On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 9:54 AM, Michael Torrie <[email protected]> wrote:
> Thought some of you might be interested in this interview with Lennart
> Poettering concerning systemd:
>
> http://www.linuxvoice.com/interview-lennart-poettering/

I disagree that this interview was good.  In my opinion, it was just a
puff piece.
The interviewer didn't call him out on most of his non-answer answers.

Before you call me ignorant, BS'er, or a hater, I am not a systemd
lover or hater.  Lennart has great technical chops, and has
implemented many great ideas into systemd.  It is way better than the
old sysvinit systems.  Though I have concerns with what it is becoming
over time.

The very first question asked about the biggest misconceptions.
Lennart answered with two of them, monolithic and not like UNIX.  He
completely ignored talking about the first one, probably the most
important one.  Then he, seemingly willfully, misunderstood the not
UNIX argument, and went off on a tangent.  What is generally meant by
this argument is that systemd goes against the general UNIX philosophy
of small things that do one thing well working together.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy).   The interviewer did
not call him on it, nor did he ask about the complaint of being
monolithic.

The second question hit on another important topic of systemd doing
way more than what was thought as intended.  Went completely ignored.
The second point in the question was about whether it was driven by
Red Hat.  This small point could have been answered with a single
sentence or two, but turned into a bunch of shade-throwing at
Canonical and Upstart, while talking about the history of Systemd.
Again, the interviewer did not redirect Lennart to the first point.

Third and forth questions were just fawning.  Though it was a bit
interesting to hear about internal Red Hat politics.

Finally in the sixth question he was asked about his feature creep
problem.  Which was ignored for most of the answer.  It wasn't until
toward the end when he just said those are just optional, which is
mostly true, but still somewhat troubling for me.


TL;DR  Not a good interview, mostly a puff piece that lets Lennart
rehash stuff he has already said in blogs, Google+ posts, etc.   A few
interesting points, but not very good overall.

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