Re: A few observations about systemd
On Sun, 2012-02-26 at 17:36 +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> Uoti Urpala <uoti.urpala@pp1.inet.fi> writes:
>
> > I think it's quite arrogant of BSD users to expect others to work to
> > support their systems. The BSD userbase is small enough that most
> > projects have alternative things to work on that help a lot more people
> > than BSD support would. Trying to support extra platforms the
> > maintainers themselves never use does have a real negative effect on the
> > rest of a project.
>
> By that reasonsing we should not support bsd, hurd, mips, arm, ppc,
> ia64, s390 either. Hell lets drop i386 too.
If someone complained about a nontrivial s390-specific problem in a
context where I was upstream, I'd likely ignore him. In the Debian
context, people other than porters should not be obligated to do
significant work to resolve problems specific to fringe architectures,
and neither "we can't, because kFreeBSD" nor "we can't, because s390"
should be accepted as arguments against any significant decision.
However, I don't think it's an accident that this discussion came up in
the context of kFreeBSD. Extra hardware architectures typically require
a lot less effort than extra software platforms. I think it is quite
realistic to support extra hardware architectures without adding undue
burden on people not using them. It's a lot less realistic or reasonable
in the kFreeBSD case.
The kernel already does most of the work abstracting away hardware
differences. If you'd pick your favorite architectures first, and then
argued that Debian should concentrate on a kernel other than Linux
because Linux fails to support your pet architecture, that would be a
different thing.
> Experience has shown that supporting more than just the majority
> architecture has real positive effects too.
It can have positive effects, but it's definitely not "more supported
platforms equals better". There are plenty of cases where extra
compatibility requirements have had major negative effects.
> > It's definitely arrogant for users of other operating systems to try to
> > obstruct people from using better technology on Linux. It's not like
> > there would be anything equaling the quality of systemd that would run
> > on BSD. It's not your place to say that people shouldn't get to use it
> > on Linux, or that Linux users should have to work on BSD support to be
> > allowed to use it now.
>
> It is equaly arrogant to say that people must use it on Linux and screw
> BSD users.
You see no difference between "group A chooses to use what's good for
group A" and "small group B tells group A that they must use what B
prefers"?
There's no obligation for Linux users to keep supporting BSD, any more
than there's an obligation to support Linux kernel version 1, MSWindows
or OS/2. Yes, there are still users asking for OS/2 support too.
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