Re: Proposal - preserve freedom of choice of init systems

[Uoti Urpala <uoti.urpala@pp1.inet.fi>]

On Wed, 2014-03-05 at 00:42 +0000, Sam Kuper wrote:
> On Mar 4, 2014 11:57 PM, "Uoti Urpala" <uoti.urpala@pp1.inet.fi>
> wrote:
> > If systemd "hegemony" becomes a problem, there is a much better
> > open-source answer: fork systemd.
> 
> By saying this, you have outlined the following competing scenarios
> for users for whom systemd is unsuitable...
> 
> (1) Spend time trying to live with systemd. Conclude you can't. Fork
> it. Hack the fork, perhaps extensively, until it becomes suitable for
> your system - by which time it might no longer be very compatible with
> anyone else's.
> 
> (2) Continue using (e.g.) SysV, which you know works.

Sysvinit never worked well. It's become worse since things have become
more dynamic (both underlying kernel and use cases that need to be
supported). That it ever worked even to the extent that it did was
because people spent significant effort to work around its limitations.
You can't expect them to keep doing that.

For many years GCC was the only credible open-source compiler. Even if
you think that the eventual appearance of LLVM as an alternative was a
positive thing, do you really think it would have been a good idea for
Debian to require before that that all packages must work OK if compiled
with some other non-GCC compiler? Or that such a policy would actually
have worked to create multiple credible compiler alternatives sooner?