Peter Nieman wrote:
On 04/11/14 03:53, Jerry Stuckle wrote:On 11/3/2014 8:36 PM, Joel Rees wrote: <snip>I suppose it may be polemic to assert that forking debian and setting upa new community would be labor-intensive, fractious, divisive, and general not a wise use of precious free/libre/open community resources, in short, "dumb".But just the fact there are people who consider systemd to be problematic enough to consider forking Debian should not be ignored.
I very much agree with this sentiment - any good designer should take a high level of negative feedback as a sign to at least take a pause for review. That the systemd proponents have not, is, in itself cause for concern.
I agree it would be labor-intensive, fractious and divisive. However, if the people feel it is that important, I think it would be a wise use of community resources.Forking often makes things worse (classical example: libav) and it should always be the last resort. But when two entirely different "philosophies" exist inside a project and the two parts of a whole start moving in opposite directions and keep doing so for some time it might be a natural and perhaps the only sensible thing to do, and in that case I would call it "dumb" to simply call people suggesting a fork "dumb".
Well said.
In Debian we have two different groups of people with entirely different visions. One that tries to stick to the "traditional" Linux (or Unix) way of doing things and one that tries to create something that I would call a copy of MS Windows, something that the first group ran away from. The latter group is backed by powerful commercial companies and paid developers, which brings the first group into a situation where it increasingly feels compelled to fight in order not to lose what it has learned to love. That's my experience with Debian over the last few years at least.Now, my impression is that some people advocating things like Gnome and systemd here are so much "experts" and concerned with technical details that they fail to see the overall picture and the fundamental differences. They essentially ask the critics (of systemd in this case) to just give in unless they have precise technical problems, in which case they should start coding or at least report these problems because they can all be solved, and in the end everyone can reasonably be expected to be happy. I guess these people would also deny that Gnome is intransparent and that it resembles MS Windows, because everyone can look at the code, after all.But to the user, things look quite different. Even if the user hasn't consciously installed anything like Gnome, he will see that more and more things are happening on his computer that he doesn't want and doesn't understand, and that he has to spend more and more time looking for ways to understand things, disable things and restore the way things were done before, if that is still possible at all. And when he digs deep enough he will often find that the reason why something has changed for the worse is that "it's the Gnome way".
I don't think it's quite accurate to characterize this as a clash between "experts" and "users." There are plenty of "experts" who are dead set against systemd - for reasons of design philosophy and/or impact on the configuration and administration of server-side systems.
So to my mind the fundamental question is if you want to keep control of your computer or if you prefer eye candy and things happening "automagically". And there is no middle way (only "extremist" ones).And to the people who have no problem with the way things are going right now I would say: there's a perfect OS for you already, and it's called Microsoft Windows 7.
Again. Well said. Miles Fidelman -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra