Re: [Lennart Poettering] Re: A few observations about systemd
On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 01:12:33PM +0000, Uoti Urpala wrote:
> Wouter Verhelst <wouter <at> debian.org> writes:
> > On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 11:05:56PM +0000, Uoti Urpala wrote:
> > > I think the important question is whether portability to other kernels is or
> > > should be a "project's goal", and how much else you're willing to lose for
> > > the sake of that goal.
> >
> > Debian/kFreeBSD is here to stay, it's not going away. With that as a given,
> > systemd is suddenly a lot less interesting.
>
> Once you stop taking things as a given there are a lot more opportunities for
> improvement.
kFreeBSD is hardly the only reason why systemd is a bad idea for Debian.
> If you want to do whatever work is necessary to keep kFreeBSD working that's
> fine of course. But the attitude that it's OK for kFreeBSD to set limits on
> Linux development (or that developers working on Linux must handle the BSD
> porting/compatibility to be "permitted" to adopt a new technology) smells of
> trying to hold the project hostage, and I doubt it can have positive effects
> for the project overall.
There's nothing wrong with requiring portability.
> IMO letting kFreeBSD block a technology like systemd (or even letting it have
> a significant impact on the discussion about whether it's desirable to
> introduce the technology for the main Linux case) would only be justifiable
> if there were very solid arguments why kFreeBSD is a big net win for the
> project, or after a vote showing significant support for the port.
IMAO, a statement of (paraphrased) 'portability is for weenies' isn't
doing any of us a favor. Systemd might've been nice if it was portable
to other kernels; the fact that it isn't, makes it less than useful for
Debian.
This would have been okay if upstream would be ready to accept patches.
But apparently he's not even willing to consider the possibility of
doing so. Yuck.
> > Whatever its features, if we have to jump through a large heap of hoops
> > to get it to work at all, or to make life for maintainers of daemon
> > packages not a complete nightmare, it's not likely to become the default
> > in Debian any time soon.
>
> I think the life of many maintainers of daemon packages is a "complete
> nightmare" now with sysvinit, compared to what it would be with systemd.
It's of course your prerogative to have that opinion, but (as a
maintainer of a source package that ships two initscripts) I disagree
with it. Especially since I doubt that supporting NBD exports with
systemd is going to be possible, at all, given what I know about it.
At any rate, if we need to support more than one init system just so
that Debian continues to work on more than just Linux, then Something Is
Very Wrong(tm).
--
The volume of a pizza of thickness a and radius z can be described by
the following formula:
pi zz a
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