Re: hacking your car
Wookey <wookey@wookware.org> writes:
> I've changed all of those bits on my cars at some point, and the fact
> that it was relatively simple to do was, and is, a good thing. I've
> never owned a car with a warranty, and as they only come with one for
> the first few years, they are not that relevant to the majority of
> vehicle ownership.
> Hacking is good. Replaceable parts with vaguely standard, or at least
> discoverable, interfaces is also good. This is just as true in cars as
> it is in computers. PLease don't try to tell us that hackability and
> fixability is bad.
I agree wholeheartedly with Wookey on this. If systemd were actually some
sort of closed black box, I would not want to run it on my systems.
The car analogy is not really that good period, but to go out on a limb
and try to strain it into a vaguely more accurate shape, I think one of
the things that people are concerned about is that sysvinit plus
surrounding infrastructure is an "assemble your own car" kit. We have a
distribution full of auto mechanics, and we're actually really good at
assembling cars, so there's a lot of appeal in that. But some parts of
the kit are pretty questionable, and while a lot of people like stick
shifts, the fact that the kit doesn't even allow for the possibility of an
automatic transmission, let alone any of this new-fangled hybrid stuff, is
getting kind of annoying.
systemd is an unpainted but mostly functional car body and engine that you
can disassemble and reassemble. You can very easily remove the engine,
take apart the drive train, rewire the carborator, and so forth. And it
has support for hybrid power trains (and an automatic transmission). And
all the parts are standardized and work together... *internally*. But it
comes with a few pieces that we previously were providing ourselves when
we built our own car, and it's dubious whether those are really better.
And each time someone points out something that the car is missing, the
systemd folks prefer to add that piece to all future cars in a way that
works according to their vision of the car, as opposed to pointing people
at five or six suppliers who can produce compatible parts.
This analogy still has a ton of problems, but I think it captures a bit
more of the nuance of the situation. When you start from systemd, you are
moving away from the community of practice that had been built up around
the old assemble-your-own-car kit. And some of the parts don't work quite
right, and sometimes one has to go at systemd with a grinder and a saw to
get them to fit back together. But the systemd kit has some Really Neat
Parts, and it was rather inobvious how we were going to fit those into the
world of the old car kit. Also, it's kind of nice to start from a bunch
of parts that all use the same size screwdriver and wrench, have standard
fittings, and don't require a bunch of home-made tools to assemble
properly. (Even if we have some fond memories and a lot of respect for
our wrenchamdriver.)
I won't even attempt to explain upstart in this analogy... I'll leave that
for someone else. :)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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