Re: Perfect Jessie is something like this...
Le Tue, 04 Nov 2014 15:22:32 +0100,
Peter Nieman <gmane-acct@t-online.de> a écrit :
> 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 up a 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 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".
That probably the only part of your mail that I'll agree with you.
Using the threat of forking to make people change their mind or change
a policy that has been decided by the project (the CTTE has been
delegated by the project the power to take such decisions) is bad. If
you want to fork just do it, do not send 100 mails to ML's, fork and
start working.
It's free software after all.
> 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.
Not sure what you are implying here. That people that are supporting
systemd are somehow related to Red Hat or that they want to transform
Debian into a MS/Windows clone?
Having unified plumbing across distribution is good, it reduces the
maintenance burden, it allows to leverage other people work and
knowledge. I don't really see where the problem is.
> 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".
The change of initsystem has nothing to do with GNOME (even if GNOME is
using some features extensively). systemd (or upstart) is solving long
standing issues regarding starting of daemon (clean environment,
selinux context, loginuid attribute or prevents other stuff that can
leak from the user session) and daemon life cycle management (being
sure that when a service is stopped all the processes are effectively
stopped). Then systemd add other features like private /tmp directory
using namespace or socket activation. All of these features are for
servers, again nothing to do with GNOME. AND in addition to these, it
gives DE an unique API to interact with the power state of the machine
(inhibition, notification about power state changes,...) and user
session management via logind.
> 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).
I fail to see how you are loosing control of your computer as systemd
provides more logging and more information about the state of the
services running on your machine. Without talking about the descriptive
language used to describe to .service file.
> 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.
Not too sure what to answer to that. Maybe that again systemd is a
project decision and that if you are not happy with it you are free to
fork or use another distribution?
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