Re: [Lennart Poettering] Re: A few observations about systemd
* Uoti Urpala <uoti.urpala@pp1.inet.fi> [110719 23:31]:
> Wouter Verhelst <wouter <at> debian.org> writes:
> > Debian is the 'Universal' operating system, and many of our developers
> > (including myself) pride themselves on that. We port to many
> > architectures, we port to multiple kernels. It's one of the defining
> > features of Debian: you can run it /anywhere/
>
> This is an almost religious argument. You take the value of running on multiple
> kernels as an article of faith, with no evaluation of the benefits (either to
> people directly using such ports, or possible feedback to the main
> distribution). It's hard to make rational arguments against such a position,
> other than to note that the position is irrational and causes practical harm
> where it interferes with rational decisions.
If you do not address the issues, but try to reduce arguments to
something almost absurd then of course you will have problems to refute
things.
Universal is not so much about choice of kernels. It's about not
excluding people. Saying "This is no problem for 95% of people, why care
about the rest if it makes things harder for such a vast majority" might
sound reasonable if not thinking about it. Of course such decisions will
often not be independent, but in that case 14 such decisions would
already be enough to rule out over more than half the people.
We should care about niches or minorities, if only because every single
person in earth is in some niche or part of some minority. Noone if
mayority in every single aspect.
Please understand that a "You are all doing it wrong since ever,
everything you know shall no longer have any value, I know how things
should be done instead and I do not even care about the big obvious cases
where this no longer works" will not become sounding better to people by
claiming that the obvious victims have no value and should not exist
anyway.
Bernhard R. Link
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