Re: Survey answers part 3: systemd is not portable and what this means for our ports
On 07/15/2013 08:07 AM, Josselin Mouette wrote:
Le lundi 15 juillet 2013 à 16:18 +0800, Thomas Goirand a écrit :
If OpenRC goes up to the shape I expect, it will have a huge
advantage over systemd and Upstart: it will not be controversial,
throwing away non-Linux ports, and taking over the whole of the
system. It will just be an improvement, and that's it.
You want some controversy?
I don’t even want to hear about such a piece of junk at the base of
any system under my responsibility.
At least sysvinit/insserv is maintained by competent people.
Which is preferable: software maintained by competent people with an
ideology (or, if you prefer, a design philosophy) which you starkly
disagree with, or software maintained by less- (or even less-than-)
competent people with whose ideology / philosophy you do not disagree?
My personal objections to systemd come down to the fact that I don't
trust its developers /maintainers. Part of that is bleedover from the
fact that I've so far had only poor experiences with pulseaudio (and
have heard several negative reviews of it not purely based on user
experience, mostly summing up to "why did they start a new audio system
from scratch instead of adding the missing capabilities on to JACK?"),
but most of it hangs from the discussion I once read in which Lennart
expressed - and, when objections were raised to it, reiterated - the
desire to eventually drop support for using udev without systemd.
Joining together the overwhelmingly-dominant device-node-management
system with one of several init systems would not only serve to more
effectively lock out the other init systems, but would act as a sizable
additional obstacle to someone down the line who wants to design another
new init system - one which might differ as much in design and interface
from systemd as systemd does from sysvinit, and which might not need to
interface with (or might need a completely different interface to) a
device-management system. The potential to impede further innovation and
improvement in that way, more than any current technical problems or
limitations, is what I find problematic about the idea.
That attitude as a whole, in fact, is the major offputting thing about
the entire systemd-et-al. project(s) from my perspective; it reminds me
of proprietarianism, and a little bit of "embrace, extend, extinguish",
and I very much want to avoid lock-in.
I actually *like* most of what I've read about systemd's capabilities,
performance, and behavior, as compared to at least sysvinit; I'm even
reasonably willing to accept that it's superior to the other alternative
init systems in those regards. I'm just not at all sure that those
improved capabilities, performance, and behavior are enough of a benefit
to be worth the trade-off of being essentially at the mercy of
developers whose philosophies and attitudes I find so strongly
objectionable.
(I get enough of that nowadays with the Mozilla project; I don't need
more of it elsewhere.)
--
The Wanderer
Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.
Every time you let somebody set a limit they start moving it.
- LiveJournal user antonia_tiger
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