Bug#727708: multiple init systems - formal resolution proposal - Don't like software, don't use it. Absolutely.
2014-01-30 Thorsten Glaser <tg@mirbsd.de>:
> Matthias Klumpp dixit:
>
>>2014-01-30 ChaosEsque Team <chaosesqueteam@yahoo.com>:
>>> [bullshit]
>
> This was actually *not* bullshit. The delivery of most of the
> content could use some polishing, but the content is a(n inconvenient)
> truth.
>
>>Wasn't there some kind of a ban applied here?
>
> Apparently not, but it’s better that way, as the reasoning
> was something along the lines of the messages being off-topic,
> which they are clearly not, so I believe the ban to be in
> error, anyway.
First of all, I am sorry for leaking information and this rather rude
reply - won't happen again. I was just very annoyed yesterday, but a
more polite reply would still have been better (although I still think
the arguments weren't valid)
On thing about the whole "dropping GNOME" and "punishing Lennart/the
systemd team for pushing innovations without caring for how it was
done prevously":
What would be the effecr if we decided to drop GNOME, because it
depends on systemd?
Of course, Debian would have played with it's muscles, but in the end
we would have lost GNOME users, all GNOME developers and many
motivated people involved in taking care of GNOME. GNOME upstream
won't really change, because they test the with-systemd codepath,
which means they are running it. So we would have a great loss without
any gain.
What would happen if we adopted systemd?
We could keep every software running as-it-is on Debian. People would
not notice any issues, because (except for some bugs pending to be
fixed, and the migration phase) a systemd-system does not break
anything for Linux users (ask Arch, Fedora, OpenSUSE, ...). Of course,
there is the kFreeBSD case. But instead of porting away each and every
software from systemd to $other_init, in case of kFreeBSD we would
"just" have to maintain portability patches for applications which
want to run on this architecture. So, less work. For users of
alternative kernels, they could also use sysvinit or anything else,
because existing scripts won't stop working and new ones can be
written which match the underlying alternative kernel (sysvinit is
running on kFreeBSD due to some hacks to make /proc Linux-ish, so this
kind of adaption is already happening).
If we would drop systemd or anything which Lennart created, we would
reject functionality without any technical reason to do so. The
software written by Lennart fixes issues. That's why Wayland uses it
and an X patch is pending, to make some new scenarios with X possible.
People working on these projects are no idiots who add a dependency
"because they can", but because it seems to be the best solution in
order to fix a problem for them. Of course, that could - in theory -
be done differently, but nobody stepped up to write an alternative to
systemd services, so systemd is used.
Not using systemd fixes *none* of the problems, but results in much
more work in future to make stuff work on Debian - so I don't really
consider this to be a viable solution to anything.
All of the above applies to upstart as well, but with the limitation
that in case of using upstart we would still have to make upstart
support systemd features and to carry additional patches to make all
systemd services work well on that system.
In the end: Dropping GNOME or systemd does not fix issues but is only
hiding problems. Ignoring things written by the systemd people which
are adopted by many upstream projects already will harm Debian more
then simply adding them and making them work great (because that's
what distributions should do: make upstream software work well
together), no matter if systemd is running as init or not.
Phew, waaay to much text...
Cheers,
Matthias
--
I welcome VSRE emails. See http://vsre.info/
Reply to: