member-of-debian-press-publicity-teams/)