Extirpating systemd from Debian

I found out that all my debian machines switched to systemd without my consent, with just a standard apt-get ugrading.
I despise that decision.

I did not follow the latest discussion about it, I was left with the impression that it would have been installed only if needed, but evidently I was wrong.

Can you get back? Time to toss Debian? I hoped not, I know of other fellow developers who switched  distribution, but Debian is Debian.

Remove systemd and sysvinit (which is now a transitional package) and put back sysvinit-core back. I had the fear that I bricked my laptops, but it still works. For how long? I don't know.

I'm very very sad about this. If I think of GNU/Linux I think of Debian, it has been with me since 68k times, when potato was cool. Debian made a very bad decision.

Something newer than ol' sysvinit? Something modern, fast, capable of parallelism. Yes.
But something portable, light, secure, which is not a dependency hell, which does one thing. In other words, something in line with the Unix philosophy.

Not the enormous pile of rotting shit which is systemd. When I removed it, I freed almost 13Mbytes from my system. I am relieved, but it shows also how big that pile of crap is.

So, for now, Debian can stay with me, I hope it will be for a long while. Long enough that debian will revert or systemd will go away.

FTP 0.5 for GNUstep and Mac

I'm happy to announce a new release of FTP, the file transfer application of the GNUstep Application Project.

It is designed for GNUstep and completely native on the Mac too, with version 0.5 being available as a binary for both for PPC and Intel, as well, of course, as the usual source tarball for Unix.
(Please wait for the GNU.org mirrors to propagate the files or grab the sources from SVN)

There are some new features as well as bug fixes:

• Creation of local and remote directories
• Command to refresh the current directory listing, local and remote
• File renaming, local and remote
• Drag&Drop for uploading a file from GWorkspace/Finder to remote file panel
• better handling of local and remote write errors
• better parsing of File Sizes returned by FTP servers
• better handling of file adding to the views, so that less "refresh" is needed
• Bug fixes with multiple selection uploads
• Code cleanup for better portability (gcc/clang, old and new runtime, Cocoa)