Uoti Urpala <[email protected]> writes: > I don't doubt that there exist people for whose needs an existing > sysvinit system can be perfectly adequate. Just like there are people > for whose needs an old 80286 computer is adequate. But I don't think > that contradicts with "is obsolete" or "is a technological dead end".
I encourage you to take a step back and think through what you're trying to accomplish by using phrases like that. Do you expect someone who wants to continue to run sysvinit for the time being to see a statement from you that sysvinit is obsolete or a technological dead end and think "oh, I never considered that, I guess I should stop using it"? In other words, I don't think it matters whether or not those statements are correct because, regardless of whether they are correct, they are not persuasive. Saying that something is obsolete in the free software world is essentially a forecast. Because free software can always form the basis for additional development, it's making a *prediction* that no one is going to use that specific piece of software as a basis for future development or keep it working for new use cases. It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future [1]. Making non-persuasive statements of position like this doesn't come across as participating in a discussion or attempting to find common ground or shared goals. Instead, it provides tribal signaling: you are aligned with the "stop supporting sysvinit" camp and you want everyone else to know that. My position is that those statements are not useful, and indeed are actively harmful, for the following reasons: 1. We're about to hold a vote, which is the formal way in which Debian developers can decide what position they want to take. While persuasive arguments may be useful before a vote, declarations of voting intention are less useful (unless they are an argument for making a change to a proposal). There's no point in voting before we vote. (I don't remember if you are a Debian developer; if not, perhaps your goal is to persuade other people who can vote. However, as mentioned, these sorts of statements are not persuasive to people who disagree with you.) 2. Voting via mailing list post just encourages other people to also vote via mailing list post because they're worried that silence seems like disagreement, and then the thread degrades into a bunch of people stating their (unsurprising and already known) positions, which is both noisy and demoralizing. 3. It's extremely hard to make statements like this without having them come across as implicit, or even explicit, attacks on people who disagree with you. (And you're not currently succeeding at that, IMO.) In my opinion, it is very, very unlikely that anyone is going to come up with a new, insightful, and perceptive argument about init systems that is going to change a bunch of people's minds in the course of a debian-vote thread, given the past six (!!) years of project discussions. We've already heard all the arguments. Many times. This is why the discussion has focused on process and on ensuring the voting options reflect the possible ways forward, rather than on the merits of the positions. [1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/10/20/no-predict/ -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
