Re: Being part of a community and behaving
Florian Lohoff <f@zz.de> writes:
> I meanwhile see the systemd issue as a social problem within
> debian. There are design issues which are REALLY controversial. In the
> past Debian did good by delaying adoption of controversial technical
> issues e.g. devfs and waited in a conservative way until dust settled
> and there was roughly a consensus.
We waited two years, during which positions hardened, people got angrier
and angrier, and there were increasing demands to force the issue.
Serious question: how much longer were we realistically going to wait with
zero sign of forward progress?
What do you think we should have done instead? debian-devel was becoming
the standing debian-canonical-is-evil vs. debian-systemd-sucks standing
flamewar. (I think people are already forgetting the whole Canonical is
evil flamewar that was happening at the same time, with the same degree of
vitriol that is now being levelled at systemd.) Tons of influential,
respected project members were requesting that the TC make some sort of
decision. There was widespread relief at the time that we were just going
to pick something and be done with it.
That didn't happen, obviously. But don't lose sight of the fact that we
were already in a really bad place.
> This has changed - Debian has changed.
> It seems we need to rush in all interesting stuff without looking
> forward past some months - Today systemd might be THE solution to some
> peoples problems. Is it tomorrow? I doubt it.
If you think waiting two years to make a decision is rushing matters, I'm
not sure what your idea of moving slowly is.
I think people have an idealistic notion here that consensus will always
emerge eventually, and it's easy at this point in the process to
sugar-coat the past and forget how bad it was. Please, make a concerted
effort to put yourself into the mindset the project was in during the fall
of 2013. It's always easy to see, in hindsight, the cost of the option
that was taken; it's harder to see the cost of the option that was not
taken.
Personally, I strongly suspect that we could have waited until 2020 and
there still wouldn't be any consensus. And that has its own risk.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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