New Group Calls For Boycotting Systemd

[interested]

This is what really pisses me off with both systemd and pulseaudio defenders. There is never any problem with either, the problem is always elsewhere, even if everything worked perfectly before either was installed.

That there may bugs in either PA and systemd isn't what was being discussed, but statements that Lennart Poettering is a mediocre programmer, and that systemd is badly programmed, and journald is "a pile of crap" etc.

Systemd haters aren't interested in a proper discussion about systemd, they only care about discrediting it. (A lost cause now that systemd has won).

Whatever you think of PA, the project really revitalized sound on Linux and began a systematic debugging of both drivers and ALSA. Sound on Linux before PA was bad and a low priority with developers.

"PA was a brilliantly executed software project" must be one of the biggest lies I've seen written anywhere, and only those that haven't suffered the first releases of pulseaudio (before LP left) can believe that absurdity. Pulseaudio wasn't adopted because it is the best or even a fully working solution - it was adopted because of politics.

I used the PA from the very beginning and I too had severe bugs and problems with it, but most of them was simply because my internal, slightly exotic sound chip had really bad drivers; when using a well supported PCI sound card, most of the problems disappeared (though non-native Linux programs like VLC and flash continued to be a problem for a while)

But that PA would have severe problems was to be expected, all other sound projects had similar problems, if not worse, and they weren't system wide either. As I said, this was a really an insanely hard problem that PA solved. Had it been trivial, you would have seen another system wide sound daemon many years before, and likely, many competing projects.

But that it was a hard problem that no one else had been able to solve, isn't the sole reason for why the PA projects was brilliantly engineered; Poettering also cared for the deployment of PA and that it required as little work as possible (beside bug fixing).

Pray tell me, how else could the problem have been solved? Making yet another sound system instead of ALSA? A complete rewrite of all the kernel drivers? A complete rewrite of every user space program?
Poettering avoided all these classic traps of redoing everything from scratch and thereby make a new backwards incompatible solution. He made a backwards compatible solution. Just the fact how easy you can disable or even remove PA shows how well engineered the project is. With most other solutions there would have been a flag day where everything was committed to the new way, or it didn't work.


Your claim that "politics" whatever that is, was the reason why it was adopted so quickly is simply wrong. Everybody had wanted a proper system wide sound solution for years, especially the DE designers, who rightly complained that they shouldn't have to deal with messy low level stuff like kernel drivers.
Yes, there were driver bugs and ALSA bugs and kernel bugs, and bugs in PA too, but it was still better than everything else before.

Besides, claiming that LP is some kind of genius and that pulseaudio works great (which it doesn't) thanks to him is to conveniently forget that pulseaudio just started working somewhat after LP dropped it.

Yet another lame attempt to discredit Poettering for all his hard work.

The second thing that really, really, pisses me off is LP's fanclub calling every critic a "hater". I never was a pulseaudio hater or a systemd hater until called that by some fanboi. While criticisms are accepted and handled properly, I even cooperate within my limited time and ability. But when some jerk labels criticism as hate, that is when I start opposing and stop debating, as it is easy to see that the fanboi won't even bother with facts.

You are missing the most important thing in the negative campaign against systemd. The systemd haters aren't interested in an honest discussion about systemd, they just want to discredit it. This is why they are called systemd haters.

I am perfectly fine with people who doesn't want to use systemd or PA for whatever reason they feel like. But they should spend their energy on improving what they like instead of negative campaigning against something they don't use or like. E.g. GNU SysVinit doesn't even have a simple build test system, so the only way to test if a new version works is by booting a system with it. People who think SysVinit is the right solution for their Linux distro, should help the developers instead of attacking systemd. But they don't, just like they don't seem to care about ConsoleKit and anything else they may need on their non-systemd distros; they seems to prefer to attack open source developers and projects instead. This is why they are haters.

You criticise ad hominem attacks, but you are the ones labelling every critic as hater. Systemd and pulseaudio critics are becoming extremists, that is true. But the fault lies squarely on the fanboy camp, that refuses all arguments and keeps pushing ahead without any consideration for any use case different from theirs.

Criticism is only useful when it is honest and with an agenda to improve the criticised. But this isn't the case with systemd haters, they want to destroy systemd if possible, not improve it.

I do distinguish between systemd haters and systemd opponents. There is also a third group of those who doesn't care about systemd and prefer something else, but they don't attack systemd either, they just work on what they like instead.
AFAIK, Slackware still doesn't believe in package management, but slackers aren't wasting everybody's time by relentless trolling every rpm/deb thread and attacking the software for being badly programmed, the concept flawed, and call for boycotting distros that dares to use package management. They just do the things they believe in.

I think those who doesn't want to use systemd should stop caring about it, and start caring for what they want to use instead. This is much more productive.

[interested]

Although the events are correct, the people are not. Galileo did invite leaders at the time to look through a telescope, but it wasn't a Catholic tribunal, but rather Catholic (or rather Jesuit) astronomers. Things like the phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter, which could been seen through a telescope, had a direct bearing on the idea of heliocentrism, and others, like mountains on the Moon, were very closely related ideas.

The phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter could be used as an argument for a heliocentric solar system, but it wasn't evidence at all since it could be explained by other means, especially the Tychonic system that at the time was backed with the best data available.

Looking through a telescope wouldn't solve the dispute at all, and everybody, including Galileo, would have known that. The astronomers associated with the Vatican wasn't fools.
This isn't to say that the Catholic church wasn't abusive against Galileo, ultimately they didn't rely on scientific arguments against his ideas, but on brute death threats and imprisonment.

[TheBlackCat]

The phases of Venus and the moons of Jupiter could be used as an argument for a heliocentric solar system, but it wasn't evidence at all since it could be explained by other means, especially the Tychonic system that at the time was backed with the best data available.

Looking through a telescope wouldn't solve the dispute at all, and everybody, including Galileo, would have known that. The astronomers associated with the Vatican wasn't fools.

Whatever your interpretation of the implications might be, it is well-documented, including by Galileo himself, that prominent astronomers of the day refused to look through the telescope because they felt that what they were told they would see contradicted Catholic doctrine of the day, including the heliocentric model of the day.

[drSeehas]

... what are the use-cases that systemd supporters aren't considering?

The *BSDs.

[TheBlackCat]

The *BSDs.

You mean the ones that have had replacements for SysV for some time?

[interested]

Whatever your interpretation of the implications might be, it is well-documented, including by Galileo himself, that prominent astronomers of the day refused to look through the telescope because they felt that what they were told they would see contradicted Catholic doctrine of the day, including the heliocentric model of the day.

There was nothing that they could see through the telescope that could decide for or against the heliocentric worldview. They weren't afraid of having their doctrines contradicted of the same reason.

The point was that the Tychonic or geocentric models fitted the observable facts better, and that there lacked any evidence for eg. stellar parallax that could decide in the favour of a heliocentric view.
In fact, the "catholic" astronomers actually saw the Tychonic system validated by the new telescopic observations; (see note 23: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tychonic_system)

The astronomers that opposed the heliocentric view, including those of the church, had valid scientific reasons for doing so. Painting them as reactionary, dogmatic, unscientific fools that refused to accept telescopic observations simply isn't correct. The crime of the church wasn't the rejection of Galileo's ideas, but the use of force to make him stop talking about his ideas.

[TheBlackCat]

There was nothing that they could see through the telescope that could decide for or against the heliocentric worldview. They weren't afraid of having their doctrines contradicted of the same reason.

Galileo is on record saying the opposite.

Also from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo..._controversies

My dear Kepler, I wish that we might laugh at the remarkable stupidity of the common herd. What do you have to say about the principal philosophers of this academy who are filled with the stubbornness of an asp and do not want to look at either the planets, the moon or the telescope, even though I have freely and deliberately offered them the opportunity a thousand times? Truly, just as the asp stops its ears, so do these philosophers shut their eyes to the light of truth.

[interested]

Galileo is on record saying the opposite.

Also from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo..._controversies

Notice that this isn't about the Jesuit astronomers, but about some members of an academy. Looking at the paragraph above you will see that the Jesuit astronomers quickly repeated Galileo's telescopic observations, they just came to another conclusion.

There where those who disputed some of his observations, and there where probably some from the (Pisa?) academy who refused to look into a telescope, but not the leading astronomers around the church. It wasn't his telescopic observations that got him into trouble.

The point is that one of the greatest pre-telescopic astronomers, Tycho Brahe, had gathered lots of hard data about the solar system and stars in a previously unheard high quality, and that data, together with with several calculations and arguments about e.g. the size of stars, contradicted the Copernican heliocentric model, but fitted the Tychonic model very well. It is an ironic twist that the Copernicans resorted to theological arguments to counter this since they couldn't argue with the data.

There was no way this dispute could have been settled by looking into a telescope, or Galileo's troubles would have disappeared when church astronomers repeated and confirmed his observations about e.g. Jupiters moons.

[Luke]

Maybe SysVinit is so outdated even a "mediocre programmer" can do better?

Spot on. People are mistaking Lennart's manic hyperactivity for brilliance and his obsession with writing crapware for competence. The guy is a mediocre software designer and programmer at best. He has A LOT of energy but this doesn't necessarily mean he would be able to use it in the best interests of the community even if he wanted to.

The issue here is not systemd vs what a hypothetical perfect programmer could write, rather it's systemd vs what someone else wrote decades ago(SysVinit), vs Upstart. If systemd is even slightly better than the others (and in my judgement it may well be), than any issues with the programming team are issues only of how systemd could have been a better program than itself. It only has to be better than Upstart and better than SysVinit to be good enough to switch to.

[gsmith]

Stand against needless forced change (systemd, libgtk3)

http://youtu.be/dH0NkW_7968