Re: Survey answers part 3: systemd is not portable and what this means for our ports
David Kalnischkies <kalnischkies@gmail.com> writes:
> Of course, both analysis are obviously flawed as this popcon data can't
> really be interpreted that way as its an apple to banana comparison and
> way too few datapoints, but everyone likes misinterpret statistics as
> "proven" by this thread – and statistics say that I am a pro-faker!
> "I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself."
> -- Winston Churchill
[...]
> P.S.: Everyone who is now trying to disprove my "facts" has missed the
> point.
Yes, exactly.
The point is that none of this really means very much at this point, for a
whole bunch of reasons. Ways to use non-sysvinit init systems are not
widely publicized, neither upstart nor systemd are (yet) that widely
supported, and both are quite firmly "experimental" configurations at this
point. There's nothing *wrong* with that; it just means that if you're
trying to use popcon as a democratic vote on which one people like better,
there's simply no data there.
We're still very much in the "installing things to try them out" stage.
For example, as soon as I get my new laptop back from servicing, the
systemd numbers will go up by one, because I want to try running it for a
while so that my opinions are based on facts and so that I can start
adding systemd unit files to some of my packages. I don't have the same
level of need to do so for upstart because I can see upstart on Ubuntu
boxes, although I'm looking around for a good system to run with upstart
for a while as well for similar reasons. None of those really constitute
user choices or votes or whatnot for that particular init system.
I would *hope* a lot of Debian developers would do things like that, for
any of the options! There's no substitute for actually trying the
software and seeing how easy it is to use, how well it works, and how
difficult it is to support. There are a bunch of good reasons to install
packages, even if one isn't going to use them regularly. Among other
things, it's often the easiest way to read the documentation so that one
knows what people are even talking about!
Maybe at some point in the future when whatever options we've converged on
have been widely publicized and everyone knows how to switch and test and
whatnot we might be able to gauge something about levels of interest from
popcon. But it's going to be a while before we're at that point.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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