Re: Bug#684396: ITP: openrc -- alternative boot mechanism that manages the services, startup and shutdown of a host
2012/8/31 John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> The init system is a critical part of the operating system, so we
> shouldn't be messing around with it. Focus on the best solution,
> period.
It's often someone says something similar about many ITPs. I believe noone
should say things like that, unless he wants to scare everybody away and
have Debian forgotten and dead. Saying that you not only reduce the number
of bugs in Debian, but you also reduce the number of people working on
Debian, because when they hear that they just turn around and go away.
If I was an employee of Debian Inc, and I was paid to spend my 40 hours/week
to my company, then you could tell me "don't mess around openrc, focus on
upstart, that's a chief's order" (that may work for RedHat). But Debian
does not pay me, and noone can tell me what to do.
When I come and say "Hey, I want to work on openrc in debian" (replace
"openrc" with any other package), I mean what I say. Most probably I just
like this particular software for some reason. And it usually never means
that I also want to work on upstart/systemd/sysvinit/etc. So when you tell
me "don't mess around it", I won't drop openrc, I'll just drop debian.
You can only politely ask "Please, before continuing to work on openrc,
look at other init systems, maybe you will find there what you need, or
maybe it would be easier for you to implement the features you need in
those systems instead of maintaining a new init system on your own". But
you can't say me what should I do, because I'll just go to Arch/Gentoo,
that are not as hostile.
If we want debian to be a successful and popular distribution, we should
welcome everybody, does not matter what they want to work on. That should
bring more people to debian. And we want more people to work on debian,
don't we? We must help them to work on it, and just hope, that some day
they will also help us to work on our projects too. That's IMHO, of course.
> 95% of the users don't ever interact with the init system directly, so
> there is no point in being able to have a choice
Bad argument. :) 95% of the users don't even know what Linux is (it's just
a kernel, you know) and they certainly don't interact with it directly.
But it does not mean that we can forget about linux and never allow
people to choose it. :)
--
Serge
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