New Group Calls For Boycotting Systemd

[Karl Napf]

People have been trying to replace UNIX with Windows back then, too. It does not mean much.

No, it just makes it clear that your statement that sysvinit was always good enough is wrong. It is not good enough for about 20 years now.

And if you think it was messy in the 90s then you took your sweet time to come forward.

I never said that I was bothered by the init scripts. For the most part I just used to use the scripts that came with the distribution and cursed them when they broke in interesting ways:-)

I also used to run with a couple of different init systems for a while. Since they tended to use exactly the same mess of start/stop scripts it was generally not worth bothering with them though, so I tended to come back to the default init system.

And how can you be so convinced of systemd being better in the short time it exists? You cannot, right?

Why would I not be able to develop an informed opinion in the years that systemd is around?

So I am going to assume that you only did not like sysvinit for personal reasons and now enjoy systemd like most people do when they get a new broom.

I tend to not become personally involved with basic infrastructure like an init system.

Systemd is the default in arch for a year (or two? Don't remember) by now. That broom is getting pretty old by now. It still is so much better in than sysvinit used to be.

And please do not get me wrong. I do not want to simply dismiss your comment. I only find it much harder to do the same with all the people who have given many good reasons why they think systemd is bad.

I guess we do agree with our evaluation of the reasons given for and against systemd.

I do find Lennart's blog posts way more reasonable than the couple of opponents that mostly shout "unix philosophy", meander into arguments that I know to be wrong ever since I bothered to check out the systemd code, and then run off sulking.

The shit storm systemd has caused is very real.

Most of the "important" people in the open source community -- those that actually produce or package code -- are in the systemd camp by now, too. Gnome and KDE both depend on bits and pieces of systemd. So does wayland. All major distributions are either shipping or planing to ship systemd as their default init system. Systemd is by far more actively developed as all the alternatives together (based on number of commits per month). Nobody seriously bothers to make the interesting non-PID1 pieces of systemd available for other init systems (even though that would help with e.g. gnome on the BSDs, too).

To get Debian to do a general resolution on whether systemd should be used or not would have taken less than 10 Debian developers (I think it is 6 or 7, but am not 100% sure) to request such an resolution. The systemd opponents did not manage to mobilize even these few votes -- much to my surprise by the way. So obviously there are just a handful of people that somehow manage to raise a huge fuss.

There is no shit storm, just a tempest in a teapot.

[TheBlackCat]

To get Debian to do a general resolution on whether systemd should be used or not would have taken less than 10 Debian developers (I think it is 6 or 7, but am not 100% sure) to request such an resolution. The systemd opponents did not manage to mobilize even these few votes -- much to my surprise by the way. So obviously there are just a handful of people that somehow manage to raise a huge fuss.

openSUSE recently had a poll on whether to support alternatives to systemd. The poll was fairly vague, but despite the fact that you would expect people who want a change to be more motivated to vote, a majority of voters voted not to support alternatives.

[sdack]

There is no shit storm, just a tempest in a teapot.

I am not going to read any of your sentence-by-sentence defying nonsense. Learn to read comments as a whole and then respond.

Your attitude only works when you are the older and wiser of two brothers and your little brother is annoying you. Then it is ok to be a "douche" to your little brother and to show how you little you care, but it does not have the same effect when you try to do the same to a lot of people of different ages on a public forum. To some will you only look stupid.

[Karl Napf]

I am not going to read any of your sentence-by-sentence defying nonsense. Learn to read comments as a whole and then respond.

I hardly ever use forums and basically follow the communication patterns that worked well in decades of mailing list communications. Sorry if those offend you, that was not my intention.

[sdack]

I hardly ever use forums and basically follow the communication patterns that worked well in decades of mailing list communications. Sorry if those offend you, that was not my intention.

No, it does not offend me. I am also not offended by systemd. It is now a hard component in Debian and trying to remove it leaves one currently with a broken system. I am sure this will get resolved, but I might actually follow the protest and switch to a new distro even when it is just for my computer at home. People have the right to protest, they should be heard and their concerns resolved and not be dismissed as a "tempest in a teapot", don't you agree?

[interested]

I have to decide if you're a pathological liar or a moron. Nice attempt to rewrite history, maybe someone who has just started to use linux will believe you. Pulseaudio only started to work after Poettering abandoned it, it rewrites the sound system, it breaks Jack and many apps that talked to alsa, and it is still an unstable piece of code. The first versions were so bad that they broke almost everywhere, and worked only with a couple of soundboards. Too bad linux went with alsa instead of OSS4 for licensing issues, but plain alsa is still superior to that resource hog pulseaudio. If anyone is using rose tinted glasses, it is you.

If the first versions of PulseAudio only worked with "with a couple of soundboards", it really shows that the problems was Alsa and sound driver problems, not a general problem with PulseAudio, just like I said.

It never broke Jack (how could it), but it is true that you manually had to disable PA when using Jack for a while. For a long time PA will now just swap out to the background when a program needs Jack. It was hardly a mainstream problem, since Jack users were few, and those who needed Jack, probably knew what they were doing.

As I said, not only did PulseAudio provide Linux with a system wide sounds daemon, which was beyond extremely hard to do at that time, but it also cleaned up Alsa, and helped with debugging sound chip kernel drivers.

The problem was that until PA came around, sound simply sucked on Linux. You really had to be careful about what sound card /sound chip you used and many drivers were really buggy.

Lennart's PA was a major factor in getting sound right on Linux, which is exactly why all major distros embraced it so fast. Even Slackware used PA before PA reached 1.0.

100.000's of Linux users have used PA since its inception, if it really was so broken and dysfunctional, why did the users and distros keep using it? The problem with the PA haters are they confuse their own individual system problems, with Linux wide problems. Just because your sound chip had buggy drivers, or you used a distro with a broken PA implementation ( like early Ubuntu), doesn't mean the PA was broken.

PA solved a really hard problem, which is why no one had successfully made one before, and why, if anybody tries to write a PA replacement, they will basically just build on top of the pioneering work PA did by defining a "safe" Alsa subset and debugging the hell out of it.

Lennart Poettering isn't just a very bright and good programmer (many are), but a most excellent software engineer that attacks hard problems with smart plans, and execute those plans brilliantly. This is why his software is so successful.

[TheBlackCat]

People have the right to protest, they should be heard and their concerns resolved and not be dismissed as a "tempest in a teapot", don't you agree?

People should be heard, and they have been. But whether their concerns should be resolved depends on how valid those concerns are, the overall effect resolving those concerns will have on the project and community as a whole, and whether there is anyone who cares enough to put in the work to resolve the concerns. Lots of people have lots of concerns about lots of random issues with various projects that don't get resolved for one or more of these reasons.

In this case, we are dealing with what seems to be a relatively small fraction of the community, that isn't willing to do any work, and is demanding things that at best will increase the maintenance burden of the project without much, if an, objective benefit and at worst involve outright abandoning a piece of software that a lot of projects find very useful.

[Stauffen]

Because I do not hate systemd

I do not like systemd, for me is a project of RedHat, aiming her interests and not mine, so I should not be forced to use it. Windows works well but this is not the way to do things in Linux. Will not tell me this is not true and not be a hypocrite to say to make me a fork. The problem for me is this: the tyrant way of doing things. Also do not tell me that amount automatically siguinifica quality. If this were true it would be better Windows than Linux and it is not so.

Systemd also has a lot of bug and pulseaudio is an unfinished software, the facts speak for themselves.

[sdack]

If the first versions of PulseAudio only worked with "with a couple of soundboards", it really shows that the problems was Alsa and sound driver problems, not a general problem with PulseAudio, just like I said.

It never broke Jack (how could it), but it is true that you manually had to disable PA when using Jack for a while. For a long time PA will now just swap out to the background when a program needs Jack. It was hardly a mainstream problem, since Jack users were few, and those who needed Jack, probably knew what they were doing.

As I said, not only did PulseAudio provide Linux with a system wide sounds daemon, which was beyond extremely hard to do at that time, but it also cleaned up Alsa, and helped with debugging sound chip kernel drivers.

The problem was that until PA came around, sound simply sucked on Linux. You really had to be careful about what sound card /sound chip you used and many drivers were really buggy.

Lennart's PA was a major factor in getting sound right on Linux, which is exactly why all major distros embraced it so fast. Even Slackware used PA before PA reached 1.0.

100.000's of Linux users have used PA since its inception, if it really was so broken and dysfunctional, why did the users and distros keep using it? The problem with the PA haters are they confuse their own individual system problems, with Linux wide problems. Just because your sound chip had buggy drivers, or you used a distro with a broken PA implementation ( like early Ubuntu), doesn't mean the PA was broken.

PA solved a really hard problem, which is why no one had successfully made one before, and why, if anybody tries to write a PA replacement, they will basically just build on top of the pioneering work PA did by defining a "safe" Alsa subset and debugging the hell out of it.

Lennart Poettering isn't just a very bright and good programmer (many are), but a most excellent software engineer that attacks hard problems with smart plans, and execute those plans brilliantly. This is why his software is so successful.

You are drifting of into being a fanboy to a single software developer. Lennert is really still young. What he lacks in competence does he make up with creativity. Sometime it works and sometimes it does not. PulseAudio is also not all that of an issue. Nor did we not have sound before PulseAudio. It does what people expect it to do, which is to do a single job and to do it good. It has got problems, too, but this too is in line with expectations. Which application is free of problems?! I do not think it is fair to throw PulseAudio into the discussion with systemd based only on their author, but to focus on the application itself. Discussions get dumb when they end up being about a person.

[sdack]

In this case, we are dealing with what seems to be a relatively small fraction of the community, that isn't willing to do any work, and is demanding things that at best will increase the maintenance burden of the project without much, if an, objective benefit and at worst involve outright abandoning a piece of software that a lot of projects find very useful.

So you are saying the users should really write their own system software when they only do not want a particular one and cannot get rid of it. Seems like you are having a snarky attitude towards people who only do not like your software.