Latest Round Of Debian Systemd vs. Upstart Voting Ends

[mrugiero]

ofc linuxcounter is not that precise
you can check steam hw_survey that shows ubuntu having way more users then "other linux"
or distrowatch for popularity that shows ubuntu+mint dominating

None of those have any measurable accuracy. Linux counter only measures on people who care about showing we are a big number. Steam hw_survey only measures gamers. It's obvious there will be more gamers on Ubuntu, because it's aimed to "regular" users. Distrowatch measures mostly interest between people who are trying to weight their options. I don't know a single person who uses distrowatch. They either go with my recommendations, or already picked a distro they learned about from someone else. This is not to deny the huge popularity of Ubuntu, but really, none of those measures are really accurate as the population they measure is pretty much biased. Distrowatch is the worst of them all, you can click on whichever distro you want while using Windows. It only measures curiosity.
I think the best we could get, although it's probably inaccurate too, is Wikipedia, as I think people is equally likely to look for something there independently of their interests and independently of being a consumer or a professional.

I fully agree that whatever other people uses is irrelevant for the choice.

Ubuntu uses in-house upstart due to politics.

Hmmm, I don't think it's politics in this case, but rather not wanting to invest time in another init system migration after having migrated from sysvinit to Upstart. Remember systemd appeared quite some time after Upstart, and migrations are always problematic. They have something that works right now and they don't want to "fix it" without a good reason. I call that a technical decision, even though they do in other areas call "technical decisions" some things that are nothing but their desire to control their ecosystem. They probably weighted the possible pros of using systemd against the cons of having to go through another migration after not much time, and the cons weighed more; consider they are already planning a big migration of a key piece of the stack for this year (and this one IS based in politics only, AFAIK), there's no point in adding more work and possible breaks in the same year.

i
i keep saying computing is a science and should be looked as that
there is no "it sounds better" or "everybody is doing it" in science

Actually, there is. And there are also controversial issues in science, problems where you can't really decide with what you have. Relativity and quantum physics have some points where they don't work too well together, but at the same time they are considered to be "true" (as in being generally accepted in their use contexts) theories, so you usually pick the one that "sounds better" for the context, until you have a breakthrough that "proves" them (this doesn't reeeeeally exist in natural sciences like physics, although it does in general for exact sciences like math and computer science, although some things can't be proved in the latter either). And the "everybody is doing it" is really a big thing in science in general, although that's more correlated to how fucked up the system to measure scientists performance is: you need to have lots of publications in popular journals, and this is far easier to do by making incremental science over the hottest topics at the moment. In my college you can't even teach science if you don't have a high enough publication and quote count (and being quoted is also favored by working in a hot topic).

("systemd is Linux-specific", "systemd is hasty", "systemd is "greedy".", "systemd is unproven") you can't define as technical.

The Linux specific part is technical, and true, and acknowledged by the authors. It will be Linux specific until someone implements the features needed on another kernel.
However, Upstart is Linux specific too until it actually works with another kernel. The fact it doesn't depend on Linux specific features will not make a working port appear out of nowhere. First finish the BSD port and start a Hurd port, then claim it can be used with them.

[AdamW]

I've got a big box of microwave popcorn, and it's less than half gone, so.... bring it on!

by the time they're done you'll have eaten the popcorn, the box, and the microwave.

[finalzone]

The Linux specific part is technical, and true, and acknowledged by the authors. It will be Linux specific until someone implements the features needed on another kernel.
However, Upstart is Linux specific too until it actually works with another kernel. The fact it doesn't depend on Linux specific features will not make a working port appear out of nowhere. First finish the BSD port and start a Hurd port, then claim it can be used with them.

Before ever thinking of porting Upstart to other system, Canonical needs to fix these design flaws first.
It appears some Debian TC members involved knew about these problem highlighted by the original creator Scott Renmant which needs major rewrites yet did nothing. So how can Canonical be certain they will do both BSD and Hurd port when they have CLA attached?

[Chaz]

Wikipedia has the potential to be a fairly accurate distro counter (assuming web browsers accurately reported their distro, which I think a lot don't), but they haven't done the work needed to properly identify distros. Basically they sort Linux into "Ubuntu" and "Other Linux" and even that distinction is questionable. The Wikipedia folks say they aren't going to ever fix this, because finding out which Linux distro you use does not help them make a better encyclopedia. I'm kind of surprised some Linux fans haven't gotten together and done the work themselves; surely Wikipedia would accept their code?

[mrugiero]

So how can Canonical be certain they will do both BSD and Hurd port when they have CLA attached?

Exactly my point. It's not honest to sell your product based on features you *could* have instead of features you *do* have. There's no certainty there will be BSD and Hurd support, regardless any CLA, so they are not any better than systemd there. When it's there, they can claim they have it and use it as a selling point, until then, I call bluffing.

Wikipedia has the potential to be a fairly accurate distro counter (assuming web browsers accurately reported their distro, which I think a lot don't), but they haven't done the work needed to properly identify distros. Basically they sort Linux into "Ubuntu" and "Other Linux" and even that distinction is questionable. The Wikipedia folks say they aren't going to ever fix this, because finding out which Linux distro you use does not help them make a better encyclopedia. I'm kind of surprised some Linux fans haven't gotten together and done the work themselves; surely Wikipedia would accept their code?

My guess is they would accept the code, but most Linux users seems to just expect someone else does the work. See people complaining about GNOME's dependencies, for example. Nobody volunteered when they asked for someone to maintain the ConsoleKit backend, yet they complain because it now requires logind for the features that used to depend on ConsoleKit. Nobody created an alternative either, of those who say ConsoleKit is not an option; they waited until I don't know who (but my guess is it was Canonical) started the shim-systemd project to emulate the PID1 functionality to run logind. I'm not interested in those "my distro is better than yours" arguments, so even if I knew web development (which I don't, and I'm not interested in learning), I wouldn't do the work.

[Skrapion]

if you define popular as "most used by people" then upstart wins by far and is a clear choice

It still isn't that clear.

If "most used by people" means "most used by desktop machines", then sure, Upstart wins.

But don't forget that the website you're using right now also runs on a computer, with its own init system. RPM distros, which are quite popular for servers, use systemd.

If "most used by people" means "has more developers contributing", then systemd surely wins.

[Alejandro Nova]

Let's do politics

Well, it seems the time for rational, technical discussions has ended. Now it's the time for cheap political maneuvering and vote mangling. The systemd community has no incentive to take over the Debian decision making procedures, but Ubuntu has every incentive to do so, and it's willing to do that, so we'll see exactly that. So, systemd proponents, please, put the Upstart in your last preference options. That will force two Schwarz winners, and if the casting vote is with systemd, then all is set. They are manipulating the vote, so, please, do it too, or you will be defeated.

[finalzone]

Well, it seems the time for rational, technical discussions has ended. Now it's the time for cheap political maneuvering and vote mangling. The systemd community has no incentive to take over the Debian decision making procedures, but Ubuntu has every incentive to do so, and it's willing to do that, so we'll see exactly that. So, systemd proponents, please, put the Upstart in your last preference options. That will force two Schwarz winners, and if the casting vote is with systemd, then all is set. They are manipulating the vote, so, please, do it too, or you will be defeated.

Nah. Let Debian having hard lesson themselves for having Canonical influence and non-technical stuff impending the voting process.
Should Debian want to become irrelevant with the status quo like keep using sysv, so be it. Meawhile, other distributions are moving forward.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Nah. Let Debian having hard lesson themselves for having Canonical influence and non-technical stuff impending the voting process.
Should Debian want to become irrelevant with the status quo like keep using sysv, so be it. Meawhile, other distributions are moving forward.

The word is impeding.

[finalzone]

The word is impeding.

Thanks for the correction. Unfortunately, I can no longer edit to fix the typo.