On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 01:25:12AM +1100, Russell Coker wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Oct 2014, [email protected] wrote:
> > Linux is developed by more people than just Debian Developers, I
> > regularly submit well researched bug fixes to various projects,
> > including the kernels framebuffer code (one of linux's more
> > difficult areas to work in). Very much time is spent on making sure
> > these are well valued contributions. DD's are not the only ones
> > spending time in Linux code.................
>
> Would you like to have a bunch of people who know nothing about
> framebuffer code start telling you what you should be doing?
that's not exactly what's happening with complaints about systemd. a lot
of highly skilled people with many years of experience have written very
detailed technical complaints about systemd and the dangers of software
monoculture that are ignored and patronisingly dismissed with "fuck
off, we know better than you". At best, trivial benefits ("it boots
faster", "you don't need to know about ulimit -c", "you can almost make
it do something similar to what you want with some obscure undocumented
systemdctl argument") are touted as if they're somehow worth the price
of switching from a robust software ecosystem to a software monoculture.
i used to call that the Gnome Attitude Problem[1], but it seems to be a
common attitude with RedHat projects - which is exactly what systemd
is, Redhat's weapon against Ubuntu which they'd lost huge market share
to. Which is precisely why debian should have stayed out of it and not
taken sides in redhat's commercial war with ubuntu....but what happened
was that Debian took RH's side and within days Ubuntu announced their
surrender.
[1] try submitting a bug report to gnome if you want to experience the
joy of being insulted and ridiculed for giving a damn. ditto for systemd.
> What if they start saying that such code should be the subject of a
> democratic vote among people who have never read it?
you can't have it both ways. first you say that systemd won the vote[2]
in debian, so that's reason enough for whingers to STFU. now you're
saying that votes should play no part.
[2] it won the tech committee's vote ONLY because of the chairman's
tie-breaking vote. 50/50 is hardly a ringing endorsement, especially
for a change as radical and controversial as this.
> Changing an init system is not such a big deal.
as has been mentioned many times before, systemd is not just an init
system. if it was just an init system, it wouldn't be a problem -
it would be just another implementation of a component (i.e. init -
sysvinit, upstart, openrc, systemd and others are current options) that
can be replaced without too much fuss or bother.
by merging in dozens of other functions, however, it makes it nearly
impossible to replace systemd (or any part of it) once you've switched
to it.
> We went from BSD style to SysV without any serious problems.
if by "we" you mean "debian", i don't recall debian ever having a
monolithic /etc/rc like freebsd. MCC and SLS and Slackware all had
that, and i remember liking the flexibility offered by sysvinit when i
switched to debian in 1994.
> Ubuntu went to Upstart and it worked reasonably well for them even
> though almost no-one in Debian used it.
yes, switching init should be no big deal. it isn't, right now. that's
because all-but-one of the current init systems aren't designed with
lock-in in mind. switching away from systemd will prove to be a huge
problem in the future.
craig
--
craig sanders <[email protected]>
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