when lmde 2 (betsy) will be available?

[kurotsugi]

I wasn't here for several days. have the situation changed now? last time I visited this forum someone happily announce he succesfully use cinnamon 2.4 on top of debian testing. since mint 17.1 have been released mint team is now have lot of free time. the gtk breakage is also over so technically they only need to release lmde2 repo for public testing then release lmde2 when several days later.

[glebihan]

I wasn't here for several days. have the situation changed now? last time I visited this forum someone happily announce he succesfully use cinnamon 2.4 on top of debian testing. since mint 17.1 have been released mint team is now have lot of free time. the gtk breakage is also over so technically they only need to release lmde2 repo for public testing then release lmde2 when several days later.

How about you read the posts that were made in between ?
Maybe you'll see how wrong you are and how disrespectful your behavior is...

[GeneC]

................... last time I visited this forum someone happily announce he succesfully use cinnamon 2.4 on top of debian testing. .....

NOTE:
This is about other Debian Testing derived distros (Debian Jessie, Sparky, Makulu, et) NOT LMDE....

Just a word of warning to anyone trying to update a Debian Testing installation to Cinnamon 2.4 from "LMDE Debbie" repo. Its not compatible with the current Debian Cinnamon version

Code: Select all

gene@sparky:~$ apt-cache policy cinnamon
cinnamon:
  Installed: 2.2.16-4
  Candidate: 2.2.16-4
  Version table:
 *** 2.2.16-4 0
        500 http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

It will break. I tried. (Sorry didn't document the errors, but logging in crashes Cinnamon 2.4). If your determined to try, possibly remove all of Cinnamon 2.2 from Debian first. Best yet, wait for 2.4 to come to Debian repos. OR, wait for LMDE2. Its worth the wait. The new Cinnamon 2.4 is most excellent.

[kurotsugi]

Maybe you'll see how wrong you are and how disrespectful your behavior is...

sure...you can me whatever you like :3
if you don't mind, on this case I'd prefer insensitive_bastard_who_continously_bragging_about_updates

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 0&t=181140
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 0&t=161962
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 0&t=183561
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 9&t=183188

certainly I'm not the one who need those updates. those guys above and all user of LMDE did. lot of user move away when the team announce that LMDE will move into debian stable but LMDE still have lot of user out there. last time I checked there's 400+ unpatched security holes in LMDE. effectiverly made LMDE as a one of the most vulnerable distro. if advocating these people means that I'm a bad person then let it be. sure, I'm a criminal in this forum because I tried to advocate these people to get their right :3

the reason why I continously bragging about updates is because the intermediary transition is an essential phase. user currently can't directly move into debian testing. mint team need to provide an intermidiary transition between UP8 and betsy. after that mint team could abandon it and focused on betsy because user could manage their system by himself. that's a win-win solution for both user and mint team. user will got benefit for all those bug fix and security patch. they can also manage their system and move into jessie by himself without breaking something. OTOH mint team's benefits would be:
- smoother and safer upgrade to LMDE2
- less work on LMDE2 because some of them is already done in the transition update
- the team got better reputation
- ... less grunt and rant from user.

IIRC there was a plan to release this intermediary transition on november. I was really happy with that but it got canceled. I'm astounished with this decision to abandon LMDE until jessie got released. the current situation about LMDE: a 10 months abandoned system with no bug fixes, 400+ security holes? is it me who becomes 'insensitive bastard who continously bragging about updates' or is it the mint team now becomes 'insensitive distro maintainer who doesn't care about his user"? is it really that hard to give an intermediary transition until jessie becomes stable?

[reference2myself]

I wasn't here for several days. have the situation changed now? last time I visited this forum someone happily announce he succesfully use cinnamon 2.4 on top of debian testing. since mint 17.1 have been released mint team is now have lot of free time. the gtk breakage is also over so technically they only need to release lmde2 repo for public testing then release lmde2 when several days later.

i'm sure there's lots of stuff they're still working on but cinnamon 2.4.3 with the jessie and betsy repos is working nice for me after getting through the update process and fixing a couple little things. Check here if you're more interested. http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 8&t=183280

[py-thon]

user currently can't directly move into debian testing.

You can and you don't have to wait. Just install Debian Testing on your system and get rid of LMDE at the same time
LMDE is useless anyway if what you want is Debian Testing. I'm sure that this is easier, cleaner and quicker than moving from LMDE 1 to LMDE 2 to Debian Testing.

[kurotsugi]

You can and you don't have to wait.

as explained above, it wasn't about me :3

1. not every LMDE user aware the current LMDE situation
2. not every LMDE user have a capability to manage his system by himself.
3. most of them highly depends on UP system to get bug fix and security patch.

whether if LMDE stay on testing or move into stable is out of our discussion. when the decision taken roughly two months ago, LMDE is already on a dire situation, 6 month without UP. the problem get worse when decided to abandon LMDE until jessie becomes stable. the users, especially who doesn't well informed about this situation, got the biggest damage since they ended up with a system with unresolved issue and lot of system vulnerabilities. certainly we can avoid this situation and old LMDE user doesn't have to be the victim.

on an ideal condition when this situation occur, a distro maintainer should minimalize the damage on the user. when mint team decided to move into stable there are several scenario to minimalize the damage to the user. as an example, they could use the most direct route, completely shut off LMDE and tell user to use mint main version until LMDE2 ready. else, there are several other scenario to do it. here's some example.
1. create an intermediary UP as explained above.
2. block access to the iso. tell new user to use mint main version instead. the team can keep the repo so that the old user can access it but they need to make a big announcement that the repo is unmaintained to make old user aware of the situation.
3. allow security updates into LMDE repo so that user can have a safe and reliable system.

obviously they're free to decide which scenario they want. nevertheless, mint team doesn't take neither the direct route nor scenario 2 or 3. the only one way to minimalize the damage on the current LMDE user is providing an intermediary UP between UP8 and betsy. I can understand that mint team want to make betsy as perfect as possible but they need to consider that "the more delay to updates the more damages are taken by user". there's no demand to get new-shiny stuffs. we only want mint team to resolve the damage taken by current LMDE user. as explained above, when the intermediary transition released, LMDE will becomes self-manageable. user will happily get a safe and reliable system and mint team could happily focused on the development of betsy. the user testimony about cinnamon 2.4 on debian testing means that providing intermediary transition isn't that hard. the remained question will be "whether if mint team, as legitimate LMDE maintainer have a concern for his user or not"?

[clem]

the user testimony about cinnamon 2.4 on debian testing means that providing intermediary transition isn't that hard.

You're doing people a disservice by depicting Betsy (i.e. Jessie "current") as being better, more stable and more reliable than LMDE. It certainly isn't.

We don't just maintain LMDE, we also happen to develop Cinnamon. I think we know what we're talking about here.

If we were to open the tap and freeze you yet another UP, sure you'd get updates.. but you'd also see quite a lot of regressions. Think about it like that: LMDE passed QA and release. Betsy is nowhere near achieving that.

You can be productive and talk about real issues (we fix them often, you might have seen updates for Firefox, flash, ssl, bash..etc), or you can continue to throw quantities (10+ months, 400+ issues) and security terms to vehiculate concern amongst peers and give people the idea that LMDE is some abandoned unreliable broken piece of history people can no longer use... to me that looks like FUD though, or if it's not deliberate, like misguided obsession.

There's no question 17.x is ahead right now. What it achieved, no UP can do. Betsy will get much closer to it. But make no mistake, right now and until we (and Debian) are done working on it, LMDE is a much better system than Jessie/Betsy.

Finally, from a technical point of view, note that other than timing and quality there is very little difference between UP9 and Jessie. They're both snapshots of the same release. Don't be eager to get something that isn't ready just before it becomes stable. UP9 would be what exactly? GTK 3.14 with Cinnamon 2.4 without all the fixes? Some broken Jessie missing the final touches Debian fixed just before it moved to Stable? You can already get all that by moving to Jessie/Betsy... and that's alright if that's what you want, but please don't tell everybody else that's what they need, that's just bad advice.

LMDE users will upgrade to Betsy and it WILL be a better system then, when it's ready. It isn't yet though. When that happens we'll be looking at 2+ years. Maya was released in 2012, it stopped getting new features in 2014, got outshined by Qiana and Rebecca since and is stuck with Cinnamon 2.0. Do we look at it as some sort of abandoned-ware? Do we consider removing download links for it? Do you hear us say it's more 10+ months old so let's trash it? Are you kidding me? There are distros out there which roll on bleeding edge (Arch, Debian Unstable), and there are OSes out there which rely on static 3rd party executables so you can always run the absolute latest version of anything you want (Microsoft Windows). People who value bleeding edge and version numbers more than stability, maturity, release management, should of course prefer these distros and operating systems over frozen releases such as Mint and the upcoming LMDE 2. That's not what we're doing though.

I'm sorry you probably don't agree with me on that, but I look at LMDE and Maya with pride, not just as historical/past pride, but actual pride. I'm happy people use them and I consider them good systems. The fact that we released newer versions since does not change that. Similarly, I might be excited when I work on Betsy, but I don't wish or recommend for people to run it. If you tried Cinnamon 2.4 on Jessie and you're happy with it, good for you. You might not fully understand what we do other than developing Cinnamon and using a base and that's ok.. but take my word here, Cinnamon 2.4 is out, Jessie is almost out, Betsy is not ready yet. We've got plans, we want to make that base as good to us as Trusty, we want its quality to raise to the same standard and I really don't care if that takes a few more months or so.

In the meantime LMDE is a good system, its latest release was great. I understand people want new stuff, and it's coming. Until that happens, it just needs to be stable, and I'm pretty sure it is. If there are particular issues that need fixing prior to Betsy, let's talk about them and we'll address them. This isn't a number's game though. We support LMDE, we're proud of it, we're working on its new version and yes it's true.. we're not as concerned as you are that it's 10 months old or that it'll be a year or so when Betsy comes out.

[Distro-Don]

the user testimony about cinnamon 2.4 on debian testing means that providing intermediary transition isn't that hard.

You're doing people a disservice by depicting Betsy (i.e. Jessie "current") as being better, more stable and more reliable than LMDE. It certainly isn't.

You can be productive and talk about real issues (we fix them often, you might have seen updates for Firefox, flash, ssl, bash..etc), or you can continue to throw quantities (10+ months, 400+ issues) and security terms to vehiculate concern amongst peers and give people the idea that LMDE is some abandoned unreliable broken piece of history people can no longer use... to me that looks like FUD though, or if it's not deliberate, like misguided obsession.

In the meantime LMDE is a good system, its latest release was great. I understand people want new stuff, and it's coming. Until that happens, it just needs to be stable, and I'm pretty sure it is. If there are particular issues that need fixing prior to Betsy, let's talk about them and we'll address them. This isn't a number's game though. We support LMDE, we're proud of it, we're working on its new version and yes it's true.. we're not as concerned as you are that it's 10 months old or that it'll be a year or so when Betsy comes out.

I agree 100% and will upgrade to LMDE 2 mate, "When it is Ready".

[reference2myself]

If you want to update to Betsy/Jessie then just do it and quit whining, and don't complain when it's not stable for you. It's not ready yet, so why would they release it with a bunch of bugs? It's not hard to update on your own if you want to play with it in its current state. It's working great for me, but I did have to fix a few things along the way and I'm sure other things will pop up before it's released. If you're not capable of jumping to and maintaining a debian testing or unstable system then don't even bother and just wait for an official update or install another distro. I think the lmde teams decision to move to debian stable will be a very good thing for the distribution. Testing is too unstable for the average user and the update packs I never liked or used because they weren't frequent enough. LMDE 2 will be rock solid and something I could start recommending to anybody. Testing and unstable will always be there for those that want to play with newer stuff and break things.

[kurotsugi]

If there are particular issues that need fixing prior to Betsy, let's talk about them and we'll address them.

as requested :3
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 8&t=162350
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 0&t=181140
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 0&t=161962
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 0&t=183561
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 0&t=181142
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 9&t=161739
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 0&t=183090

these problem comes because the latest UP is too old. there are actually more of them but they already deep buried in this forum. an easy way to solve them did exist. simply give UP9. hal of them will automatically fixed and you can avoid the pain for debugging these problem one by one.

Finally, from a technical point of view, note that other than timing and quality there is very little difference between UP9 and Jessie. They're both snapshots of the same release. Don't be eager to get something that isn't ready just before it becomes stable. UP9 would be what exactly? GTK 3.14 with Cinnamon 2.4 without all the fixes? Some broken Jessie missing the final touches Debian fixed just before it moved to Stable? You can already get all that by moving to Jessie/Betsy... and that's alright if that's what you want, but please don't tell everybody else that's what they need, that's just bad advice.

1627 package updates. 10month develepment gap. both of them are a wide gap regardless how you see it. both UP9 and jessie is both debian testing but jessie is continously evolving. UP9 is 10month late behind current jessie and since you mentioned GTK you should know better the wide differences between UP9 and jessie. like I said before, there's no demand to get all new shiny stuffs. we only want to safely upgrade into testing. that's all. on extreme case, as long as we can upgrade to jessie and both the desktop (MATE and Cinnamon) works that would be enough, and you don't have to upgrade anything in LMDE's native repo (packages.linuxmint.com) unless it really needed. if you don't want to give cinnamon 2.4 that's not problem at all. 1.8? 2.2? 2.4? that's not our concern. our concern is to get a working desktop and we don't care about cinnamon/mate version. some stuff is broken in jessie, yes, but it will get fixed soon. meanwhile, since jessie only accept buf fixing updates, we will able to manager our system without depends on mint team. you seems insisted saying that user can move into jessie from LMDE if they want, well...it's not. http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 20#p952745 this is the latest attempt to move into jessie and he failed to do that.

You can be productive and talk about real issues (we fix them often, you might have seen updates for Firefox, flash, ssl, bash..etc), or you can continue to throw quantities (10+ months, 400+ issues) and security terms to vehiculate concern amongst peers and give people the idea that LMDE is some abandoned unreliable broken piece of history people can no longer use... to me that looks like FUD though, or if it's not deliberate, like misguided obsession.

I hope it's true but this guy said it wasn't http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 0&t=181376 pidgin have a serious security issue and it haven't got fixed on LMDE yet. user might could get _working_ system but he's far from a _safe_ environtment. security updates on LMDE only cover some famous issue but certainly it's nothing compared to 400+ vulnerabilities on LMDE. you should know better that not every LMDE user, or even veteran linux user, know how to check whether if his system have been hacked or not. the 400+ vulnerabilities isn't an imaginary threat. it's real. we should also consider that MINT is a famous distro (still ranked #1 on distrowatch). the fact that LMDE have 400+ vulnerabilities should be well known by hackers and this situation will highly increase the risk of system breach.

I'm not saying LMDE, as a whole distro is bad. it's just that LMDE UP9 is currently bad and user should not use it for their own sake. if you really take a big pride as LMDE maintainer then _please show more concern for LMDE user_. like I've said before, my concern is to minimalize the damage taken by user. intermediary transition is one of the method to do it. you can choose other scenario if you want. other scenario might exist but I can only think this 4 scenario at this moment.

as an example, they could use the most direct route, completely shut off LMDE and tell user to use mint main version until LMDE2 ready. else, there are several other scenario to do it. here's some example.
1. create an intermediary UP as explained above.
2. block access to the iso. tell new user to use mint main version instead. the team can keep the repo so that the old user can access it but they need to make a big announcement that the repo is unmaintained to make old user aware of the situation.
3. allow security updates into LMDE repo so that user can have a safe and reliable system.

while we talk here, new LMDE user is still coming.

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 0&t=181140
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 9&t=183970
http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 9&t=183962

LMDE2 will get released when it ready. sure. I agree with it. there's no meaning to get half baked LMDE2. but, as explained before, there are other thing to be concerned. in case if you've missed it, the reason why I insisted to ask UP9 is "the more delay to updates the more damages are taken by user". on an extreme scenario, you can keep developing betsy for next 10 years so that LMDE2 will be a shiny perfect distro. the _future_ user of LMDE2 will got benefit of that. however, the _current_ LMDE user with his UP9 will get a massive damage from that decision. with the best scenario, jessie will finished on February but there's also bad scenario where jessie released on 2016 or later. we definetely don't want that happened but we need to prepare for that too, don't we? our debate started because in several official statement you insisted to delay system upgrade on LMDE until jessie becomes stable, which is, no one really know when will it happened.

obviously you're free to choose which scenario will be taken to minimalize the damage to user. if you choose the direct route you don't have to provide UP9. UP9 only needed if you prefer to keep current LMDE alive.

lastly, allow me to restate some stuff:

1. my concern is to minimalize the damage taken by user.
2. no demand to get all new shiny stuff. we only want to safely upgrade into current jessie and get a safe and self manageable system. that's all.
3. provide an UP isn't the only solution.
4. you're free to choose which scenario taken to minimalize the damage taken by user.

in case if you accept our demands obviously we don't want to get them tomorrow. if I should personally give a certain range, anytime between December-February or even March is something acceptable. that's quite long time to prepare an UP. faster is better but there's no need to rush for that. nevertheless, we feel that delaying the system upgrade until jessie becomes stable is something unacceptable because _it's not predictable_ and it _could lasted more than a year_.

you might want to avoid doing duplicated job, i.e: work on UP9 then several months later when jessie becomes stable, work on next upgrade to jessie. but you need to consider that the amount of work between UP9 and jessie stable is lot simpler and smaller. in a good scenario you only need to change the repo from debian snapshot to jessie then let all bug fix patch flow to user.

[JosephM]

@kurotsugi I mean no disrespect but I think you're missing the point at least partially. Upgrading LMDE to the current Jessie brings some major issues. Due to the newer GTK version, a number of things are broken. Mint's default gtk and icon themes do not even function properly on Jessie and those things take time to fix. Cinnamon, regardless of version has some issues that need to be worked out. Those are just the things I actually know something about. There are probably more. I assume Debians move to systemd also causes some issues that need to be dealt with. Despite some claims I have seen here that everything works fine moving to the Betsy repos, it simply isn't true.

[Crewp]

I've been wondering how Debian's move to systemd, and Ubuntu's move to Mir would effect Mint? Do you think they are deal breakers for a Mint base?

[py-thon]

Upgrading LMDE to the current Jessie brings some major issues.

That's why kurotsogi suggested (or should I say demanded?) UP9 before the move to Jessie. But I think that's irrelevant by now. People who want a rolling release have already left LMDE and the other users simply don't seem to care. Stability vs. security is a topic that has been discussed here on various occasions. It seems that with LMDE it's not possible to deliver both.

With regard to systemd I can only say that shutdown time has been reduced from 15-20 seconds (LMDE UP 8 Mate 64bit with sysvinit) to 2-3 seconds (Sparky/Debian Jessie Mate 64bit with systemd). Startup time has remained the same (maybe a bit quicker now because of lightdm instead of mdm).

[cb474]

...
You can be productive and talk about real issues (we fix them often, you might have seen updates for Firefox, flash, ssl, bash..etc), or you can continue to throw quantities (10+ months, 400+ issues) and security terms to vehiculate concern amongst peers and give people the idea that LMDE is some abandoned unreliable broken piece of history people can no longer use... to me that looks like FUD though, or if it's not deliberate, like misguided obsession....

...In the meantime LMDE is a good system, its latest release was great. I understand people want new stuff, and it's coming. Until that happens, it just needs to be stable, and I'm pretty sure it is. If there are particular issues that need fixing prior to Betsy, let's talk about them and we'll address them. This isn't a number's game though. We support LMDE, we're proud of it, we're working on its new version and yes it's true.. we're not as concerned as you are that it's 10 months old or that it'll be a year or so when Betsy comes out.

I appreciate that the developers are working to make LMDE Betsy into a good stable release. And I understand that it will be ready when it's ready and that asking for ETAs isn't really fair, in the world of open source development.

I also am really not concerned about having bleeding edge packages (hey, I'm a Mate user, this is hardly the bleeding edge).

But I do worry about security with the current state of LMDE. I know there have been some updates. But other packages, like Chromium, are far behind even Debian stable, which has version 37 of Chromium (and it's on 39 in testing and sid), whereas LMDE is on 31. Is this really secure? There are usually a lot of security and bug fixes in these releases--and browsers are such a large potential risk for security issues. For example, Chromium 31 is vulnerable to the SSLv3 security bug (unless the user takes steps on their own to change how the program launches to block SSLv3). I don't know if their are other examples, with other packages in LMDE, but I do wonder if LMDE in it's current state is really safe to use.

I'm not saying that to complain about the slowness of LMDE development or criticize the developers, I really appreciate their work. I just think that the security question is a legitimate issue for end users. From a security perspective it seems like LMDE is in a sort of limbo state that's not really like an LTS distro (which is stable but gets security updates) and not really like a rolling release (which gets security updates by virtue of having the latest packages).

[Crewp]

I think that's some of what LMDE 2 Betsy is going to address, Being on Debian's stable will give us those fixes.

[cb474]

I think that's some of what LMDE 2 Betsy is going to address, Being on Debian's stable will give us those fixes.

Yes, I understand that. But my point was that in the meantime, which will have been more than a year by the time Betsy comes out, LMDE is left in a limbo state which is really not secure, as far I as can tell. That leaves users in a bad place. I think that's a reasonable cause for concern. Betsy solves the problem in the long term. But in the short term it's just in limbo, as far as security goes, with some packages getting security updates, but not others.

[clem]

I've been wondering how Debian's move to systemd, and Ubuntu's move to Mir would effect Mint? Do you think they are deal breakers for a Mint base?

Very good question. It's hard to predict, but one thing is for sure, using frozen long-term bases gives us more opportunity to deviate and to adapt the base if need be.

Now, on the present situation:

- Mir changed nothing so far. It's not on our radar. We'll reassess Wayland/Mir/Xorg in 2016, who knows what the future will be like? If things stay the same though, we'll continue to use Xorg.
- Systemd ... that's at the heart of one of the big decisions for Betsy. We've been talking a lot with the fork-debian guys. Prior to this we had a few exchanges with maintainers of other distributions and with Lennart P, in particular about that runtime directory collision bug which got us really worried. There's no question systemd is vastly superior to the traditional linear systemvinit we're using, but we're not sure people actually need what it brings, and like other people we're worried about the way it's being developed. If we're pragmatic, considering what happened with Debian and GNOME/GTK3 already, I'd say neither Ubuntu nor Mint have a choice in the matter. Systemd, unless it loses momentum, will become the new face of Linux eventually. The question for us is whether we want to expose Betsy to it already, or whether we want to hold to sysvinit for 2+ years and jump on systemd around 2016. Big big question. I'm hoping we'll know in a month or so... right now that's the one thing we're looking into

[Crewp]

Clem, thanks for the reply. You all have a lot on your plate, but what ever you and team decide I'm looking forward to Betsy.

[gweaver]

..

- Systemd ... that's at the heart of one of the big decisions for Betsy. We've been talking a lot with the fork-debian guys. Prior to this we had a few exchanges with maintainers of other distributions and with Lennart P, in particular about that runtime directory collision bug which got us really worried. There's no question systemd is vastly superior to the traditional linear systemvinit we're using, but we're not sure people actually need what it brings, and like other people we're worried about the way it's being developed. If we're pragmatic, considering what happened with Debian and GNOME/GTK3 already, I'd say neither Ubuntu nor Mint have a choice in the matter. Systemd, unless it loses momentum, will become the new face of Linux eventually. The question for us is whether we want to expose Betsy to it already, or whether we want to hold to sysvinit for 2+ years and jump on systemd around 2016. Big big question. I'm hoping we'll know in a month or so... right now that's the one thing we're looking into

By "fork-debian guys", do you mean Devuan? uselessd? Perhaps you can't say?

The attitude of the systemd developers is worrying, but switching to Devuan (or similar) over Debian as a base would be a drastic move. I'd be concerned that Betsy on Devuan would be left behind by upstream software predominately using/moving to systemd (or requiring systemd compatibility). I could also see it creating a lot of extra work for the Mint developers, though that's your problem, not mine!

For myself (and I suspect many power users and developers) the attraction of Betsy would be having a stable desktop environment that receives a lot of love, allied with the potential for cherry picking some development tools and applications from Debian testing/unstable. Not your target audience, perhaps, but Mint isn't aimed at the system administrators who dislike systemd so much either. Regular users might appreciate the faster boot speeds of systemd, but not at the expense of stability.

I guess the crux of the issue is this: will Betsy be sufficiently stable and reliable if based on systemd? I wonder how the Debian systemd package maintainers intend to deal with bugs such as the one mentioned above?

Or maybe you and some of the other distribution maintainers have been discussing forking systemd and concentrating your efforts on finessing the good parts and removing the superfluous and underdeveloped parts? Now that would be amusing (in a good way), and would make a lot of people happy! Except Red Hat and the systemd team..

Just my 2p worth.. thanks again for all of the hard work

P.S. Maybe you're still smarting from Pulseaudio?!