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Re: Really, ...



Uoti Urpala <uoti.urpala@pp1.inet.fi> writes:
> Russ Allbery wrote:

>> 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.

> Systemd does much better than its competitors as a social activity.
> Neither OpenRC nor Upstart (with its highly questionable form of
> contributor agreement) can match systemd. You shouldn't confuse the
> existence of a group of vocal naysayers as the lack of a thriving
> community.

You've made your opinion quite clear.  Message received.

>> 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.

> I question the usefulness of this approach for init systems.

No one is expecting you to help, so your statement that you don't think
this activity is useful is just noise.  One of the features of free
software is that there is no need to concern onself with the (presumably
billions) of people who *don't* want to work on something.  Only the
people who *do* want to work on something matter, provided that they
include the resources to do the minimum amount of work required to
coordinate this sort of flexibility.

If we were asking everyone maintaining Debian packages to do something
proactive to provide this flexibility, that would be another matter, but
so far that's not been necessary.  The work is largely isolated to those
people who want to work on it, which makes the opinions of people who
don't want to work on it uninteresting.

Even if we all decided that systemd was the one and only one way to go, we
would *still* have to develop init system flexibility in the archive in
order to handle the transition.  So we are *far* from any lost resources
in the effort we're putting into this, and it's completely premature to
pick a winner.

> I think there's already enough evidence to show that systemd is clearly
> the best choice. How much more would you expect to have before it would
> not be "premature" any more?

I don't see any need to have a firm answer to that question at this time.
The point is less about the amount of evidence required and much more
about the fact that there's no reason to make this decision unless and
until we actually need to as a project.  We're not at that point.

At this point, the single most annoying thing about systemd is the people
who are advocating it on debian-devel at every opportunity and seem
incapable of shutting up about it for more than a week, even though the
repeated conversations are both useless to the project as a whole and
don't vary with repetition.

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


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