Re: Really, ...
Russ Allbery wrote:
> John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> writes:
>
> > Yes, I do accept vocals against systemd, but only if these are actually
> > valid arguments. Because I want software development to be driven on
> > technical merits and not on sympathies against or for certain people
> > neither the stance to reject any modern developments.
>
> Free software is a social activity. The past history of qmail should be
> informative here (or, for that matter, both gcc and glibc, which had to go
> through disruptive forks to sort out long-term issues). One of the
> determiners of the long-term success of a free software project is the
> social skills of the primary maintainers, regardless of their skill as
> software designers.
Systemd does much better than its competitors as a social activity.
Neither OpenRC nor Upstart (with its highly questionable form of
contributor agreement) can match systemd. You shouldn't confuse the
existence of a group of vocal naysayers as the lack of a thriving
community.
> I'm on the side of wanting to support a variety of different choices in
> the archive so that people can experiment and evaluate and choose what
> works best for them.
I question the usefulness of this approach for init systems. Yes,
developers do need a degree of familiarity to evaluate the merits of the
systems. But personalized init systems don't make much sense; everyone
deciding what works "best for *them*" is not a good approach. And when
talking about a larger number of people and how well things work in
their personal use in practice (as opposed to more in-depth technical
evaluation), what matters is largely the amount of effort spent on
polishing the most typical cases. Sysvinit has "worked well" for a
significant number of people; but that's not because it wouldn't suck,
but because a lot of effort has been used to paper over the problems.
> But to the extent that we have to pick winners and
> losers (and, to be clear, I think it's premature to do that for init
> systems),
I think there's already enough evidence to show that systemd is clearly
the best choice. How much more would you expect to have before it would
not be "premature" any more?
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