Re: Really, ...
On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 03:34:08PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> 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.
Correct. But if it means when a minority of people have a vastly
different opinion on a certain matter and this opinion means extra
work and redundancies, I think this is something that should not be
persued.
> 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.
Well, the choice of init system can have a huge impact on lots of
packages. If we decide to use either systemd or upstart by default,
we should ship all daemons with the appropriate unit/upstart files to
make the most of these sysvinit replacements.
> 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.
As far as I know, at least ArchLinux and Fedora already made the full
transition. According to a befriended Arch user I talked to today,
their old rc system is completely defunct now.
> > 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.
Well, on the other hand, it's not a good thing to postpone this
decision forever. Mandriva, openSuSE, Fedora, Arch, Frugalware and
Mageia already made the full transition while we're still arguing over
it.
systemd also has by far more contributors than any other init system,
so I think it's a sane decision to adopt the system which has the
highest popularity and momentum. This will guarantee that *most* of
our users will be happy (we can't satisfy everyone anyway) and the
upstream code will always be maintained.
> 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.
And for me, the most annoying thing is the neverending circlejerk of
systemd bashing on a non-technical basis. If anyone of these people
would really take the time to read into the design rationales of the
available init systems (upstart, systemd, sysvinit, openrc), look at
the popularity and the amount of contributors, the decision would be
far easier to make.
Adrian
--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' : Debian Developer - glaubitz@debian.org
`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
`- GPG: 62FF 8A75 84E0 2956 9546 0006 7426 3B37 F5B5 F913
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