Bug#727708: init system other points, and conclusion
On Mon, 2013-12-30 at 18:58 +0000, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Also, I get the impression me that the "integration" of much of this
> functionality into the systemd source package has been done for
> political rather than technical reasons. Indeed to the extent that
> there is a problematically tight technical coupling between these
> components, I find it difficult to avoid doubting the good faith of
> the people making those decisions. At the very least, I worry that
> the systemd project as a whole is far too willing to impose decisions
> of all kinds on its downstreams.
Your own expressed preference for upstart appeared to be very much
driven by political rather than technical considerations. Using the same
terminology you do, would it not be entirely fair to say that your
decision to support upstart was made in bad faith?
> > 3.3. Project Momentum
>
> I don't see the outlook here the same way as you do.
>
> Furthermore, I am much less worried about Debian going it alone
> (although, of course, it's not alone) than you seem to be. We have
> historically been entirely unafraid to do our own better things, even
> if it is more work and takes us longer.
>
> I felt that way when Debian was very much a minority interest. That's
> far from the case nowadays; I've heard it asserted that Debian-based
> distros now account for a majority of traditional distro installs. I
> guess numbers on that are all speculative but it is certainly true
> that we have a thriving ecosystem of our own.
>
> We have got where we are by doing things the way we think is best, not
> by simply following the herd.
Who would actually do the work? Getting the amount of development there
is for systemd is not easy. Do you really believe that a Debian decision
in favor of upstart would create that many interested developers working
on it, when that has not happened while it's been used in Ubuntu?
Working on things that they believe to be better than existing ones does
motivate people. But how many Debian developers actually share your
extreme views about portability to the extent that they would be happy
to work on another system motivated by that, when systemd already works
better on Linux? I doubt that group is large enough to create
significant momentum.
Reply to: