@cazabon @landley Grats!

Switching from runit to s6 should be easy: your service directories basically don't change, unless you want to adapt them to use s6-specific features such as readiness notification.

The only difficult (and it's "difficult" in the sense that it requires a bit of work, not that you need l33t skill or arcane knowledge) part would be s6-linux-init installation, since unlike runit, s6 doesn't natively come with its own pid 1 process; s6-linux-init is the package that performs the necessary little dance so that s6-svscan can run as your pid 1 for the rest of the machine's lifetime.

You can look at this post from heliocat https://www.reddit.com/r/voidlinux/comments/khn1jy/adventures_in_booting_void_on_s6/ who has done exactly that, not on Devuan, but on Void. You can probably ignore everything about s6-rc, which is the advanced level: for a simple runit-to-s6 conversion, you need s6 and s6-linux-init, and that's it.

The s6 and s6-linux-init documentation should be clear enough, especially since daemontools-like have no secrets for you, but if you need support, come to the #s6 IRC channel on OFTC and we'll be delighted to have you 😉

So, I rescued a 12-year-old Macbook Pro, given up by its owner because Apple had orphaned it from security updates, and also it was suffering from Apple High-Qwality Spicy Pillow Syndrome.

I replaced the battery and installed Linux on it.

And I gotta say, this was the most satisfying thing I've done with a keyboard in years:

# apt-get purge systemd libnss-systemd

#Devuan Excalibur installed/upgraded from Debian Trixie like a champ. Now I don't have to deal with extraneous horseshit when Lennart adds systemd-mountd, systemd-sshd, systemd-bourne-shell, systemd-emacs, etc, etc...

Thanks to @landley for the post that finally convinced me to give Devuan a go. I'd been thinking about it for years, but didn't feel like setting aside a bunch of debugging time which I assumed would be needed.

Now to figure out how to switch to s6 from runit. ( @ska )

#Debian #systemd #UnixPhilosophy #runit #s6 #init #Unix #Linux

@ska

#s6 doesn't even have anything dealing generally with the #Unix accounts database in the first place, does it?

That is more the domain of nsss and utmps, ne?

#utmps #nsss

Let's see how this setup pans out: https://schmonz.com/2025/04/15/sensible-basic-minecraft-hosting/

#SelfHosting #s6 #ProcessSupervision