Re: A few observations about systemd
Bernhard R. Link <brlink <at> debian.org> writes:
> * Uoti Urpala <uoti.urpala <at> 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.
I don't see how this applies to what you're replying to. In the discussion with
Wouter I did quite a lot better at addressing factual issues than he did.
> 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
I think you're committing exactly the fallacy I described in the part you
snipped. You think that "excluding" people who want a particular kernel is
significant when it's a "big thing" like a kernel. But _any_ case of not
supporting something can be described as "exclusion". Any time a package is
dropped, Debian is "excluding" the people who want to use that package. Every
time a decision is made not to package something people are being "excluded".
When Debian Linux fails to run on a specific submodel X of hardware Y, people
who use that hardware are "excluded". Any of those cases can affect a much
larger number of people than kFreeBSD support.
If it were possible to support every use case and every piece of hardware then
things would be different. But it is not possible. You have to prioritize
things. And it is exactly the lack of a rational approach to this that I was
criticizing above. When a bug goes unfixed and that prevents a user from
achieving whatever goal he had, that is no better than someone being unable to
achieve what he wanted because kFreeBSD was not available (and in fact I'd say
the latter would typically be less severe, as the typical goal would be just
"play with kFreeBSD for its own sake").
Supporting things like kFreeBSD is a lot of effort to benefit few people. If
it's what a volunteer wants to work on then that is his right. But to insist
that others should work on it is wrong; project-wide priorities should be based
on rational decisions instead. And to compare "support kFreeBSD" and "make Linux
work well for a larger number of people" and claim that kFreeBSD stands more for
"inclusion" is nothing but bullshit rhetoric.
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