Debian community splits over systemd, but fork still unlikely

"When I saw the [website], I honestly thought it was parody," he told Network World. "Forking a distribution is a *lot* of work and is more involved than just creating new packages."

Bacon said that, beyond the technical aspects, there are huge issues of recruitment and general management to address.

"It involves creating an entirely new community, building trust, building a developer base, deploying infrastructure, managing governance and process, and much more," he said.

It should be noted, in the interest of fairness, that the people behind the debianfork.org site have stated that a fork of Debian isn't their preferred solution to the issue, either they state that they would rather have the older sysvinit remain as the default, with systemd merely optional.

For his part, Bacon also stated that it's crucial for Debian to consider all the angles in making a decision on systemd.