On having a track record in operating systems development

[Marco d'Itri]

Now that Debian 12 has been released with proprietary firmwares on the
official media[0], non-optional merged-/usr[1] and systemd adopted by
everybody, I want to take a moment to list, not without some pride, a
few things that I was right about over the last 20 years:


* Distribution of proprietary firmwares (#33[2], #40[3], #114[4])
* udev
* systemd (#454[5])
* merged-/usrAccepting the obvious solution about firmwares took 18
years. My work on the merged-/usr transition started in 2014, and the
first discussions about replacing sysvinit are from 2011. The general
adoption of udev (and dynamic device names, and persistent network
interface names...) took less time in comparison and no large-scale
flame wars, since people could enable it at their own pace. But it
required countless little debates in the Debian Bug Tracking System: I
still remember the people insisting that they would never use this
newfangled dynamic /dev/, or complaining about their beloved /dev/cdrom
symbolic link and persistent network interface names.

So follow me for more rants about inevitable technologies.


[0]
https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/amd64/release-notes/ch-information.en.html#non-free-split
[1] https://wiki.debian.org/UsrMerge
[2] https://blog.bofh.it/id_33
[3] https://blog.bofh.it/id_40
[4] https://blog.bofh.it/id_114
[5] https://blog.bofh.it/debian/id_454

Permalink: https://blog.bofh.it/debian/id_467