Re: Really, ...

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> writes:

> Yes, I do accept vocals against systemd, but only if these are actually
> valid arguments. Because I want software development to be driven on
> technical merits and not on sympathies against or for certain people
> neither the stance to reject any modern developments.

Free software is a social activity.  The past history of qmail should be
informative here (or, for that matter, both gcc and glibc, which had to go
through disruptive forks to sort out long-term issues).  One of the
determiners of the long-term success of a free software project is the
social skills of the primary maintainers, regardless of their skill as
software designers.

I'm on the side of wanting to support a variety of different choices in
the archive so that people can experiment and evaluate and choose what
works best for them.  But to the extent that we have to pick winners and
losers (and, to be clear, I think it's premature to do that for init
systems), I for one will always advocate taking social considerations into
account as well as technical considerations.  In the long term, they often
matter more than the initial technical design.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>