Re: Survey answers part 3: systemd is not portable and what this means for our ports
brian m. carlson wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 02:59:20AM +0300, Uoti Urpala wrote:
> > Whether your argument was honest or not, I think it was a bad one. OK,
> > perhaps you have concerns about the philosophy behind systemd and where
> > that might take it in the future. Such "philosophy" issues are rather
> > subjective. But your argument objectively fails at the "... and
> > therefore moving to systemd may not be the right choice" part. Your
> > concerns, even if taken seriously, do justify such a conclusion. If
> > systemd development goes in a direction you don't like, the rational
> > answer is to fork it and do better if you can. Leaving Debian behind
> > with an inferior init system is not an answer to your concerns.
>
> Since Debian is always in need of developers and volunteers, it isn't
> objectively reasonable to expect that forking a project will be
> possible. One thing that needs to be taken into consideration is the
> *likelihood* that upstream will take development in an undesirable
> direction, or in a direction that is not acceptable for Debian.
If you don't do development, and nobody sharing your views does either,
then there's a limit to the extent you can choose your direction just by
refusing to follow those that do develop things further. You can't stick
with Minix forever even if you think the direction of Linux is
undesirable.
Suppose that in the future systemd does go in a direction you don't
like. Now would it have done any good for Debian to not adopt it? Not
really, if nobody develops a competitive alternative to its
functionality. Not using it would only make Debian obsolete for most use
cases. And the most realistic way to create a competitive alternative
going in a different direction would be to fork systemd, so adopting
current systemd would not make moving to such alternatives harder.
> For example, if an upstream expresses disinterest in supporting non-PC
> architectures, that may be a bad piece of software for Debian to place
> in an important role, even if it currently works on all our
> architectures, since Debian is very portable among different
> architectures.
Of course, this isn't relevant to systemd, as it has no hardware-
specific code and supports embedded platforms for which Debian is too
bloated.
IMO being portable should not be considered a positive thing by itself.
Being suited to a lot of use cases is positive, but that could be
achieved by either porting to more platforms or supporting more use
cases on the same platform. Assuming X.Org had supported x86 platforms
only and supporting multiple X servers in Debian had not been realistic,
do you think Debian should have kept using XFree86 on every platform
rather than move to X.Org and drop support for X on non-x86?
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