Why is Gentoo not switching to systemd?

Shamus397 · Apprentice Joined: 03 Apr 2005 Posts: 218 Location: Ur-th

In terms of understanding how the other side thinks, this post by one of the Gnome developers pretty much sums up their thinking (under the section "Aggressive anti-advocacy").

The most telling ones are the bullet points labelled "Failure to provide any realistic alternatives", "Lack of understanding that systemd is providing things which are wanted", and "Lack of understanding that systemd is focussed to adding additional wanted functionality". As long as this kind of mentality reigns supreme (at least in Gnome) you will never reach these guys. Is it possible to persuade these guys that they are likely wrong? Maybe. It might be worth a shot, and using those bullet points as a guideline to knowing what the thought processes are behind the decision would go a long way towards opening up a dialog.

There are a couple of really great comments near the end of that post; even so, I was disappointed that I couldn't slip Systemd: Biggest Fallacies and Demystifying Init into a comment (as commenting on that post is closed).

BTW, also found this post in Felipe Contreras' blog to be quite enlightening on the character of Lennart Poettering.

steveL · Posted: Sun Oct 19, 2014 4:09 pm Post subject:

miket · Posted: Mon Oct 20, 2014 1:07 pm Post subject:

Now, following hard on the heels of a discussion about forking in daemons comes one about forking in Debian. I saw this on Slashdot just now: http://debianfork.org/

Sulman · n00b Joined: 15 Feb 2014 Posts: 63

avx · Advocate Joined: 21 Jun 2004 Posts: 2152

And instead of talking to debianfork.org people, here's the satire: http://forkfedora.org

They really know how to piss of the people they'd like to join in...
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mv · Watchman Joined: 20 Apr 2005 Posts: 6747

avx · Advocate Joined: 21 Jun 2004 Posts: 2152

Oh boy, those guys are starting to get funny.

Reply from someone on a post of mine on reddit:

Sulman · n00b Joined: 15 Feb 2014 Posts: 63

baaann · Guru Joined: 23 Jan 2006 Posts: 558 Location: uk

Thought Martin Gräßlin gives a very fair and clear description of KWin's future requirements on his blog

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2014/10/libinput-integration-in-kwinwayland/

creaker · l33t Joined: 14 Jul 2012 Posts: 651

djdunn · l33t Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 810

steveL · Posted: Mon Oct 20, 2014 6:29 pm Post subject:

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Mon Oct 20, 2014 7:42 pm Post subject:

steveL · Posted: Mon Oct 20, 2014 9:23 pm Post subject:

mrsteven · Veteran Joined: 04 Jul 2003 Posts: 1938

Now EMACS has got a web browser before systemd. Maybe we should consider using EMACS instead of systemd as an init system because it has more super-duper features which are absolutely needed in an init system. To bad it still does not do binary logging - a real show-stopper for me... :wink:

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Unix philosophy: "Do one thing and do it well."
systemd: "Do everything and do it wrong."

avx · Advocate Joined: 21 Jun 2004 Posts: 2152

Just leaving this here: http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/
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djdunn · l33t Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 810

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2014 9:54 am Post subject:

Interesting read and the whole "debate thing" has gotten old, at least to me,
and one of the reasons that I don't participate much in them other than a few posts like this.

But I do like the last couple of paragraphs

saellaven · l33t Joined: 23 Jul 2006 Posts: 646

For as much as he rattles on about the endless politics and nobody wanting to talk about the facts, he pretty much ignores any facts himself and just rattles off his own opinions, which, at least from my perspective in the "systemd is fine for those that want to use it, just don't force me to use it" camp, which he exclusively refers to as systemd opponents. He's utterly oblivious to many of our arguments, continues the false dichotomy presented by the systemd proponents, again presents false dichotomies of his own (you either believe that RH has singlehandedly taken over every governing body of every distro, "as amusing as it sounds," or it's just simple political posturing and RH doesn't have any involvement - you know, ignoring that they're paying the GNOME developers and others to integrate it, forcing distros hands without taking over those distros politically).

In short, IMO, he's the author of uselessd, so he obviously finds parts of systemd interesting and useful, and thus, feels the need to justify systemd even if he disagrees with how systemd was developed, pushed and maintained. That gives him a subconscious incentive to pull punches on systemd instead of actually listening to the technical arguments made against it. He dismisses us and equivocates away our arguments by saying it's just petty politics, cheerleading, emotion and nobody on either side knows what they're talking about.

Yep, the debate is old and stale... absolutely beyond tiresome at this point. But is has become so precisely because of the politicking, the people that don't actually care about the technical matters, the people that care about the technical matters but are too inexperienced or egotistical to see why maybe their ideas aren't the best approach, and the endless drumbeat of people wanting to force their opinions on others without any regard for what those others might think, how their usage needs may be different, etc.

I just want to be left alone and I don't want people deliberately breaking long existing software and then telling me it's my job to fix it again (despite the fact that those fixes won't be accepted upstream). To some, that's apparently to much to ask.

steveL · Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2014 6:46 pm Post subject:

What saellaven said sums up what I thought of that article, too; I just couldn't be bothered to write it up so well ;)

All I'd add is, apart from expecting everyone else to fork projects they've subsumed, instead of just using them, they also expect us to use completely broken design ideas throughout the OS, as well as on the desktop, where they remain broken designs.

I don't care how many nubskulls collaborated to come up with the wacky ideas, they're still crap.

I'm sure they had a fun time doing so, but it's time to move on. If you can't see the flaws, or you don't care, nor do I. The rest of us will get round to correcting this crapfest when we can be bothered. Principally that will consist of a "radical new philosophy" of "delete that sh1t!"

tld · Veteran Joined: 09 Dec 2003 Posts: 1816

I love this comment on the soylentnews.org post regarding that uslessd post above:

http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=4493&cid=108820

He really nails it.

Tom

steveL · Posted: Thu Oct 23, 2014 12:40 am Post subject:

mv · Watchman Joined: 20 Apr 2005 Posts: 6747

Just for the record: The perl question I posed above is solved and has been tested.
Although it still appears somewhat hackish, the only problem is lacking "official" support in perl: It only needs to be raised to a documented solution. (But this is only perl- and not systemd-related.)

So I confirm now - in this case which at a first glance seemed to be one of the hardest to avoid - that it is absolutely possible to write code which does not depend on an init system, even if socket-based activation and other apparent "features" of systemd are used: All dependencies you see in programs have only political and no technical reasons.