Re: Please stop hating on sysvinit (was Re: do packages depend on lexical order or {daily,weekly,monthly} cron jobs?)

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Ondřej Surý <ondrej@sury.org> writes:

> So, just to clarify…  so, it’s ok to hate systemd, but it’s not ok to
> hate sysvinit (spaghetti of shell scripts)?

Personally, I'd be happy if people would just stop hating on any free
software in general.  Even buggy free software is someone's effort,
released into the world hopefully for our benefit.  These conversations
would be so much easier to have if they were framed in terms of costs and
benefits, different use cases, and personal preferences, rather than
making supposedly-objective statements grounded in strong personal
opinions about the merits or worthlessness of some piece of software.

Far, far beyond init systems, I wish we would be less denegrating and
dismissive even of small pieces of software with obvious problems that
people propose packaging.  We can say that something needs various
improvements to make sense to include in Debian without hating on it.
Maybe that sort of positive and thankful attitude would then carry over to
larger and more controversial pieces of software.

(And yes, I wish upstreams would take that same advice, but I know how to
preach to this audience and have less ability to preach to other
audiences, so....)

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>