Re: systemd

[Joel Rees <joel.rees@gmail.com>]

On 8/1/12, Tom H <tomh0665@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 8:36 PM, Joel Rees <joel.rees@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 7/30/12, Tom H <tomh0665@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 11:26 AM, Ralf Mardorf
>>> <ralf.mardorf@alice-dsl.net> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I hate pulseaudio, but I could imagine that systemd anyway could have
>>>> some advantages, even if it's from a man (boy) who often takes photos
>>>> from himself in front of a mirror and then publish this snapshots in
>>>> the
>>>> Internet.
>>>
>>> Is there a relationship between taking your own picture in a mirror
>>> and developing software?
>>
>> I, personally, recognize a certain ironic connection, particularly in
>> relation to Poettering. I'll leave it to the list readers who care, to
>> understand or misunderstand what I mean. (Not sure discussing it
>> belongs here, but I can understand why Ralf might want to bring it
>> up.)
>>
>> I don't know what brings Tom H here, but I am becoming more active
>> here precisely because of systemd. Well, that, and SELinux. Too many
>> changes too fast, too many of them shifting from stable techniques
>> known to work in *nix environments to experimental implementations of
>> techniques that are known to be primary underlying factors of many of
>> the technical issues in the monoculture/world-domination OS.
>>
>> I don't, for example, dare try Fedora as an alternative to the ancient
>> Mac OS X on the ancient but still viable iBook that my sister uses to
>> keep in touch with the family. I have absolutely no confidence that I
>> would be able to do the remote administration she needs done every now
>> and then.
>>
>> (Fedora 13 or 14 would still have worked, fwiw.)
>>
>> There are both technical and political issues here that go way beyond
>> the scope of this thread in debian-user, beyond a simple word to the
>> wise:
>>
>> Be very, very careful with systemd.
>
> I have absolutely no idea why I'm subscribed and post to d-u! ;)

That seems odd to me.

> If you have genuine technical reasons for being wary of systemd, fine!

Uh, huh, and that's why I'm offering the heads-up.

> If you have an emotional negative reaction to Lennart Poettering, then
> your "carefulness" is silly.

I notice there is a certain class of politicking where the "Don't be
emotional!" argument gets trotted out really quickly.

Poettering actually seems like he'd be a fun guy to hang around with.
If you're on his side.

> The reiserfs developer's a convicted
> murderer, that didn't make reiserfs technically inferior overnight.
> (Please note that I've never used reiserfs, so I don't care either
> way.)

And the primary vision which guided development of the file system is,
well, no longer able to be applied to the project.

But I've never accused Poettering of being any kind of criminal.
Excessive pride in one's creations and inability to deal with
criticism are personal failings, but they are not crimes. Not
particularly rare, either. (Yeah, I have personal failings, too, and
they do impact my projects.)

Yeah, talking about people tends to draw attention away from technical
issues, which is why I'm biting my tongue here.

The technical issues start out with this problem:

systemd is far too disruptive to have been stuffed into the main
branch of Fedora the way it was. Good engineering would have been to
have set up two concurrent forks of Fedora, to keep reference points
available when working on the integration, and to provide a safety net
when systemd's basic design errors surface.

Concurrent forks are usually not a good idea, but systemd affects
everything. Parallel forks become a necessary evil here, and it will
be the same for any replacement to sysinitv that doesn't try to
maintain a fairly high level of compatibility.

And basic design errors should always be assumed to exist in projects
of this scope, which is one of the big reasons for the parallel work.

That's where the technical problems started, and some of the fallout
has been noted on this list. Lots more can be seen in lots of bugs
that haven't even been triaged yet on Fedora's bugzilla.

And I have other things to do.

--
Joel Rees