Lennart Poettering: Open Source Community "Quite a Sick Place To Be In"

An anonymous reader writes "Free software programmer Lennart Poettering has been part of his fair share of controversy in the open source community, and his latest essay may raise the most eyebrows yet. Poettering takes on the idea that the community is one big happy family and has some harsh words for the loudest and most obnoxious members. He says in part: "I don't usually talk about this too much, and hence I figure that people are really not aware of this, but yes, the Open Source community is full of a#@&oles, and I probably more than most others am one of their most favourite targets. I get hate mail for hacking on Open Source. People have started multiple 'petitions' on petition web sites, asking me to stop working (google for it). Recently, people started collecting Bitcoins to hire a hitman for me (this really happened!). Just the other day, some idiot posted a 'song' on youtube, a creepy work, filled with expletives about me and suggestions of violence. People post websites about boycotting my projects, containing pretty personal attacks. On IRC, people /msg me sometimes, with nasty messages, and references to artwork in 4chan style. And there's more. A lot more."

Comments

Systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Lennart is 110% correct, but the rampant, mostly unjustified hatred of systemd is going to discredit what he says.

What am I kidding? The "open source" community stopped caring about the effects of their actions years ago. Much easier to just insult Microsoft (with added dollar signs) than worry about your own problems.

Re:Systemd

[jedidiah]

If you troll and do things that people don't like, you are bound to get a lot of negative feedback. Your own remarks a a fine example of this.

It's fascinating how in the digital age people have lost sight of this. This was pretty well understood back when you actually had to troll someone to their face. It was no big surprise if you managed to cause a backlash. It was a real backlash too and not just people posting mean things about you.

Re:Systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you don't troll, you are still bound to get a lot of negative feedback on account of the fact that you have such a large audience on the internet.

Most people don't/can't grasp the concept of hundreds/thousands/millions of people using their product(s) and responding in sometimes unreasonable or irrational ways. The fact that most of it sent directly to the "victim" (for lack of a better word) means the larger public is simply never aware of it.

Re:Systemd

[LWATCDR]

In a "civil" world this is how things should work.
Statement:I think this technical solution is better.
Reply: No and here is the reason why.

In a world where "civil has descended to the Jr. High level.
Statment: You morons are doing it wrong.
Reply: You're an idiot.

In a world that is terribly out of control.
Reply: A threat of violence and or sexual assault.

That is never justified. And frankly that is what is happening here.

Re:Systemd

[davydagger]

Poettering is not a troll. He's a software developer, who has the unforunateness of writing lots of great software that a lot of people simply do not like.

Simply not liking someone's software is one thing, but the level of Poettering hate, while amusing, is counterproductive, and at sometimes scary.

That said, I'm a fan of the man and his work, based purely on its technical merrits.

Re:Systemd

[Chas]

Really?

You're a fan of non-standards-compliant software that breaks compatibility, creeps features all over the place, and compromises system integrity, stability and reliability by introducing a massive SPOF?

Good for you! Me? I like software that works RIGHT.

Re:Systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet people could happily live on without hating him or his software if the distros (and certain mammoth software projects) didn't force-feed us with his creations.

I still don't quite know what problems pulseaudio or systemd are trying to solve, that hasn't already been solved some other way.

Re:Systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a moron and you're doing it wrong.

Re:Systemd

[Blaskowicz]

But hopefully, with systemd making things more "Windows-like" people will be able to disable avahi daemon without being a professional linux/unix sysadmin.

Re:Systemd

[sxpert]

hilarious link with this newspaper like graphics saying "the london stock exchange choses windows over linux for reliability"

yet, wikipedia here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... states :

Technology

The LSE's current trading platform is its own Linux-based edition named Millennium Exchange.[12]

Their old trading platform TradElect was based on Microsoft's .NET Framework, and was developed by Microsoft and Accenture. Microsoft used the LSE software as an example of the supposed superiority of Windows over Linux in the "Get the Facts" campaign,[13] claiming that the LSE system provided "five nines" reliability, and a processing speed of 3–4 milliseconds. For Microsoft, LSE was a good combination of a highly visible exchange and yet a relatively modest IT problem.[14]

Despite TradElect only being in use for about two years,[15] after suffering multiple periods of extended downtime and unreliability[16][17] the LSE announced in 2009 that it was planning to switch to Linux in 2010.[18][19]

Re:Systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Bobody is such a slave driver, always forcing me to use his software! Probably has some emotional baggage from being given such an absurd name.

Re:Systemd

[0123456]

Yes, because going to System/Administration/Services and disabling it is such hard work.

Oh, sorry, I forgot, that's the old, outdated Gnome 2. They probably removed it from Gnome 3 because it was 'confusing to users'.

Re:Systemd

[Blaskowicz]

I tend to be a systemd hater, on the grounds of not using it and being sad it's some linux-only thing.
But pulseaudio gives me a global software volume control that doesn't put cracks in the sound when I change volume, and I can leave the "hardware" master volume fixed. So I like it for that I guess. What I don't like is I have no idea how to set up OSSv4 + pulseaudio instead of ALSA + pulseaudio.

Re:Systemd

[0123456]

To be fair, Pulseaudio seems to work OK now, and something like it was needed.

It was just the first five years or so that it sucked.

Similarly, something like systemd probably has its uses, even though they're not clear to me. It's just easier to live with five years of sucky audio than five years of a sucky init system.

Re:Systemd

[morgauxo]

The real problem isn't that he writes such software. To each their own, everyone should be able to write anything they want without attacks. The problem is the distributions that insist on making his crap the new default!

Re:Systemd

[geminidomino]

Are you aware that you're helping to reinforce one of the points two comments up? And somehow, writing software that a group of people deem as bad means that you should be met with horrible physical tortures?

Nowhere did GP say anything about whether or not LP deserved the abuse. He offered counterexamples to GGP's assertion that LP writes "great software," which has had plenty of objective explanations as to its flaws. He said nothing about the person himself.

Re:Systemd

[LWATCDR]

It does not matter if Systemd is good or junk.
People should not even kid about getting a hitman or physical violence online.
It does not help make things better.
"While I do agree that such comments are mostly uncalled for,"
Replace the mostly with totally and you have a start.
BTW you are taking this wrong. I am not just talking about FOSS. I am talking about society in general.

Re:Systemd

[davydagger]

What standards? you mean backwards compatibility that you never really had with software originally designed to run on a machine with 64 kbit of RAM. Or compataibility with other Operating Systems, that no one really cares about except their propretary forks. You know, the same people who complain about "Freetards", and generally bitch how terrible FOSS is, but yet dependant on BSD licensed components to make their proprietary systems run, because they are too dense to do it themselves. That?

I've also yet to see systemd, or networkmanager, really comrpomise system integrity, mabey you can give a few examples?

Here is another thing, most distro's initscripts never worked right, and they were also completely non-standard, and usually tied to one distro, and incompatible with eachother. Systemd is distribution agnostic, and is doing a fine job at creating new, better inter-distro standards.

Its not ported to other OSs, but fucking shit, its free software, if someone else wants it, they can port it.

Leonart dragged the linux desktop kicking and screaming into the 21st century and contiues to do so, again and again addressing major defeciences between Linux and Windows featurewise, and time and time again, surpassing the proprietary competition.

People keep talking about "the year of the Linux Desktop". Guess what, Leonart is the only fucking person who is actually working on getting us there.

Re:Systemd

[Cramer]

Ah, but he won't use the word "we". He is incapable of admitting he's one of "those assholes". (if you took a vote, he'd be in the top 10.)

Re:Systemd

[DamnOregonian]

To be fair, Pulseaudio seems to work OK now, and something like it was needed.

Well, it definitely works... better than it used to.

I'm pretty sure it still holds some kind of record for being the only piece of software that every single distribution has a wiki entry for turning off.

Re:Systemd

[Cramer]

Unfortunately, yes they do. Unless you want to switch to BSD, or roll your own distribution -- which now involves resurrecting old init shell scripts, or writing new one, and maintaining them going forward -- you are very likely to be forced to use systemd by the distro or 3rd party apps that deeply integrate systemd.

Re:Systemd

[Somebody Is Using My]

While I agree with the above, I think that Poettering is incorrect in his assessment that the "Open Source Community" is a sick place to be. This problem is not just limited to that particular group; it is endemic on the Internet. But its not really limited to that either, because people have been making those sorts of comments (e.g., "Man, some days I'd really like to kill my boss") throughout history; they aren't meant seriously and are just a method of expressing spleen. The Internet just provides a larger audience. Open Source advocates, by nature of their dealing with digital products, just happen to be more common and comfortable with the digital medium of the Internet.

So I I think it would be more accurate to say that it is the Human Race that is a sick place to be in.

Of course, I personally think the bigger problem is taking these comments so seriously. It's just "feeding the trolls" by giving them the audience they desire, providing the sort of feedback that only provokes them - and others - into worse and worse behavior in order to get attention. After all, if everybody is already screaming at the top of their lungs, even a "normal person" (is there such a thing?) might feel obligated to use a bullhorn to get his message out.

Re:Systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Poettering is not a troll..

No, he's a troll, just of a different sort. If you want proof of his trolling, here you go. The haranguing and general harassment starts at around 12:00 and continues for the rest of the presentation (almost 45 minutes), gradually getting more and more volatile as things progress. You can see how uncomfortable the presenter is, and he starts flipping through slides at the end because he's run out of time, all because Poettering chewed up his time being a jerk. Poettering should have written down his points and discussed them after the presentation ended. But the very end... well, where I come from, nothing says "douchebag" to me like getting up on stage, beer in hand... fuck it, just watch the video. Also take note of his "usually we don't get much criticism" comment around 54:00 -- classic textbook narcissism combined with ostrich syndrome.

I ask you to put yourself in the shoes of the fellow giving the presentation, while simultaneously asking yourself "why didn't the folks putting on the event do something?"

Nothing justifies Poettering getting death threats or things that could actually impact him personally (deeply) or professionally -- I urge everyone to actually read, not skim, RFC 2635 (Lennart should be the first to) -- but karma is playing somewhat of a role here. The video should speak for itself. It is that type of personality that I think drives people to dislike him in the same way that people dislike Theo de Raadt.

Anyway, his whinging makes me chuckle a bit because it's extremely pot-kettle-black, but nobody should be subjected to physical threats, continual harassment, or anything even remotely extreme like that.

Re:Systemd

[sjames]

The problem is, the actual conversation went:

I think this is better!

No, and here's why

Well, I'm doing it anyway!

Fine, have fun.

So you'll use it?

No, I won't. But gave fun anyway.

Well now, X,Y, and Z REQUIRE it. You will use it or else! So Nyahhhhhhh!

FOAD!

Re:Systemd

[TheCarp]

This right here.

I didn't know who this guy was, but now I see people listing a littany of things I either avoid, or grudgingly accept because its easier to do so than figure out what I have to do to rip it out and replace it and keep it out through updates.

Don't get me wrong, network manager works. I use it, but, whenever I have had an issue with it, I have generally found it to be far more of a time sink than its worth and very hard to make heads or tails out of if you need to get under the covers

Basically, it is, in many ways, very similar to the problems I had 13 years ago when I said "screw redhat, this debian system is cleaner and I can figure it out without the gui" . (of course I ended up having to learn for work anyway, so I guess the joke was on me...twice now)

That said.... my main disagreement with him is this idea that there is an "open source community". Its too big for "a community". That is like saying the "Eastern seaboard community has a bunch of assholes" or "boston has a lot of assholes", yup, all over the place.

I think he draws so much ire because of the visibility of his software. Its not a problem endemic to open source, you think closed source companies don't get nasty emails? Hell, I have SENT companies nasty emails about their software....maybe not death threats but, certainly some very choice metaphors about their general material makeup have certainly been given.

This is not "the community" this is "the public".

Re:Systemd

[grcumb]

Poettering is not a troll. He's a software developer, who has the unforunateness of writing lots of great software that a lot of people simply do not like.

See, this, right here, is why people lose it when they deal with Lennart.

This is not a matter of 'like' or 'do not like'. If it were, we could tell Lennart his software sucks and move on. But no, he's so fucking clever he not only has to be right, he has to foist his rightness onto systems before it's anywhere near mature.

And then.... and then, to add insult to injury, he refuses to accept that integrating core software, which in his own words claims to offer a one-stop-shop for kernel-userland interaction, without extensive use in real world conditions, might reasonably be thought a little rash. No, he has to go and accuse the entire software establishment of bias, an unwillingness to change (without even beginning to address where that inclination comes from), and ultimately, of a simple lack of ability to see and accept just how fucking right he is.

Amazingly, astonishingly to abso-fucking-lutely no one, his actions give rise to more than a little rancour. And now he has the gall to say that he was right all along, that his opponents are irrational and that it's a problem with the rest of the world.

To which I can only reply: seek help.

Re:Systemd

[Blaskowicz]

I wasn't aware that GUI feature existed, I now remember I once launched it about once. Old news : the Gnome 2 fork is one of the major DEs out there.

It displays not many things, though. Not even the ssh server. Avahi is absent of the list, yet is running on my system (two processes)
In fact that a small subset of running things is represented there proves that things don't run together well enough and are too disjointed, no?

Re:Systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, the Bebian is forcing me to use his crap. Getting rid of pulseaudio was easy, but systemd is harder target to keep away since it assimilates into more parts of system on every upgrade.

Re:Systemd

[jcdr]

You maybe have to consider that most distributions change there default for good reasons. I am certain that if the choice proved to be a failure, there will revert the default on the next release, or forks will be created to revert the default.

Re:Systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never had a problem with avahi. NetworkManager used to be an abortion, somewhere since v0.7.0 it has stopped actively causing me grief and I still use it on my laptop (though not on any of my various home servers, where it's easier just to make all the networking static). PulseAudio has probably caused me the most grief but that's largely been config-wise and I suspect an M-Audio multichannel audio interface with specific channels used for specific tasks including monitoring, also linking to jackd has never really been a priority use case. But even that oddball, once working, stays working. I haven't used a systemd system yet: I've had plenty of opportunity to read both the genuine arguments and bile on both sides and I'm looking forward to trying it out and making my own mind up.

Re:Systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, at least on Ubuntu/XFCE the pulseaudio's global volume control is a curse; the mute button performs one way operation and to re-enable audio one needs to open the control panel and enable a bunch of audio outputs and turn their volume up.

Re:Systemd

[sribe]

Avahi is disabled...

Why bother? Just leave it alone for a few minutes, and it will disable itself ;-)

Re:Systemd

[Chas]

Why would they want it? It's setting itself up as a single point of failure and breaks POSIX compliance.

That's like asking "Why doesn't FreeBSD just use the Windows bootloader?"

Re:Systemd

[geminidomino]

I am?

Or did you mean the parent to my post?

Re:Systemd

[Anonymous Coward]

Poettering is not a troll. He's a software developer, who has the unforunateness of writing lots of great software that a lot of people simply do not like.

Caveat: I am a part-time contribuer to two geeky distros, meaning I get paid in beer at conferences, and so am constantly inundated with seeing a certain cycle play out over IRC and email lists. This isn't about that at all, rather it's the community being treated as less of a community and more MBA/business tactics being employed against that community -- and eventually hitting resistance against people with little other leverage. There are several things going on:

1. It isn't that people don't like the software and/or design choices, it is that Poettering and Redhat have made design/business decisions purely to force adoption of what they want as business tactics to push "a standard" which happens to be Redhat. This is not good community behavior, and instead of competing on technical merits makes people feel they are competing via other tactics. For example, if they roll in udev, you then either have to fork udev and deal with keeping it patched or adopt systemd. No one has a real issue with logind as software as consolekit wasn't getting much love, but then Gnome3 depends on logind, and logind depends on Systemd, so then you'd have to fork Gnome3 to stay off systemd. And on, and on.

2. They have made claims they haven't followed through on, and come to be seen as disingenious in what they say. There is little to no reason for udev to be rolled into systemd, the "it's easier to develop as one tree" stuff is true yet kind of silly considering the issues it causes for everyone else. Still, it was claimed it'd also be seperate so people should just relax and not make a fuss... and then udev became dependent. It is a tactic that gets repeated because it works unless you are really paying attention. Another example coming to mind is text logging vaporware: "Don't worry, we get that you need that but adopt it now as we'll have an option shortly on month x where you can turn off binary logging and have..." and then just decide not to do it.

3. They have pushed solutions that aren't ready for prime-time for everyone, yet gloss over everyone having serious problems and/or shunt the blame elsewhere. This doesn't build community.

4. His software has become politicized, often by Poettering himself as a tactic. Poettering will mock rather than people who don't share his views and are interacting/criticizing choices rationally and calmly. Just a bit ago I watched him publically mocking gentoo devs who have been putting time into eudev as an alternative, using the same verbage someone might to mock climate-change deniers. It's language obviously designed to mock and exclude. When he then complains about the same, it just furthers the image people have of him.

5. Redhat and Poettering have some really, really big sticks: mostly a bank account to pay developers to have things and an existing code base/market. If you're debian, gentoo or any distro, forking half of Gnome3, etc, etc just to deal with this stuff is one hell of a tall ask considering how they are comprised and/or not funded. Many users lacking any of this leverage are using the tools they feel they have: public vitriol and mocking.

I run systemd, but I basically had to switch because I had no choice. I agree with Poettering on some technical issues, disagree with him greatly on others, and absolutely abhore how they treated the community. In every controversy involving him I can think of, it all could have been avoided via either 5% more effort on Poettering/Redhat's part.

Re:Systemd

[znrt]

now you just wait for my hitman, smartass!

Re:Systemd

[The Technomancer]

I think systems admins would care a lot less about systemd if it didn't take over a ton of other things beyond booting, to make gains on boot time, when that's something that a sysadmin should be doing rarely (and in a cloud infrastructure, once per instance). systemd is fine for the desktop. It's great software for that. My issue is with the project managers for the various major distros that make this the new normal going forward and sacrifice stability and tested software on the server side for the desktop.

Re:Systemd

[Vellmont]

Are you aware that you're helping to reinforce one of the points two comments up?

I don't agree. Being critical of his work on a technical basis is VERY different from personal attacks. I found poettering's post to be good, and I agreed with that he has to say. I've also had shitty problems with the sound on Linux before, which I _think_ might be attributable to pulseaudio. I can't be sure, but I have no trouble beliving pulseaudio might be shit. I don't take a stand on systemd yet, but my instincts are that it's the wrong approach. But I'd never get personal with the man, after all, it's just software.

And somehow, writing software that a group of people deem as bad means that you should be met with horrible physical tortures?

Umm.. what? Where did that come from? Nobody suggested physical violence. Nobody even got personal. Please stick to what people actually said rather than pulling stuff out of nowhere.

Re:Systemd

[Vellmont]

Their old trading platform TradElect was based on Microsoft's .NET Framework, and was developed by Microsoft and Accenture

You missed the real problem. The last word in that sentence. Accenture. I don't love Microsoft, but I don't think they're the big problem here. Accenture is a WELL KNOWN bad company that produces shit. They make Microsoft look good. Everyone I've ever know that's worked with them has a bad story to report. The same isn't true of Microsoft. So don't blame MS for the failures of a shitty outsourcing firm.

Re:Systemd

[multimediavt]

I agree with the OP, but not with what you said. The Internet has enabled and emboldened those that would be passive agressive under face-to-face circumstances to be much more animalistic and capable of carrying out their threats. Why? Because the consequences for saying such things is minimalized and in a lot of cases supported by other people thinking and saying the same things. The disconnect from any real consequences and the support whackos can find on the Internet, definitely makes it, not the whole human race, the sick place to be. Hell, I like to build things and get information from the Internet, but I wouldn't want to live there! It's a vile nasty place filled with juvenile behavior and sick twisted world views, for the most part. All you have to do is read some comments on news sites and the like some time if you really want to see how scary it is!

Re:Systemd

[The Terminator]

Well, on my Thinkpad with Trusty and KUBUNTU, the volume control just works fine out of the box - including muting and unmuting.
That the mainstream distros are switching to systemd seems to have a reason, systemd being crap, I cannot imagine to be the reason.

Re:Systemd

[Barsteward]

unfortunately there are too many wankers who will never learn to be decent human beings and a lot of them frequent these forums. they think they are grown and mature but they are too immature to realise they are not.

Re: Systemd

[Barsteward]

unfortunately there are too many people who cannot understand that its the distros fault, the same happened with KDE4.0

Re:Systemd

[Barsteward]

for the majority of desktop users who do not use servers, systemd works fine. i've never had any problems with it at all, it changed over in opensuse and i didn;t notice any difference apart from getting to a working desktop a lot faster.

Re:Systemd

[Narcocide]

This post deserves to be modded up.

Re:Systemd

[TheCarp]

and? I said I had no idea who he was before this discussion, the same point remains either way.
I guess I still have no idea who he is. Its such a small "community" you know.

Kind of like the "community" of breathers and drinkers.

Re:Systemd

[Darinbob]

Can you explain in a logical and coherent manner why his software is not good? By saying "pure excrement" and "ice sculpture in the middle of the Sahara desert", you end up being the sort of troll that gives open source a bad name, thus reinforcing Lennart's position that he wrote. If you don't like something, then say why you don't like it in the way that intelligent adults used to do. Dropping down to name calling is like listening to a political arguments or to sports fans of opposing teams.

Re:Systemd

[amicusNYCL]

I'm missing part (ok, the vast majority) of this story, but if his software is such shit, then why are so many distros, who presumably enjoy when their operating systems run correctly, using his software? Is there actually a consensus on his software being shit, and if so, why do people use it? If not, why do people act like it's a foregone conclusion that his software is shit? To an outside observer this kind of looks like a shouting match amongst a huge group of egotistical assholes.

Re:Systemd

[weilawei]

You ought to meet his siblings, Bibbidy and Boo.

Re:Systemd

[phantomfive]

That said, I'm a fan of the man and his work, based purely on its technical merits.

Really? I'm interested. What about his work do you find especially interesting?

Re:Systemd

[drinkypoo]

But no, he's so fucking clever he not only has to be right, he has to foist his rightness onto systems before it's anywhere near mature.

Which distributions does he maintain? I can certainly understand being highly upset if he unilaterally placed systemd into this distributions. Oh wait, the answer is zero.

Re:Systemd

[drinkypoo]

To an outside observer this kind of looks like a shouting match amongst a huge group of egotistical assholes.

To an inside observer, it looks like the same thing, but that doesn't mean there isn't a right answer as to whether systemd sucks ass.

systemd sucks in many ways, and its adoption is due to it doing just a couple of things that people wanted done. But it is superseding many things which it has no fucking business messing with, especially logging. binary logs are a fine thing to add to a system, for example. Most of us can agree on that. Systemd makes text logs second-class citizens. You know, the kind of log you can read from the boot loader...

Re:Systemd

[Antique Geekmeister]

I do believe you've forgotten SELinux and requiring passwords for your particular tool.

Re:Systemd

[klagermkii]

The Internet has enabled and emboldened those that would be passive agressive under face-to-face circumstances to be much more animalistic and capable of carrying out their threats.

Why do you feel they're any more capable of carrying out their threats? Surely as soon as they get into the face-to-face circumstance that is required to execute the murder (or heck, even deal with the hitman) the passiveness would win out? Can you think of any internet celebs (like Lennart would be) who have had a lot of death threats from random angry posters actually have one become a murder?

If people are going to be cowards throwing death threats across the Internet, they're unlikely to suddenly discover the "courage" to go kill someone in real life.

Re:Systemd

[weilawei]

I have a Thinkpad T61 running Debian Jessie/MATE and I have the same problem as the GP. The dedicated mute button is one way, and I have to go into alsamixer to unmute it. My empire of dirt for a mute button that works both ways!

Re:Systemd

[Blaskowicz]

Trying OSS may be worth it. It even became Free seven years ago.
Alternatively writing a script that triggers when you hit the hardware mute button might be a fine band aid. (xbindkeys or your window manager would call it)

Re:Systemd

[weilawei]

That's not a solution, that's a hacked up workaround.

Re:Systemd

[QuantumRiff]

Funny how the exact same complaints were said about PulseAudio when it came out 10 years ago.. my god the complaints, and flame wars.. and bitching about how Every Single DIstro was fooling, and not smart, and ruining linux.. Funny thing is, pulse audio works pretty darn well, and has many nice features ALSA didn't have. Even solaris rus it now.....

Same Lead developer too...

I find it hilarious that some people seem think that every single diistro has not even thought about same problems they came up with in 3 minutes.. I'm sure they just latched on, because of the slick glossy sales brochures...

Re:Systemd

[shutdown -p now]

If it was needed, then why sound works great on FreeBSD with no PA (or ALSA, for that matter) in sight?

Re:Systemd

[phantomfive]

It's setting itself up as a single point of failure and breaks POSIX compliance.

Does it really break POSIX compliance?

Re:Systemd

[Blaskowicz]

Can I have a barony of dirt?

Re:Systemd

[matthekc83]

Because his crappy software was the best in a large steaming pile of crappy software...

Re:Systemd

[Chas]

Look at the specifications for modern POSIX compliance and then ask that again.

Re:Systemd

[Zontar The Mindless]

I didn't know who this guy was, but now I see people listing a littany of things I either avoid, or grudgingly accept because its easier to do so than figure out what I have to do to rip it out and replace it and keep it out through updates.

I got as far as reading Google's 2-line extract from the Wikipedia article about him, and had much the same reaction.

Didn't feel a need to go read the actual article after that.

Re:Systemd

[Zontar The Mindless]

Leonart dragged the linux desktop kicking and screaming into the 21st century and contiues to do so, again and again addressing major defeciences between Linux and Windows featurewise, and time and time again, surpassing the proprietary competition.

People keep talking about "the year of the Linux Desktop". Guess what, Leonart is the only fucking person who is actually working on getting us there.

So he's making Linux more like Windows, and for this we should be grateful?

So he's the only one involved in this effort? For this we should be grateful.

Re:Systemd

[Zontar The Mindless]

BTW, he didn't drag my desktop anywhere because I've the good sense not to use Gnome. :)

Re: Systemd

[silentcoder]

I think the problem is that gnome is so very tightly bound to it now that you cannot offer a GNOME desktop without switching. GNOME itself mostly owes its current position to Mark Shuttleworth's ignorance of KDE back in 2005. Very few distros would drop GNOME now. Even those that maintain a separate KDE release like mint aren't going to maintain two radically different init systems. Even arch has switched. The only way left to not have systemd if you dislike it is to use gentoo, Slackware (which dropped GNOME support years ago) or LFS which has two branches. All however are distros that require massive user time investment. Now building a new just-works distro with a KDE desktop and no systemd isnt feasible anymore as you would need to work from scratch - you can't rely on any upstream distro to help provide packages and patches.

Re:Systemd

[Barsteward]

i was asking about software you wrote as you are the one moaning. So have you ripped systemd out of your system and installed any other those systems? if you have, then stop moaning as systemd is not for you

Re:Systemd

[KozmoStevnNaut]

In other words, you have no rational arguments and can't be bothered to do anything other than sling mud. Brilliant.

FWIW, I'm using networkmanager, pulseaudio and systemd on my Arch system and they're working beautifully.

Re:Systemd

[KozmoStevnNaut]

Did you ever stop to think why all of the top 10 Linux distributions are using systemd? Could it be because it's actually useful and serves its purpose well?

Re:Systemd

[AlterEager]

I've also had shitty problems with the sound on Linux before, which I _think_ might be attributable to pulseaudio.

I've had shitty problems with the sound on Linux long before pulseaudio was invented.

Sound on Linux has historically been shit. Since pulseaudio has come along it's got somewhat better.
 

Re: Systemd

[jcdr]

I used all releases of Ubuntu that existed on a test machine, and all releases of Debian starting from 1.3 Bo on my main machine.

Each distribution make there own choice based on a different team of peoples. Sometimes one of them experiment something new and the others observes the result (pure AMD64, Multiarch, Unity, Upstart, to name a few). Sometime, some distributions fell the needs to make a common choice and start talking each others about there own experiment. The whole process is a good one: open to innovate and open to consolidate the advancement. So many companies fail to archives this, especially on the long term.

Re:Systemd

[AlterEager]

Look at the specifications for modern POSIX compliance and then ask that again.

So you don't know whether it breaks POSIX compliance, you just assume it does.

Re:Systemd

[goarilla]

What am I kidding? The "open source" community stopped caring about the effects of their actions years ago. Much easier to just insult Microsoft (with added dollar signs) than worry about your own problems.

I don't think this is particular to the open source movement.
It's rampant all over the Internet.
it's the result of the fact that actions on the Internet rarely have real-world consequences so people feel invincible.
Couple that with this new generation of egotists. Who have grown up around the internet fulfilling their every want.

Re:Systemd

[goarilla]

In a world that is terribly out of control.
Reply: A threat of violence and or sexual assault.

That is never justified. And frankly that is what is happening here.

Guess you didn't grow up in a worker class family ?

Re:Systemd

[psmears]

Look at the 3,000+ page document that gives the specifications for modern POSIX compliance and then ask that again.

Do you think you could possibly narrow it down a little?

Re: Systemd

[DamnOregonian]

Parent to yours. You were spot-on.

Re:Systemd

[SmallFurryCreature]

> lots of great software that a lot of people simply do not like.

Yeah and I am really famous but a lot of people don't know that.

I am also a fantastic cook but many people don't the taste of my cooking.

But you sound like an idiot, you judge a product on its technical merits, not whether it has any use or value. Your the kind of idiot who would implement an idea because it sounds noble and fuck whether it has actually does anything useful.

Re:Systemd

[weilawei]

The problem is that I have packages with PulseAudio as a dependency now. Previously, I had it pinned to oblivion. Same for systemd. Until my shutdown option disappeared from my System menu (in MATE), it was also pinned to oblivion.

Fscking creeping dependencies.

Re:Systemd

[Barsteward]

i didn't moan/topic switch anywhere, you obviously have reading and comprehension problems

Re:Systemd

[drinkypoo]

Here is your face slap

Well, I steeled myself for the slap, but it never came. I see why you don't log in.

Re:Systemd

[CronoCloud]

I wasn't aware that GUI feature existed
It displays not many things, though. Not even the ssh server. Avahi is absent of the list,

/me opens up Administration>Services in Fedora 20 XFCE, and sees both avahi.daemon and sshd in the list.

Re:Systemd

[Rich0]

Demanding other people to repeat easily searched reasons is your problem, not other people's.

Actually, it is everybody's problem. The issue is that technical arguments get made once, and insults get thrown around all day long.

The original poster made comments about excrement. Then when asked for an actual argument they said, "well, google it."

Why not just make a post that says "I have an unoriginal comment to add - type systemd into google and see what comes up." It would be about as helpful to the discussion.

If you'd like to know how I feel about you, just type your own name into Google and see what comes up. :)

Re:Systemd

[CronoCloud]

Perhaps you should switch to a different distro? Mute/unmute works just fine on Fedora.

Re:Systemd

[CronoCloud]

Well, at least on Ubuntu/XFCE the pulseaudio's global volume control is a curse; the mute button performs one way operation

The mute button works properly on Fedora/XFCE.

Re:Systemd

[Rich0]

Redhat and Poettering have some really, really big sticks: mostly a bank account to pay developers to have things and an existing code base/market. If you're debian, gentoo or any distro, forking half of Gnome3, etc, etc just to deal with this stuff is one hell of a tall ask considering how they are comprised and/or not funded.

I think most of the issue really boils down to this (that is, the code issues and not the social ones - which I'm not discounting). SystemD couldn't just "absorb" udev if there were an army of people already maintaining udev. The same is true of just about everything else.

An issue with FOSS is that people tend to work on the fun stuff. That is why you end up with two guys trying to maintain things like openssl or bash - the fun part ended 15 years ago. With corporate money you can make the boring stuff happen, and then the guy with the money can unilaterally make all the decisions.

The interesting thing is that the FOSS community often flocks to the new stuff all the same, because something new is almost always more fun than something that is in bugfix mode.

The other thing is that when you look at something like systemd, what is it even competing against? Look at the featureset of sysvinit plus a hodge-podge of bash scripts, and then look at the planned featureset of systemd. Which would you rather contribute to or work with?

I think the biggest issue with something like systemd is that it tends to get rolled out quickly, and there are growing pains as a result. However, distros don't have much choice - their devs want to work on what is new and flashy, and they actually prefer the buggy new system with more features than the stable old system. The bar on the customer side keeps raising too - people don't just want to boot a system and launch a few daemons - they want to be hosting containers, or running in containers, and they want to be able to plug in a USB network adapter and just have it do the right thing, etc.

Re:Systemd

[weilawei]

The cure is worse than the disease. (YMMV, to each their own, etc.)

Re:Systemd

[Megol]

So you like Systemd?

Re:Systemd

[Etcetera]

Unfortunately, yes they do. Unless you want to switch to BSD, or roll your own distribution -- which now involves resurrecting old init shell scripts, or writing new one, and maintaining them going forward -- you are very likely to be forced to use systemd by the distro or 3rd party apps that deeply integrate systemd.

This is one of the keys, and why the Lennart-hate is slightly more justified than the usual OSS spats.

Actively pushing to deprecate and then FORCE TO BE REMOVED initscripts from the Fedora RPMs was a way, similar to the integration of udev and GNOME, of forcing adoption and making migration back to other init systems difficult. This is classic embrace-and-extend, anti-competitive behavior except instead of Microsoft leveraging its weight, it's a developer making a power play.

As for how and why Fedora agreed to this... Well, there are a couple of different things at play. To some extent, it's felt like for a few years now the developers in the community have been pushing things and the sysadmins in the community have been busy doing their jobs or otherwise not paying attention. Suddenly Fedora is all about people running on their laptops and their little docker VMs with very little thought to the poor schlub who's dealing with a half-broken system at 3am in the morning. I can't say I blame Fedora specifically -- communities go awry all sorts of ways -- but I do wish RedHat had and has been taking administrator feedback into account with RHEL7.

Suffice to say, there's a lot of concern out there.

Re:Systemd

[Wastl]

Look at the specifications for modern POSIX compliance and then ask that again.

Can you point me to the POSIX standard concerned with the init system? All I can find is standards concerned with the C library, system calls, how to express command line arguments, file system, ... ;-)

Besides, Linux never was fully POSIX compliant anyways.

Re:Systemd

[rochrist]

#systemdgate!!

Re:Systemd

[amicusNYCL]

No one has been able to come up with a solution to have it create text logs?

Re:Systemd

[Rakarra]

Why do you feel they're any more capable of carrying out their threats?

The problem is that when death threats are given out casually, it's harder to tell the difference between an anti-social wanker and a true threat.

Re:Systemd

[Rakarra]

No one has been able to come up with a solution to have it create text logs?

Plenty of people have, but the complainers usually don't know about them and keep throwing the same charges that have either been debunked or fixed from earlier versions.

There's a lot of systemd "lore" (along with Pulseaudio and Networkmanger et all) that gets passed around from person to person and swallowed up without actually checking for the accuracy.

Re:Systemd

[Rakarra]

I still don't quite know what problems pulseaudio or systemd are trying to solve

Well, for Pulseaudio, one of the biggest problems it was trying to solve was that a number of years ago, hardware vendors stopped putting audio mixers on their sound cards/chips, necessitating a sound server to do all the muxing in software. ALSA's dmix feature did this, but it was a horrible solution and not easy to set up. Pulseaudio was similarly terrible when it was first release, but starting around... oh, 0.9.22 it finally achieved some sort of production-usable status.

Plus Pulseaudio lets you mux together audio from a number of computers into one, which can be nice, though your average home user likely won't care.

Re:Systemd

[Hans Adler]

The parts of the internet where I spend most of my online time aren't half as bad as what you describe. But those bad parts definitely exist, and when we are talking real-life consequences such as hiring hitmen this is the only thing that matters. I am not at all surprised by what Poettering is complaining about. It's just the logical next step after doxing, calling employers and swatting.

How far someone will go is determined to a large extent by the attitudes of their peers. Many will always go with the average opinion, some will always be a little more moderate, and some will always make sure to be the most extreme person in the room. Once several people of the latter type meet online, it gets dangerous because this results in a one-upmanship competition not unlike that 'game' where two stolen cars race towards a frontal crash and the first driver to brake or turn aside 'loses'. Come to think of it, the idiots playing this 'game' are also on the internet, which should explain a lot.

Re:Systemd

[cwsumner]

"An armed society is a polite society."

But a society, that only connects anonymously, has less incentive to be polite.

The Internet will probably continue to be rude, until many people are "armed" with a way to defend themselves.

Backstory: My several-greats Grandfather killed a man in broad daylight, in the middle of Broad Street in Charleston, SC, because the man snapped his fingers in my grandfather's face. The Judge ruled it "Justifiable Homicide".
The customs of other times were Different, what you see today is -not- necessarily normal.
  8-}

Re:Systemd

[qpqp]

here you go

What a jerk!

Re:Systemd

[AntiSol]

writing lots of great software that a lot of people simply do not like

Am I the only one who finds this statement somewhat paradoxical?

Re:Systemd

[AntiSol]

systemd sucks in many ways, and its adoption is due to it doing just a couple of things that people wanted done. But it is superseding many things which it has no fucking business messing with

This answer also applies to pulseaudio

Re:Systemd

[KozmoStevnNaut]

Troll? For pointing out that networkmanager, pulseaudio and systemd actually work?

At best, you can accuse me of relying on anecdotal evidence (and you would be right), but trolling? Maybe you need to recalibrate your trolldar, or stop being blinded by your hate of Lennart Poettering.

Re:Systemd

[KozmoStevnNaut]

A piece of software starts requiring a specific dependency. The distros have a simple choice, either drop that piece of software or satisfy the dependency. They looked at the options and chose the one they considered most beneficial to the distro.

Personally, I would just as easily have dropped Gnome, but I don't run a distro.

Re: Systemd

[morgauxo]

It baffles me that Gnome is so popular. I find it pretty much unusable. Every default option seems to be exactly opposite of what I would chose for myself. Then they are all stored in something that looks like the Windows registry. Hating the Windows registry was one of the big things that drove me to Linux in the first place!

To each their own I guess!

But... I don't think my own desktop should be forced to get a bloated init replacement that makes everything harder to troubleshoot, replaces simple commands with long, hard to memorize lines that look like classpaths and lose cron just because a bunch of people who will never use my desktop like Gnome!

Re:Systemd

[morgauxo]

That seems like a pretty crappy way to look at things to me. It's ok if they break shit, if it's really bad someone will fix it later?

Re: Systemd

[silentcoder]

And now you understand why the significant number of Linux folks who use KDE; xfce; lxde... Are upset.

Re:Systemd

[allo]

you're doing it wrong. There should be no gui for this.
ssh only runs, if you installed it. Then you better know what it is.
avahi should run without the need for knowing it or the option to disable it, if you do not understand it.
Avahi is the apple way, make the things work, without configuration by the user. ssh is the unix way: only use it, if you understand it.
gnome is the windows way. you can configure some things, you can break stuff, it tries to be easy but does something wrong.

Re:Systemd

[segedunum]

Troll? For pointing out that networkmanager, pulseaudio and systemd actually work?

You sound surprised. However, they all still have longstanding problems which their developers have a long history of passing off.

Re:Systemd

[segedunum]

i was asking about software you wrote as you are the one moaning.

Questioning someone's ability to write software or telling everyone to write a patch knowing full well they either can't, or it won't be accepted if they do, is right up Lennart's alley. Is that you Lennart?

Re:Systemd

[davydagger]

Except all the people around the core of the GNU and Linux communities tend to disagree with you, and in reality, the Poeterring haters are a small minority of fringe users, rarely contributers. Meanwhile everyone who actually does most of the rest of the work on GNU, Linux and associated projects to include distributions think his work is awesome.

Re:Systemd

[RightwingNutjob]

People keep talking about "the year of the Linux Desktop". Guess what, Leonart is the only fucking person who is actually working on getting us there.

Screw your Linux on the Desktop. I use Linux for mission-critical compute nodes, process control systems, and engineers' and developers' workstations (ie serious work). I'm pissed already that the Ooh Shiny crowd has torn up my desktop environment (ie doesn't mess up all your mission-critical status displays at at an accidental mouse jerk), but I sure as hell will not abide the same crowd introducing bloatware into the boot system and making noise about breaking POSIX compatibilty at some point down the line. My workplace actually buys from RedHat, and

1. I will not recommend that we use RHEL 7 for anything and
2. If LP does get some non POSIX stuff into anything, I will recommend to my boss's boss that we draft a letter to RedHat demanding continued support for a POSIX compliant OS capable of network transparency on every graphical application we run on it. And maybe to fire LP for being a raging idiot.

Don't waste time on simple invective. Vote with your feet, and if you happen to do business with RedHat, vote with your dollars.

Re:Systemd

[davydagger]

>. My workplace actually buys from RedHat

Redhat is by far the leader in Linux technology. RedHat had some hand in it. Not a bad move on your companies part, expecially if you want support. Who else. Oh, speaking of which, LP is an employee at RedHat, do you not think that if systemd had no merit RedHat would continue for its paid development?

Its not just RedHat, its Debian, and Arch, and Ubuntu, and behind that, everyone else who is downstream of them, which between RH and Debian, is around 90% of the Linux market, and 99% of production capable Linux(as opposed to android/linux) solutions.

>1. I will not recommend that we use RHEL 7 for anything

So basicly your going to cling to outdated software soley because you can't be bothered to learn a new system, and your going to bring your preachy dogma into the work place? systemd works rather well actually. The arguments against it are dogma, "sayings", and conspirtard grade paranoia that is completely unfounded. You just don't want to learn something new, and you assume because you've been doing things one way for so long that its the right way.

>POSIX compliant OS

linux was never a POSIX compliant OS, and likely never will be. No one in the GNU project *ever* had UNIX compliance as its goal, and that extends to the Linux kernel as well.

https://personal.opengroup.org/~ajosey/tr28-07-2003.txt

Speaking of the "ooooh-shiny" crowd, OSX does have POSIX compliance. Go use that. Oh wait, it sucks for production enviroments. What the fuck do you need posix compliance for? UNIX is dead. UNIX has been dead since around 2003. The Linux kernel is the new fucking standard.

Re:Systemd

[KozmoStevnNaut]

From all accounts, they had teething issues, but are actually working pretty damn well now.

However, one thing that I'm sad to say I missed is that they break compatibility with BSD (especially systemd) for all applications that require them. That's unacceptable and I don't understand why people aren't more up in arms over this. BSD users should be our allies, not our enemies.

Re: Systemd

[morgauxo]

My understanding is that the KDE folks are planning on making KDE rely on systemd stuff just the same. It wouldn't surprise me, they used to rely on Hal. Man that sucked! I stuck with KDE for several years but finally about 6 months or so ago finally gave up. It just hasn't been very good since version 3. I don't want to be stuck with an old Qt version in order to run Trinity so now it's Ratpoison all the way!

I really don't need anything systemd is offering to run Ratpoison!

Re:Systemd

[segedunum]

I'm afraid it's become clear that Lennart has a lot of very serious personal and possibly mental issues that mean he just isn't suited to working with others. The progress of systemd will mean that eventually there will be a serious conflict with the kernel developers, amongst others.

Re:Systemd

[RightwingNutjob]

You wanna go rewrite all my legacy code for me that I got working with Linux? Go right ahead. If you fuck it up, you owe me money for time lost.

Re:Systemd

[davydagger]

speaking of money owed, you can't afford me. Plain and simple. Do you think I'd just port your shit for nothing? Or just talk to Redhat about support. I mean, your already paying for it.

What really does systemd break in your legacy operations? journald has a config option to turn syslog back on again. It'd be damn easy to rewrite /etc/init.d/ shims if your devs where dense enough to hardcode calls to bash scripts. No really, system calls are in the kernel, and most of the rest are in various libs.

What actually fucking breaks? Do you ever know?

Re:Systemd

[RightwingNutjob]

Wrong attitude. What breaks? Probably nothing, yet. But if you want me to upgrade, you need to provide assurance to me that your shiny new gizmo will work in all my specialized use cases, not expect me to spend time verifying it will.

Re:Systemd

[davydagger]

Look: This is an init system, not a new kernel, and not a new c library. It does not take system calls. All programs will still run. All you really need to do to port daemons is make new systemd units to replace scripts in. Unless you were dense enough to hardcode those calls, and then simple bash script shims that function the same. The other big issue is you might need syslog functionaility, something you can turn on in systemd.

your code will work just fine. I know this, because I know how a UNIX-like OS works.

I can already tell your outfit is a joke. you don't have a testing enviroment? Where is devops? systemd is Free as in beer as well as Free as in speech. I won't tell you how to do your job, but simply downloading CentOS, something Redhat actually approves of, and trying it in your testing enviroment, before you load it on your RHEL servers

If I worked for your company, I would guarantee your code would run on RHEL7. Your not paying me so I can't guaruntee anything for you, or more correctly, I won't. That is the exact wrong attitude.

I took a few business courses in college and they warned me about people like you. They said if people either stick to dogma, or can't tell you why things work, leave, because they don't have a clue what they are doing.

Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

"And that's all about this topic from me. I have no intentions to ever talk about this again on a public forum." -- LP ... throws bombs at Linus, generalizes, brings race and culture in as pejoratives ... his post is as well written as systemd

Re:Coward

[multimediavt]

"And that's all about this topic from me. I have no intentions to ever talk about this again on a public forum." -- LP ... throws bombs at Linus, generalizes, brings race and culture in as pejoratives ... his post is as well written as systemd

Spoken like a true Anonymous Coward. I find it hypocritical of you to throw stones and call someone else a coward while posting as an AC on /.

Re:Coward

[Blaskowicz]

It's probably useful to demean the "Anonymous" poster a bit. For all we can agree about internet freedom and the need for privacy, shit behavior and gratuitous insults always sneak in and these days it's become more of a problem than in the past.. Either we grow tired of it after 10/15 years, or the poor sobs that post under real names or weak pseudos are all universally and instantly googlable and the worst insults and libel follow them.
Especially the 4chan "Anonymous" phenomenom doesn't deserve much respect. "We are Anonymous, we are 1st world cry babies with a fake attitude of dissent, we're against the system but nothing is important, nothing counts, here's some script-kiddy stuff we made and a cool ascii art boat, we're Anonymous so you won't know we're slaving away in corporate jobs and entrenched in consumerism when not doing some protest shit and oh, here's some underage necrophilia pics".

Re:Coward

[Blaskowicz]

I forgot to add the beauty of Slashdot is ACs are modded +4 or +5 all the time and their comments are appraised by the other posters or readers, AC or not.

Re:Coward

[Jiro]

Cowardice is often a lot more sensible than being an Internet Tough Guy.

Re:Coward

[Oligonicella]

True, although somewhat of a non sequitur.

Greater Internet F***wad Theory

[Anonymous Coward]

This happens online a lot. It's bad, it's stupid, most of us oppose it, but as GamerGate shows, it can do real harm.

Re:Greater Internet F***wad Theory

[i kan reed]

I don't know if "most of us" oppose it. On the whole, there's a lot of people on slashdot who are like "whatever it's harmless". They bother me almost more than the threateners, because at some level, they consider themselves moderates rather than enablers.

Re:Greater Internet F***wad Theory

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe we just were smart enough to realize there's pretty easy ways to avoid the mobs of idiots, like not hanging out on IRC, or writing blogs trying to get a reaction out of a bunch of neck-beards then acting all surprised when you poked them and they lash out. Perhaps we realized that there's really no way to stop it even if we wanted to. Maybe we understand that trying to do so would be starting down a slippery slope that does more harm for all of us then good for the naive that don't understand the mob internet mentality that's existed since back when newsgroups were new and browsing the web was via gophers. Especially when things like threats of bodily harm are already illegal in most places...

Maybe we think the internet's worked fine for 30 years and all you people that can't handle the good with the bad should get the fuck off it.

Re:Greater Internet F***wad Theory

[Skarjak]

I'm not sure they are really enablers, maybe they're a bit more pragmatic. The issue is that despite many people making little PSAs about online bullying, it's not really slowing down. I think it's really the nature of internet to enable this kind of behaviour. If that's the case, any attempt to reach the bullies themselves is pointless. Faced with this, the most sensible solutions are to either stop engaging with the internet, or to try to develop a resistance to it. It might be unfortunate that we have to do this, but as long as the internet provides anonimity, it seems to me to be the only solution. The people saying "whatever it's harmless" have developped this resistance, so they are comfortable online.

Re:Greater Internet F***wad Theory

[1_brown_mouse]

This is systemdGate. Get your nomenclature right.

And it can do real harm to one's ability to debug and fix kernel issues in a sane and rational manner.

Re:Greater Internet F***wad Theory

[i kan reed]

Yeah, and I also get that my condemnation of that seems like I'm being unfair.

But I can't turn that "seems unfair" to an "actually unfair" because I see the exact same kinds of statements condemning a victim(whose only real notability is really being a victim) for imagined or real minor moral failings are used both by those pseudo-moderates and the people actually perpetuating the crimes.

It's hard not to see it as creating an environment that fosters the attacks we see, and so I can't see it as actual unfairness to condemn peoples sense of being morally okay while doing it. Once someone becomes a target of unreasonable hostility, there isn't really any room left to criticize them for minor bullshit.

Re:Greater Internet F***wad Theory

[DamnOregonian]

I believe that is the module in systemd that manages setting the default gateway from Avahi cues.

Re: Greater Internet F***wad Theory

[MMC Monster]

I'm okay w/ systemd. I don't consider myself an enabler. I use Linux for my day to day work. Whatever the kernel guys put in is fine by me. If it breaks my workflow, I look for something else. That's how I switched from Ubuntu to Mint.

There are plenty of FOSS OSs out there. I don't care about the internals of them. I care about the apps they run so I can get my work done.

Re:Greater Internet F***wad Theory

[Microlith]

The correct response is to find and confront these people. No one should have to get used to an environment with a constant onslaught of horrible shit spewed by the emotionally stunted.

Re:Greater Internet F***wad Theory

[Fwipp]

Oh, okay, anti-systemd folk are like the gamergaters? Cool, now I don't feel so worried about the systemd migration.

Thanks for clearing that up!

Re: Greater Internet F***wad Theory

[i kan reed]

It's nice to have an actual moderate position about an actual subject. But I meant the people who try to position their opinion between people and their attackers as if that's the middle.

Re: Greater Internet F***wad Theory

[dpilot]

How would you feel if there were apparent force applied to make you use systemd, regardless of our opinion of it? Some of us perceive that that's the reality. Witness L.P.'s recent rants against Gentoo, which only offers systemd as an option, and not the default option.

I like to be a moderate too, but I don't like coercion.

Re:Greater Internet F***wad Theory

[serviscope_minor]

Maybe we think the internet's worked fine for 30 years

That's an interesting definition of worked fine. I've ranted about similar things in other threads so I'll rant here. No, this is really not fucking fine. Jesus.

Personally, I don't have high opinions of LP, or his software, or Redhat and their tactics (others have adequately covered the points well enough), but no, the reaction of death threats is simply not OK. You here are acting like an enabler by basically saying it's OK. The thing to do is to ostracise these idiots from any community you take part in.

Is that nice? No. But those are the rules for makig a decent place. Can't be decent then we don't want you here, etc.

Re:Greater Internet F***wad Theory

[DutchUncle]

Maybe we think the internet's worked fine for 30 years ....

Yes. And maybe some people think it was *great* that their parents hit them with a belt, and it's *right* that plebes and pledges should be abused. OTOH maybe some people reach for other old behavior models like "chivalry", and feel that the world would be nicer if more did. One can disagree vehemently without threatening personal injury; one can be blunt and truthful about pointing out error without being an a**hole. Poor behavior is not harmless. The fact that we can't do much about it should not lead us to accept or encourage it.

Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[Anonymous Coward]

If you've done something to earn that much hate, maybe you ought to take a step back and re-evaluate your position.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[Anonymous Coward]

and if you've done nothing to "earn" it but have that much hate but have it directed at you anyway?

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[i kan reed]

"If you've done something to trigger my just world fallacy, maybe you deserve it"

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[multimediavt]

If you've done something to earn that much hate, maybe you ought to take a step back and re-evaluate your position.

Who says he earned it? Trolls and just plain socipathic and psychopathic people don't need reasons to hate. Reason rarely factors into their behavior at all. They hate someone because they have a different viewpoint, or they called a shitty piece of code (possibly written by one of these psychopaths) a shitty piece of code. And from his post I would say that he is definitely re-evaluating his position, much to the loss of the Open Source community.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[jedidiah]

You're trying to make it sound like it's some sort of middle school vendetta when it's really nothing of the sort. What you describe does happen but it's not a relevant thing to consider here.

I did not immediately recognize the name. So it did not initially understand why this poor fellow would be making these kinds of complaints. Then I Googled him and all became clear.

It's little wonder he's feeling hounded right about now.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[Jason Levine]

Who says he's "earned" it. I can't say I've been targeted by a group of trolls online, but I was bullied growing up. The bullies followed me in groups around taunting me and blocking my entrance to class. (If I passed just one of them in the hall, they would leave me alone.) I didn't do anything to them. The reason they did all this was because they found it fun to do. It was a sick sense of humor that never once considered that their target might be an actual human with actual feelings. (They stopped when someone else confronted them with the fact that their daily torments were actually doing damage to me. I was becoming increasingly paranoid and withdrawn.)

Decades later, I was targeted online by a lone troll who saw herself as a prophet of god. What did I do to her? Well, I liked photography and another of her targets liked photography so, in her twisted mind, this meant we were the same person and I was lying about everything when I said I wasn't. She harassed me online as much as she could, including threatening to file police reports on me to report me for horrible crimes. Granted, from what I could glean from her rantings, her view of "filing a police report" likely involved e-mailing the precinct to tell them god told her X committed Y crimes and thinking that they would immediately arrest X. Still, it was scary to have someone stalking you like this.

In the latter case, this person stalked me less than she possibly could since I used a pseudonym for the account she targeted. The other guy used his real name and got his relatives and place of business attacked as well. Change one off-kilter person to a gang of people who think someone has committed some horrible crime (i.e. expressing an opinion contrary to the one they hold true) and who have the time and resources to track down everything about this person and you can see how some online communities can be scary places.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[JohnFen]

If you've done something to earn that much hate, maybe you ought to take a step back and re-evaluate your position.

No. Just no. Unless the guy is doing something that actually "earns" the hate -- and last I checked, he doesn't rape babies, engage in mass murder, or any of the other things that might qualify a "earning hate" -- then he hasn't earned a drop of it. People may be angry that systemd was developed and adopted by distros (I know that I am), but hate? For writing software? Really? Backing down in the face of such hatred is the opposite of what he should be doing.

If your point is that systemd is awful, that's fair (and, in my opinion, accurate). But responding in the form of hatred, threats, etc., doesn't make that point. Actually explaining why you object to it, and agitating with distros to not make it the default, does that far more effectively.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[DamnOregonian]

Goebbels: They're just being haters. They can't even give a good argument for *not* toasting the Jews.

Reductio ad absurdum only works if the argument truly is invalid.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[geminidomino]

If, after said re-evaluation, you've come to that conclusion, then that's fine. You can be content with the fact that your position is sound and the people who disagree have no rational grounds for it, and are just assholes.

When you skip that re-evaluation step, stick your fingers in your ears, yell "la la la" really hard, and then cry because people are "being mean to you" while refusing to acknowledge that it's because they don't want your ill-considered, over-engineered crap making their lives difficult for the next decade, then that makes you an asshole.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[Nemyst]

Do you even hear yourself when you spout this sort of bullshit? Seriously, you need a reality check.

The guy's made some software you don't like. STOP THE PRESSES. Oh wait, no, don't, because it's really just a minor inconvenience at worst? You know that you can politely disagree and just elect not to use his software instead of wanting what he's worked on to be completely wiped from the face of the Earth, right?

I'm at a complete loss as to how someone can even suggest that this is the logical course of action to take because someone wrote code you don't like.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[sjames]

Before systemd sprouted tendrils of dependency everywhere, I ignored it entirely. He had his little project and that was fine.

I really don't care what he wrote or didn't, but the political manipulation to force it into everything is highly objectionable.

So the real problem is his insistence on wiping every other init off the face of the Earth. If he will kindly knock it off, I will return to not caring what he does with his project.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[war4peace]

Wow, he really did that, single-handedly? Did he personally alter every distro by threatening their developers at gunpoint or something like that?
Quick, someone hire this guy as the Angel of Justice.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[BasilBrush]

He has foisted systemd on a bunch of people who don't want it.

How is it possible for a developer fo FOSS software to foist anything on anyone? If systemd is in any distributions, it's because the people who work to produce those distributions chose to use it. And in turn you chose to use that distribution. If you don't like it use a different distribution - or create your own. This is supposed to be the great advantage of FOSS.

Now he expects those same people to send him flowers? People tried polite conversation. Failing that they suggested he take his ball and go home. Failing that, hate mail.

For creating something, that other people can use if they want? Good grief. You are proving he's right. The Open Source community is a sick place to be.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[BasilBrush]

Tell me, what power this man has to make other people people use his project as a dependancy? If this was Linus, then OK, but no one else has the power to direct Linux development one way or another.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[sjames]

He convinced Gnome and other things to depend on it. He presents an API with a built in dependency hazard and claims it's no problem. He made it so it fails if it isn't PID 1.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[sjames]

Yeah, sure. I whip together organizations like Debian every single day before my first cup of coffee. It's really easy to say.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[sjames]

So you figure I can just spin up a new distro over my lunch break, do you?

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[sjames]

Close, but he did have some help and the backing of RedHat.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[BasilBrush]

The ability to fork when unhappy with the direction of a distro was always put up as an advantage of OSS. It seems that was as much of a canard as the "many eyes make all bugs shallow" myth.

The honeymoon period is obviously truly over.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[Barsteward]

Blame your distro for forcing it on you

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[sjames]

Personally, I'm giving uselessd a good look now. There may yet BE a fork, which will make LP the asshole that caused a whole lot of people a whole lot of work that shouldn't have been needed.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[Trogre]

A while ago someone here compared Systemd to the MCP in the disney film Tron. Having re-watched that movie recently I have to admit they were right on the money.

The resemblance is very disturbing.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[qpqp]

He also won't fix a critical bug, and here's a dozen more reasons to hate this crapware.
Lennart, pack your things and go, or start playing nice finally!

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[oxdas]

This isn't about the kernel. It is about the layer of plumbing directly below the kernel. In this space, Red Hat most certainly has the resources and ability to direct development.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[sjames]

That's a pretty big wontfix after all the blather about how great binary logs are.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[arth1]

Amen to that brother, if Martin Luther King had listened to the haters and stopped, he wouldn't be dead.

Most likely he would be; he was born in 1929, and would have been 85 if not dead - far more than the average male lifespan.

Anyhow, arguing from alternative history is a fallacy.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[exomondo]

So you figure I can just spin up a new distro over my lunch break, do you?

Spin up? You mean create a new distro or install a new distro? It doesn't appear Slackware or Gentoo have a dependency on systemd nor plans to exclusively support it. If you've chosen a distro that you no longer like the decisions of then change to a different one.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[sjames]

The message I replied to was flippantly suggesting I just create my own distro.

Switching to Slack or Gentoo would naturally be less work, but it would take longer than a lunch break to make the switch on a server and make sure it's ready to go.

Speaking of Slackware, it's situation is telling. No desire whatsoever to switch to systemd but with caveat that it may one day become impractical to continue resting. That sure sounds like there is a coercive element to all of this.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[sjames]

This is an exceptionally difficult case, though note that there is a project (uselessd) to essentially redesign systemd properly. I am also considering Slackware. It remains possible to do. That just makes Poettering a gigantic pain in the ass.

It's a shame really. If he had just put it out there as something to build on, some of the ideas could have been neatly adopted without all the acrimony.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[exomondo]

Switching to Slack or Gentoo would naturally be less work, but it would take longer than a lunch break to make the switch on a server and make sure it's ready to go.

So if it takes longer than your lunch break it goes in the "too hard" basket and instead you'll just spend the time complaining on slashdot.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[sjames]

So you're claiming that while I do the install and testing I have no right to curse the cause of the extra work?

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[exomondo]

So you're claiming that while I do the install and testing I have no right to curse the cause of the extra work?

Not when it's by means of advocating hate mail toward the developer just because the distro you chose adopted his software and you don't like it. If you feel so strongly about it then get involved in the process rather than whining from the sidelines.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[sjames]

So I have the right to express my opinion as long as I'm make sure to do it behind his back?

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[exomondo]

Sending hate mail just because you didn't get your way and the distro developers actually doing the work who know what they are doing sided with him instead of doing what you wanted them to do is just fucking pathetic.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[sjames]

In other words, you present yourself as the arbiter of my free speech and presume to understand my thoughts on the subject even though you haven't actually heard them?

Of course, I notice that he lumps in people who talk about not using systemd in the same paragraph as people trying to crowdsource a hit. I presume you're fine with that. Surely that is the height of sophistication and maturity.

Given that, I suspect much of that 'hate mail' is suggestions about how systemd should deviate from his master plan.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[TheRaven64]

I don't use any of his software, but I do pay attention to the politics surrounding it. The loudest and most obnoxious person in that entire community is Lennart. He has a history of making technically questionable decisions and then, when questioned, refusing to reply with technical justifications but instead complaining that everyone hates him and that some people just don't like progress.

Now, as a FreeBSD developer, I'm quite happy with his work: He's driven more people to adopt FreeBSD than anyone else that I'm aware of, but I do find it amusing when he complains that the problem with the community is other people.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[cout]

I don't actually see a report of a specific bug there.

The text says:

"I have an issue with journal corruptions and need to know what is the accepted way to deal with them."

EXAMPLE: ...

but if someone were to tell me to fix that bug, I wouldn't know where to begin.

Marking this as NOTABUG is the correct course of action.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[Blymie]

JohnFen,

Hate is most certainly deserved. How you treat someone, hate or not -- well, that's a different matter.

However, part of the 'hate' aspect is that the way that systemd is making it into the kernel, and into every distro, is not based upon traditional meritocratic principles. It is not that Lennart is not skilled, merely that he holds incredible influence and political power through Redhat. And, that Redhat's power and tendrils spread everywhere, including the Gnome foundation.

This political power is FORCING systemd into distros. Some distros (like Debian) are doing what they can to defang systemd and including it... but it becomes more onerous daily.

Without this political power, systemd would NOT be where it is today. It would ABSOLUTELY not be in Debian, and many other distros. While you may contests some of my points above, one thing that is an actual fact is that this is the key reason for the hate.

Not the software. Not the quality of the product. Rather, the use of political power (intended or not!) based upon Redhat's money, instead of based upon merit. And yet, Redhat has done a lot of things for the community based upon that money, but this one is a TRAGEDY. And, that political power is bypassing all of the traditional checks and bounds the community has, which would normally FORCE an author of a product to shape up, or see his product ostracized!

And that, most certainly, is deserving of hate. And further? It isn't only Lennart that my hate is targeted ate. I see him as a problem, and Redhat as the real target.

Lastly. Redhat. I started with Redhat 4 (not RHEL) in 96. I switched to Debian as soon as possible, because back then? Debian wasn't just twice the product, or 10 times the product... Redhat was a *joke* comparatively.

It should be known, and it *is* known by anyone with a sense of history, that Redhat and most other commercialized distros learned MANY THINGS from Debian. The list of firsts is endless. The adoption by Redhat and others, was a constant catch-up game.

Fast forward almost 20 years. As expected, many of the 'core' things, such as online updates (yum = apt), automatic dependency resolution, installation of a distro in a 'secure' state, the list goes on, have been adopted by Redhat. And, in my profession, I work with many distros on a daily basis.

And Redhat? Every time I work with it, I find bugs that you would never find in Debian. Every. Single. Time. Their QA process is not up to snuff. Hell, I've even run into *their own configuration tools* not working, on a point release (should be more bugs squashed), and this from a company with the cash for QA that Redhat has!

My point? This poor dev methodology is showing with the hap-hazard adoption of systemd by Redhat. Its inclusion and dependency by Gnome, via Redhat's influence, is a CLEAR indicator of the problems internal to development at Redhat. What baked design philosophy would allow for a dependency on a project that has *no* *clear* *design* *specification*. Systemd has grown enormously, has morphed and changed repeatedly, and before it has even stabilized as a product?

Everything depends upon it?!

This is so ass backwards, it is like designing a car body, when the size, power, or weight distribution of the engine has not even been determined!

No. Hate is deserved. How you treat someone, hate or not -- well, that's a different matter.

But the hate? It deserves to exist.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[gbjbaanb]

I recall a quote:

FreeBSD is what you get when you take a unix developer and ask him to write a PC OS. Linux is what you get when you take a PC developer and ask him to write a Unix OS.

I guess this now is shown to be true in ways the original author never thought possible!

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[superwiz]

You can be content with the fact that your position is sound and the people who disagree have no rational grounds for it, and are just assholes.

That's not how the world works. Those people may simply have priorities different from your priorities and could be frustrated that their priorities are given less weight than yours. It doesn't make them wrong in disagreeing with you. How they react to that frustration is what makes them ass holes.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[Rich0]

He has foisted systemd on a bunch of people who don't want it. Now he expects those same people to send him flowers?

I know it is crazy. Last night I kissed good-night my Linux From Scratch (TM) box that is stripped of udev, bash, glibc, pulseaudio, and all that other crazy stuff. In truth even sysvinit and bash are too fluffy for me - I just build a minimal kernel with init=/bin/csh on the built-in command line and I'm still bummed that they stripped the bootloader code out of the kernel 15 years ago and I have to install bloatware like LILO or else it just tells me to bugger_off.

Then I went to bed and in the middle of the night a ninja hired by Lennart came in and wiped my hard drive and stole all my backups, and installed Arch running systemd and bloatware like agetty. I can't even figure out how to shut the thing down - killing my shell just logs me out and doesn't cause a panic like it is supposed to!

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[Rich0]

What is actually broken? I'm not aware of any syslog implementations that "fix" a log file if a line gets cut-off mid-write by a power outage.

Journald just rotates to a new file and starts writing a clean log. The old log is readable up until the last valid record I believe.

Sure, I guess you could have it delete the last record after-the-fact and then cleanly close the file, but that won't really "fix" anything. The resulting behavior would be the same. If anything by preserving the damaged file you have the opportunity to go poking inside to see if there is anything useful, while the log continues on in a new file after reboot.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[Rich0]

Speaking of Slackware, it's situation is telling. No desire whatsoever to switch to systemd but with caveat that it may one day become impractical to continue resting. That sure sounds like there is a coercive element to all of this.

Or, maybe it just reflects that linux distros just repackage the stuff that everybody else is already writing, and that forking every other major project is too much work for a small band of volunteers?

If I write a simple FOSS kernel in my spare time that isn't POSIX-compatible, there is nothing wrong with that. If I write some software for it, or encourage a few friends to do so there is nothing wrong with that. On the other hand, if I then go on slashdot and moan and complain about how the fact that the folks at mozilla, apache, and mariadb haven't ported their massive codebases over to my new kernel, then my expectations are clearly off the rocker.

Systemd is just the same thing in reverse. Somebody writes that new non-POSIX kernel and then mozilla, apache, and mariadb announce that they've seen the light and will no longer support POSIX environments, and you're frustrated that everybody is abandoning linux as a result.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[BasilBrush]

There is no plumbing below the kernel. systemd runs on the kernel, not the other way around.

Red Hat only has the power to direct development of their own distro. For sure other distros that cut corners by taking Red Hat and customising it will likely follow suit. But there are more distros that are not based on Red Hat than are. For example Debian and Slackware each have their own followers.

Of course Debian also use systemd. But Red Hat has no power to dictate that. Rather it shows a growing consensus on systemd being the way forward.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[sjames]

I would have it quit corrupting log files. Either use a decent transaction mechanism or go back to appending text files where bits of corruption can generally be dealt with sanely.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[CrashNBrn]

I completely understand the distaste for binary logs/configs/etc. Many moons ago that was one thing we got rid of in our project - the default binary format for saving C structs --- to XML. I suppose today one might consider the less verbose JSON.

What I don't get is why the f'k they (systemD) are using binary formats in the first place. If its about efficiency/bandwidth/(and/or)/smaller file commits --- why not just use bzip2 on a clean text format?
Then you would have the benefits efficiency/smaller file commits/etc AND a clean text format that can be accessed as needed and with the right-tool-for-the-job.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[qpqp]

RDBMS

Don't worry, they'll integrate Oracle soon enough.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[exomondo]

In other words, you present yourself as the arbiter of my free speech and presume to understand my thoughts on the subject even though you haven't actually heard them?

No, criticizing the pathetic childish behavior of sending hate mail just because you didn't get your way is not stifling your free speech, grow up.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[sjames]

I didn't claim you stifled anything, just that you claim to sit in judgement. Get over yourself before you scrape your ears.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[JohnFen]

Oh, I totally understand why people are angry about it -- I'm one of those people. I think the anger is totally justified. It's the hate I have a problem with.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[exomondo]

just that you claim to sit in judgement.

Yes, obviously you couldn't make a convincing argument to real developers to side with you so you lashed out in a childish manner when you didn't get your way. I'm not claiming to judge your argument - in fact you didn't even make one - but quite clearly people who know a lot more about it than you and who actually do the work associated with incorporating it decided whatever arguments you made to them were flimsy, so you get angry and send hate mail not to the developers who made the choice but to the person who presented that choice to them.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[Rich0]

I would have it quit corrupting log files. Either use a decent transaction mechanism or go back to appending text files where bits of corruption can generally be dealt with sanely.

How is journald NOT dealing with the corruption sanely? It just starts a new file. A text-based system would probably do the same thing, or insert a newline and keep going (basically just hiding the problem until your log parser wonders why there is malformatted line in the file).

No syslog implementation I'm aware of uses a transaction mechanism. That would basically require a journal of some kind and lots of fsyncing since Linux itself doesn't really support transactions on files.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[Rich0]

Uh, you do realize that text-based logs suffer from the same problem, right? You just ignore it when you're reading it with your eyeballs, which is basically what you do when you look at the output of journalctl with your eyeballs.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[Rich0]

So your eyeballs are really blind to "This significantly increases probability of corruption". How pathetic.

I read it. I just don't see how journald is any more susceptible to corruption than a text log.

You stated that they are susceptible "due to not having any transaction consistency, as an RDBMS would." That is certainly true, but it is also true of a text-based log. You're saying that because B is better than A, we should definitely go with C.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[sjames]

Journald is failing by corrupting the log in the first place. It is the writer, it is in control of that. It fails at that.

My old text based log files on a small group of servers and a number of desktop machines contain no corruptions in the log files at all.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[Rich0]

Journald is failing by corrupting the log in the first place. It is the writer, it is in control of that. It fails at that.

My old text based log files on a small group of servers and a number of desktop machines contain no corruptions in the log files at all.

If your text-based log files do not contain corruptions, then journald would not be expected to create corruptions under the same conditions.

The only reason you end up with corruption is if there is an ungraceful shutdown, and that will corrupt text-based logs.

The only way to prevent this sort of situation is to use full data journaling on your logging solution, which no syslog I'm aware of implements, but most RDBMS do. If you use something like syslog-ng and you pull the plug in the middle of operations, you could end up with a truncated log entry.

I don't dispute that journald can create invalid log entries. I am just saying that it is no different from all the alternatives in this regard. If I did want to create a system log that had full data journaling I'd certainly prefer to implement it using a binary file format!

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[sjames]

I don't see corruptions in embedded devices that are usually shut off by unplugging them. I don't see the corruptions after punching the reset button. It seems journald is much more susceptible to corrupting the logs.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[Rich0]

I don't see corruptions in embedded devices that are usually shut off by unplugging them. I don't see the corruptions after punching the reset button. It seems journald is much more susceptible to corrupting the logs.

Is it that, or is it just that journald actually reports when it finds an incomplete log file? I've never had DOS complain about an uncleanly mounted FAT filesystem, after all, and it might have something to do with the fact that FAT doesn't even have a way of marking itself as dirty. :)

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[sjames]

I can look at the logs and see that they aren't corrupt. Naturally, the filesystem journal ends up replaying each time the machines are shut down rough, but that actually takes care of it.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[Rich0]

I can look at the logs and see that they aren't corrupt. Naturally, the filesystem journal ends up replaying each time the machines are shut down rough, but that actually takes care of it.

Well, in that case I would expect it to take care of your journald logs as well.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[sjames]

And yet there are persistent reports of corrupted log files from journald answered with a wontfix...

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[Rich0]

And yet there are persistent reports of corrupted log files from journald answered with a wontfix...

Well, they should use whatever configuration you use then. What scenario is going to result in the corruption of a journal that isn't going to result in the corruption of a text log? They both involve appending data to the end of a file. If your system guarantees that it is impossible for a file to end up with only half a line, then it would guarantee that it is impossible for a file to end up with half a record.

If the wontfix bothers you that much, then write up a better explanation for why the bug reports are invalid and mark it as invalid instead. :)

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[sjames]

Perhaps journald should be more careful how it flushes it's buffers.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[Rich0]

Perhaps journald should be more careful how it flushes it's buffers.

In what way? How is it any different from syslog? The last time I checked syslog didn't do double-buffering, and if it did it would actually have to deal with cases where records made it out to the first log but not the second.

Syslog just doesn't bother to detect log corruptions.

You seem to think that there is something about journald that makes it more prone to log corruptions than text-based logging solutions. As far as I can tell, the only difference is one of definitions. If you get half a line in a text-based log it isn't defined as a corruption, but if you get half a record in the journald log you do call it a corruption.

The fact that people say that journald is "prone to corruptions" doesn't make it any worse than syslog.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[sjames]

You seem to mis-understand and also seem a little desperate for journald to not be a steaming pile (else why are you playing semantic games with situations I have made clear are not the case?). There are any number of possibilities for bugs in journald. For example, it could be attempting to be clever and as a result not writing entire records out promptly.

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[Rich0]

You seem to mis-understand and also seem a little desperate for journald to not be a steaming pile (else why are you playing semantic games with situations I have made clear are not the case?). There are any number of possibilities for bugs in journald. For example, it could be attempting to be clever and as a result not writing entire records out promptly.

It could also randomly delete /etc/passwd. I'm asking for substantiation, not hand-waving.

I have no desire for semantic games. I just don't understand what failure modes journald is actually susceptible to that something like syslog-ng isn't. If it doesn't flush in the way that it should, then just point that out in detail (and please don't tell me that it should run fsync every 15 seconds in a braindead fashion like the ext3 designers would have you do).

Re:Sounds like he hasn't gotten the message

[sjames]

No, you actually claimed it was impossible for journald to fail where rsyslogd succeeds. I pointed out a plausible mechanism with no claim that it was/was not the case.

Have a look at the bug report and the big fat won'tfix and then ask yourself why I would bother beating my head against the brick wall.

This guys comes across as an asshole

[Anonymous Coward]

He deserves to work for Microsoft.

Re:This guys comes across as an asshole

[shutdown -p now]

Please, no.

Tell me about it

[Anonymous Coward]

The same abusive jerk has been after me too. Through some savvy detective work, I figured out his real first name: "Linus"

As soon as I determine his last name I'm going to lay down some serious vengeance upon his ass!

Re:Tell me about it

[maestroX]

Andrew, is that you?
My version is bigger!
--
Linus

Re:Tell me about it

[tepples]

Would the surname happen to be Van Pelt, by any chance?

4Chan...

[MindPrison]

people /msg me sometimes, with nasty messages, and references to artwork in 4chan style. And there's more. A lot more.

I know how you feel, 4chan has destroyed much more than open source, it has destroyed my entire peaceful suburban neighborhood, now my neighbor has decorated his little car with a HUGE Pedo Bear decal all over the car, and no one so far - have reacted to this.

Re:4Chan...

[bughunter]

You should go scrawl "Free Candy" on his car with a bar of soap...

(Maybe he'll even like it and make it permanent.)

Re:4Chan...

[mlkj]

I honestly can't tell whether or not you're serious.

Re:4Chan...

[Ardyvee]

Most people don't know who Pedo Bear is. I would probably go full "omg ican'tbelievethisguyactuallydidit". Although your reaction is way more sensible than mine. I'm known to not work correctly.

Re:4Chan...

[MindPrison]

You should go scrawl "Free Candy" on his car with a bar of soap...

(Maybe he'll even like it and make it permanent.)

Well, now he has an Hello Kitty decal on one of his car windows...

Pick a category

[NReitzel]

Len,

In any subgroup of humans, be they white, black, brown, yellow, blonde, green, Microsoft, Apple, OpenSource, martian...

There will always be some really nasty people. There are people who are absolutely certain that they are right and evidence be damned. There are people who think that you should defer to them because of their superior intellect, good looks, buff muscles, ancestry, even who they think think they know. These days, there are people who sincerely believe that they have God's 800 number.

I've since learned that regardless of how smart, fast, clever, treacherous, blah blah, there will always be someone who is better at it than I am.

I still participate, because I can contribute towards a whole that is greater than I am, and for that matter, greater than they are. I'm not a theist, but the great body of knowledge that genus Homo has accumulated is bigger and better than all of us individually, and in spite of that, or maybe because of that, each of us can contribute our part towards making it better still.

I've learned to tell those people, "If you don't like he way I am doing it, fork you." (sic) Time will tell if you are right or we are right. Like any species, there are innumerable forks, and some will prosper, and some will not. Time will judge.

Re:Pick a category

[MrEricSir]

The key difference between non-corporate open source projects and Microsoft or Apple is that companies have HR departments. Problem employees can be dealt with or even fired.

There isn't really an analog in your typical open source community. In fact, smaller open source projects tend to be so grateful for any help that asshole behavior is tolerated -- or even considered the norm. It's a sad state of affairs for the majority of us who want to contribute, but have no interest in dealing with a cesspool of assholes.

Re:Pick a category

[ArcadeMan]

The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: people are a problem.

Re:Pick a category

[epyT-R]

Yes, and typically in companies like microsoft or apple, conflicts between groupthink hugboxes take precedent over what the customer wants because the few individuals who dare to stand up and say 'this is bad' get labeled as 'antisocial' by HR and fired. Windows 8 comes to mind right away.. The IOSification of OSX is another. An OSS equivalent is Gnome.

Re:Pick a category

[Deskpoet]

There isn't really an analog in your typical open source community. In fact, smaller open source projects tend to be so grateful for any help that asshole behavior is tolerated -- or even considered the norm. It's a sad state of affairs for the majority of us who want to contribute, but have no interest in dealing with a cesspool of assholes.

Sorry, but that sounds like an excuse.

Humans are thoroughly reprehensible creatures. There's a reason the living world is dying around us: that's because humans ARE assholes that generally destroy everything they touch. In some cases, that wicked Shiva energy is channeled in directions that benefit others ("open source", or what many profiteers say the "lunatic fringe" rightly calls "free software", is an example.) But in most cases, that energy is expended in (temporarily) fluffing the arrogant and greedy who, coincidentally or not, often seem to hover like vultures around those small eddying pools of curiosity and itch-scratching, eyeing their opportunity to profit from the collective labors. In other words, when something good happens, it's almost always an accident, and if that accident is profound enough, it needs righteous assholes to defend or protect it (like Linus does with Linux.)

So, that leaves you with a simple choice: create something for the whole with assholes that might benefit more than your local group, or not--and try on your own to profit from the assholes you manage to convince your wares are gold.

Of course, we're not addressing the concern of talent or competency here--that's a whole other layer that ALSO gets determined by assholes, the ones usually up or downstream of your project/work, either as user or developer or anything in between. And that is the area Poettering laments in his piece--which, lets be honest, has a whining tone--and seems unable to reconcile with how he sees his software (hi, Lennart!) and a great many others do (practically everyone on the "wrong" side of the systemd thing.) As many have noted, if there's significant pushback, maybe some re-thinking is involved, but that seems in short supply, particularly given the lofty position he finds himself in. With great power comes great responsibility, and one hopes humility, and that's where things seem to break down for him and the systemd posse.

In the end, he and you can just walk away if that isn't your cup of tea. There's no shame in saying "Enough! I'm outta here!" Just don't hide behind the idea the "open source" community is worse than working in a commercial firm because assholes are contained by culture--that's disingenuous bullshit. Ask anyone who's worked at a big firm and I'm sure they can name LOTS of assholes they've been forced to deal with during their time there. If you're lucky, you can do work that interests you and work around and with the assholes with the work driving you forward. Since most aren't, they just deal. Only a few play the victim card, thank the Dieties, but this gosh-darned Internet gives them a platform to vent their spleen.

Like I just did....

Re:Pick a category

[TheDarkMaster]

Martian here. And yes, is very difficult to understand you humans.

Who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is this guy, and why are his Google+ status messages frontpage-worthy?

Re:Who?

[allquixotic]

He's the developer of Avahi, Pulseaudio, and Systemd, most prominently. These components are standard middleware (userspace programs, usually that run in the background, which provide useful services to make a Linux distro more useful than just providing a terminal). The first two were accepted mostly uncontroversially; I mean, pulseaudio did have some pushback, but systemd has had orders of magnitude more pushback than pulseaudio. Now that the most popular distros ship systemd by default, people who don't like it are railing against both the program and its author(s).

People need to get a life.

Re:Who?

[sjames]

That's because the first two could be fixed with kill -9. The latter is being crammed down people's throats with what appears to be politically motivated promiscuous dependencies.

Big surprise, try to cram things down people's throats and they come to hate you.

Re:Who?

[ArcadeMan]

No, people need to get a Mac. /duck

Re:Who?

[epyT-R]

You don't recall any of the pulseaudio controversies? It's still a POS btw, but it's not quite as bad as it used to be. I have no need for it as ALSA now handles software mixing for today's simple DACs and has done so for years.

Re:Who?

[geminidomino]

I mean, pulseaudio did have some pushback, but systemd has had orders of magnitude more pushback than pulseaudio.

If by "some pushback" you mean "was utterly unusable for at least 4 years", then that part is at least true. Of course systemd has more pushback: it's the same sort of badly written, badly designed garbage that's injecting itself into the bootup process rather than being just a user-facing mess that was trivial to remove.

People need to get a life.

Some of us have lives that include being paid to take care of Linux servers, which this crap makes significantly more difficult.

Re:Who?

[wrook]

The first 2 have been banned on my machine for quite a while (many years). The third I picked up because Gnome forced it upon me. I have now abandoned Gnome.

The other system that is off my machine for good is Network Manager. If I could find a replacement for Bluez I might even be able to have a stable machine...

Re:Who?

[BasilBrush]

"politically motivated"? It's a software component that starts daemons. You have to be pretty sad if you have political objections to that.

Re:Who?

[Barsteward]

you can install any init system you like if you want to manage it or change to a BSD system. life is full of choices

Re:Who?

[sjames]

What's sad is if you use political maneuvering to get it selected.

Re:Who?

[phantomfive]

Does Pulseaudio give anything that ALSA doesn't now?

Re:Who?

[qpqp]

It's a software component that starts daemons.

No it's not. Go read this.

Re:Who?

[arth1]

Does Pulseaudio give anything that ALSA doesn't now?

Yes.
Non-deterministic latency.

Re:Who?

[phantomfive]

lol. Normally I don't post comments that just say 'lol' but that deserves one.

Re:Who?

[AK Marc]

Quit whining. If everything worked perfectly, you'd be unemployed. You should be thanking him, not hating him.

Re:Who?

[Kabukiwookie]

Typical response of a Windows admin.

Re:Who?

[epyT-R]

Actually oss in linux was doing it too before alsa came along. ALSA also had the feature, but it had to be configured and enabled in asound.conf. Now, alsa enables it by default for non hardware mixing devices.

Re:Who?

[KozmoStevnNaut]

Actually, I have one specific use case where ALSA doesn't provide needed functionality, and JACK is massively overkill for the task.

Some sound cards such as the ASUS Xonar DG do not have built-in volume controls. They rely 100% on the driver or OS sound subsystem to control volume. This obviously isn't a problem if you're just feeding the output into an external amplifier, but sometimes you want to plug headphones directly into your PC, especially considering how the Xonar DG specifically has a built-in high-quality headphone amplifier.

ALSA does not provide a volume control directly for this sound card, there is no way for you to turn down the volume from 100%. But PulseAudio does, and that was my reason for switching to PA, even before it was made effectively mandatory.

Re:Who?

[AK Marc]

I am not. So you are a bigoted idiot, so confident in your ignorance that you make false proclamations on public forums?

Must be a Linux admin...

Re:Who?

[allquixotic]

Yeah, and dmix is as compatible with most ALSA apps (even before pulseaudio came along) as a minnow and an oak tree trying to get it on with each other.

It's not great.

Re:Who?

[BasilBrush]

Yes it is. Hate it all you like, there's no point lying about what it is.

Re:Who?

[qpqp]

Are you totally ignorant? No it's not! It's also does dhcp and NTP, logging, mountpoints, PAM, swap management, fsck, snapshotting, LUKS, a fucking GUI, ... etc. etc. etc.
To put it in their own words:

systemd certainly covers more ground that it used to. It's not just an init system anymore, but the basic userspace building block to build an OS from

(http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html)
Fuck this piece of crap!

Re:Who?

[BasilBrush]

That's like saying MS Word isn't a word processor because it has mail merge and exports to HTML.

Re:Who?

[qpqp]

No, because both HTML output and mail merge are text operations that are (very close to the core) functions of an editor (i.e. process placeholders and output formats).
DHCP, however, has NOTHING to do with an INIT system. Neither does a GUI, mountpoints or any of the other examples me (and many others) are pointing out all the time.
Now stop trolling and go fuck yourself!

Re:Who?

[BasilBrush]

I think you're very much proving the guy's point that open source is "Quite a sick place to be in". Such vitriol over the description of a system component, that should never even be noticed by an end user on any rational OS.

It's like religious fanaticism.

Re:Who?

[qpqp]

I don't like that fucker trying to replace the GNU in GNU/Linux with systemd. You're welcome to go work for Microsoft if you don't like open source or Free software.

that should never even be noticed by an end user

You know, when the "end user" is the administrator, and you're replacing a core part (sorry, parts... Grrr!) of the system with a monolithic, insecure, bug-ridden piece of crap, it will come around and bite you, especially if you try to force it down their throats.

the description of a system component

Sorry to have proved you wrong that this is not an init system.

It's like religious fanaticism.

Yes it is. We want our systems pure, lean and clean.
Wanna make a mess? Go make your own fork, community and shit in your own backyard.

Re:Who?

[BasilBrush]

Sorry to have proved you wrong that this is not an init system.

Of course it's an init system. Saying you've proved me wrong doesn't make it so.

"It's like religious fanaticism."
Yes it is.

Freak.

Re:Who?

[Kabukiwookie]

Well I didn't say you were one did I?. That does not detract from the fact that this is a remark that I often hear from Windows admins.

As for 'bigoted idiot', ad hominems and accusing people of making false proclamations on public forums exposes you as bit of an idiot yourself. If required I will testify under threat of perjury that I have heard windows admins proclaim this very thing, so the proclamation is anything but false.

But let that not detract from any smug feelings you might be having and need to express

And it's Unix btw, not Linux.

Re:Who?

[geminidomino]

Which wouldn't be so bad if the documentation around systemd was so horrendously awful - and also hugely changeable dependent on version.

Some parts, perhaps.

Other parts, like the idiocy that is the "working as intended" logging abomination, would be irredeemably bad, no matter how good the documentation. Plus, that adds a nice, seething element of ominous fear: if LP and co. are so out of touch that they don't understand *why* their way is "The Wrong Way," the gods only know what else they've buggered up beyond repair that hasn't been found yet.

Re:Who?

[qpqp]

I didn't say it, they're saying it themselves. Learn to fucking read, stupid!

"systemd certainly covers more ground that it used to. It's not just an init system anymore, but the basic userspace building block to build an OS from" (http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html)

In response to your

Yes it is.

Punk!

Re:Who?

[BasilBrush]

I didn't say it, they're saying it themselves. Learn to fucking read, stupid!

Learn to comprehend. If Microsoft were to say "MS Word isn't just a Word Processor any more" they don't mean it isn't a Word Processor.

"Isn't just" != "Isn't".

"Isn't just ..." == "Is not only... plus more.

Re:Who?

[qpqp]

Apparently, you're a retard.

Re:Who?

[BasilBrush]

I the acknowledgement of your mistake.

And note you keep on confirming the point of the article.

Re:Who?

[qpqp]

You keep running around in circles clinging on to your misinformed opinion. Don't worry, I won't try to confuse you with facts any further.

Re:Hmmm

[jellomizer]

People don't like other people for a whole slew of mostly stupid reasons.

You internet presence causes a lot of those non-verbal cues to get left out. We often say a lot of things, but not all things are weighted equally.

If one would say they are for Gun Rights and Anti-Abortion you could think that they are a right wing nut-job. But if you get the non-verbal communications you may find out that the person is actually far more liberal on most issues except for say those too.

A lot of people have a hard time with gray zones anyways, so they can't really get how a person can have a complex relationship between topics and still be in a particular camp.

Critics should take positive action

[noldrin]

I haven't like the changes he's caused in Linux, but none of those things are the way one should deal with it. If you don't like where Linux is going, fork things and make it the way you like. These types of actions you'd expect from people with no discernible skills to be able to contribute. If you have skill to contribute, put the work in, if you don't have skills, put some work in and gain them.

Re:Critics should take positive action

[CRCulver]

I haven't like the changes he's caused in Linux, but none of those things are the way one should deal with it. If you don't like where Linux is going, fork things and make it the way you like.

It's one thing to fork a single tool, but it's quite another thing to fork an entire distribution, one which already has complex organization like a legal registration and funds in the bank, and which has slowly gained hard-won recognition in government and business circles. Debian, all of the Debian-derived distros, OpenSuse and Arch have adopted systemd, and those who oppose systemd can't just create a distro of such maturity and respect overnight. Sure, Slackware and the *BSDs are left, but losing Debian too was a hard blow, and it's understandable that systemd opponents are feeling a sense of desperation.

Re:Critics should take positive action

[noldrin]

People fork distros all the time, it's not as dramatic as you make it sound. You also have Gentoo and other distros based on it not using systemd, like Funtoo. Both Gentoo and *BSD could use development help. You could also work with uselessd, whether on the project itself or work on adapting a distro to use it. Start with smaller pieces and if people like what you do, others will join in to help.

Re:Critics should take positive action

[Zalbik]

Debian, all of the Debian-derived distros, OpenSuse and Arch have adopted systemd, and those who oppose systemd can't just create a distro of such maturity and respect overnight. Sure, Slackware and the *BSDs are left, but losing Debian too was a hard blow, and it's understandable that systemd opponents are feeling a sense of desperation.

Not being a massive Linux geek (use it, but don't develop for it), I don't understand the pushback against Poettering over systemd's adoption.

Let me get this straight:
- He wrote an init system that some people didn't like
- Poettering didn't agree with their objections, continued development
- Distribution maintainers liked it enough to replace init with systemd
- People bully/threaten the developer of systemd?!?!

It would seem a discussion with the distro maintainers over the technical merits/deficiencies of systemd would be more in order. I've found the few open source projects I've followed more closely (NHibernate, automapper, PetaPoco) to be reasonably polite. Is Linux very different? Is it just the size/complexity that makes people jerks?

Re: Critics should take positive action

[allquixotic]

[citation needed]

This sounds like more bandwagoning just because it's fun to hate something.

Re: Critics should take positive action

[Em Adespoton]

Fine. Aren't we talking about open source here? What is being said isn't really that people hate Poettering, but that people disagree with a decision the Debian maintainers have made.

When this happened with OpenOffice, people left and formed LibreOffice. The fact that this hasn't happened with Debian indicates that the core dev group (the people who actually work on the OS) are generally in favour of the change. So why not just fork to Febian, take the most recent non-systemd release, and move forward with it? If systemd is really so bad, the difference will be obvious to those using it and maintaining it, and eventually Debian will go the way of the dodo, to be replaced by Febian.

I fail to see the problem here, unless the problem is that there's a vocal minority who doesn't actually have the skills to maintain such a system but disagree with the way others are doing it. The minority could be correct, but it's probably not all that big a deal.

Re:Critics should take positive action

[clonehappy]

If you use Debian, trust it, and love it, and Debian has made this change, and you abhor the change, it's a good wakeup call opportunity.

Because I love something, doesn't mean I trust it blindly. You can love your wife, but if you see signs that things might be going amiss, you would dig a little deeper to determine if there is really something nefarious going on or if there is just change happening. Or at least, I would. If your wife's phone is going off all hours of the night and she's been working "late" every night for the last 3 months with no history of having done that in the past, would you just blindly trust that everything is fine, because you love her? Give me a break.

I don't particularly care about systemd either way, as I use BSD, but I see things like this happen all the time, not just in tech. A vocal minority of people who think they know what's best for everyone comes along and starts forcing changes down everyone's throats. There is no input from the vast, silent majority who just want to get by day-to-day, so the only people who end up voicing their opinion are the diehard zealots and fanatics, and boy are they loud and obnoxious.

The problem is that once the worst people stand up against something, it makes it hard for anyone level-headed, sane, or logical to do the same thing, lest they be branded in with the psychopaths. If you really want to demonize a group of people, just take their position and be as radical and destructive as possible. People aren't smart enough to actually look at real issues and facts and make decisions, it's all emotional. People with real issues, real beefs, real reasons to oppose the radical and dramatic move away from what has been the standard will now be drowned out by those who will just call them names. And then the vocal minority, those who have no real motives other than their own self-interest at heart, get their way. It happens constantly, and it has nothing to do with Linux or anything tech related.

It's human nature, and it sucks, because people who are, indeed, moderates are always being subjected to the whims of the polarized fanatics.

Re: Critics should take positive action

[0123456]

You do realize that forking one piece of software is much eaiser than forking a complete distro, right?

Re:Critics should take positive action

[sjames]

That's the problem. Systemd was quite uncontroversial (and mostly ignored) back when it was a simple matter to just not use it. So he has somehow managed to get things like the Gnome desktop to depend on it. In other words, people wouldn't adopt it willingly so it's being wedged in so it will be harder to pull it out and replace it.

Re:Critics should take positive action

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me set you straight:

• He wrote an init system that almost nobody liked and that many unrelated programs had to be be modified in order to work with, then started cramming all sorts of things which don't belong in an init system into it.
• He didn't agree with people's objections, told them that they were idiots and to fuck off, and continued development while completely ignoring input from almost everybody who would be affected.
• Distribution maintainers decided to replace init with systemd because Red Hat (for whom Pottering works) made sure that several large and important projects that they control depend on systemd, and since systemd is pretty much designed not to play well with others, basically had to either adopt it or drop those projects from their distributions.
• People will sometimes bully and threaten a person who acts like a bully. Color me surprised.

The discussions of systemd's technical discussions have happened, over and over. See point #2 above.

Re:Critics should take positive action

[Nemyst]

So what you're saying is that because an awful lot of prominent distros, and thus prominent developers, have decided that his software was the best tool for the job, people who don't like his software should resort to attacking him? Unless I'm missing something, he's not the one who chose to put his software into Debian, OpenSuse and Arch, he made it and promoted it; complain to the Debian guys if you don't like it, but don't hire a fucking hitman on him for crying out loud.

To put it briefly: there is no legitimacy to what those people are doing. It's not logical, it won't help anything, it's dangerous, it's deranged, it's scary.

Re:Critics should take positive action

[nctritech]

You can't fork everything (unless you're insane) and you damn sure can't maintain all those forks once you've made them. One person cannot write an entire modern operating system, even if that is the only thing they do with their time. If 5 important programs require systemd, your choices are to fork everything and perform major surgery (could take months), code something like uselessd as an empty surrogate, or welcome systemd as your new overlord.

Or go back to your Amiga, which is what we all should be doing anyway.

Re:Critics should take positive action

[JohnFen]

If you use Debian, trust it, and love it, and Debian has made this change, and you abhor the change, it's a good wakeup call opportunity. Most people will take this chance to say "perhaps I am on the wrong side of this issue" and then adjust accordingly.

Indeed. I use and love Debian, and this systemd thing certainly was a wakeup call to me. I'm now beginning the nontrivial effort required to move all my systems over to BSD.

Re:Critics should take positive action

[UnknownSoldier]

"You can take people out of politics,
But you can't take politics out of people."

Why?

Because politics is just another form of applied philosophy.

Re:Critics should take positive action

[BasilBrush]

So he has somehow managed to get things like the Gnome desktop to depend on it.

Well either he's got some incriminating photos of the Gnome developers, or the Gnome developers looked at systemd and found it's advantages outweighed the effort if would take to move from init.

Why do you think you know better than the Gnome developers what they should use?

Re:Critics should take positive action

[Barsteward]

wow, thats going to be an objective and rational site

Re:Critics should take positive action

[Barsteward]

"So he has somehow managed to get things like the Gnome desktop to depend on it." - you mean he sneaked some code in to Gnome to fool them?

Re:Critics should take positive action

[sjames]

For one, they never needed the dependency before. Then there's the KISS principle. Then there's the Unix way. Next up, it's not nice to leave people high and dry just because systemd won't run on their platform.

Of course, Gnome hasn't exactly endeared itself to the community lately.

Re:Critics should take positive action

[sjames]

Based on the amount of hate mail LP is getting, it may well be that a vocal minority DID decide everything and now the silent majority would like it's say.

Even better though would be to make the necessary changes that would allow systemd to co-exist as an option. Personally, I will happily forego both systemd and Gnome 3.

Re:Critics should take positive action

[npongratz]

Would you hire a hitman to kill her, then?

Hire a hitman to kill Debian? I know the Internet has everything, but where would one begin to look? In clonehappy's analogy, the wife is the distribution, not LP.

Besides, I don't know clonehappy, but I'm pretty sure clonehappy would never hire a hitman to kill Debian, LP, or anyone's wife. Strawmen have no place here. (Yeah, I know: "must be new here lol")

Re:Critics should take positive action

[PvtVoid]

losing Debian too was a hard blow, and it's understandable that systemd opponents are feeling a sense of desperation.

Really? You get "a sense of desperation" about a piece of software being different than you would like it to be? And you think this is a normal emotional reaction for a well-adjusted person?

Re:Critics should take positive action

[arth1]

It doesn't matter whether they are objective or not - what you can easily do is check the claims they make. They're verifiable and for the technical claims, falsifiable.

Dismissing something based on who is saying it is a fallacy.

Re:Critics should take positive action

[Bite The Pillow]

It would seem a discussion with the distro maintainers over the technical merits/deficiencies of systemd would be more in order. I've found the few open source projects I've followed more closely (NHibernate, automapper, PetaPoco) to be reasonably polite. Is Linux very different? Is it just the size/complexity that makes people jerks?

You are as correct as you are wrong.

People feel betrayed when large changes are made. It is easier to agree with someone who has a terrible argument, but is vocal. So people feel betrayed because other people say they should feel that way.

Windows XP is the Teletubby OS. Fallout 3 is about wandering around collecting bottlecaps. These statements catch on, and people state them religiously to explain what the people can't put into words - which is that they are confused.

When people are confused and can't articulate, they devolve into name calling and posturing, which triggers a primal response in the person they responded to, who feels attacked and responds (in) appropriately.

Now, anyone personally identifiable is a foaming shitsquirt, a cum covered fuckstack, and a ball-gargling one-person anal bat-smuggling operation. Because anger now has a target. A group is hard to blame, easier to dismiss. An identity, specifically a name, is really easy to attack.

People are jerks because they don't realize how emotionally attached to nonsense they are. People don't know how to express confusion, and they feel that they are on the right side of the argument without truly knowing what makes that true. Rarely, they are just not right in the head, like anger issues. But that is the outlier.

Re:Critics should take positive action

[See Attached]

What admin wants the clarity of /etc/init.d/* to disappear, and how clear is the difference between "telinit 3" and "systemctl isolate graphical.target"? Systemd needs to be more intuitive? Annexing Cron and Syslog seems heavy handed. Most admins value the control and the clarity of how it works. The new approach doesn't really match a consistent language pattern. This should be a system fork, instead of feeling like a hijack.

Re:Critics should take positive action

[Electricity Likes Me]

The silent majority can man up and do the development work. Or fork Gnome and maintain the changes. But that might involve learning to play nice with others to coordinate such an effort, rather then flaming one developer who by definition can't actually be responsible for distro-uptake of it.

Re: Critics should take positive action

[NormalVisual]

A fairly comprehensive list of perceived problems can be found here.

Re: Critics should take positive action

[NormalVisual]

What is being said isn't really that people hate Poettering, but that people disagree with a decision the Debian maintainers have made.

The problem is that the Debian folks (along with a lot of other distro maintainers) don't really have a choice. Recent versions of a lot of popular packages simply won't run without it due to a LOT of lobbying by Poettering and Red Hat, and most maintainers simply don't have the resources to fork everything that has those dependencies.

Re:Critics should take positive action

[NormalVisual]

Read it before you judge. They don't make any claim to be objective, but they *do* have rational and technically sound arguments against it.

Re:Critics should take positive action

[NormalVisual]

Unless I'm missing something, he's not the one who chose to put his software into Debian, OpenSuse and Arch, he made it and promoted it

No, but he and Red Hat pressured the maintainers for a lot of important packages (Gnome is probably the biggest) to include it as a dependency. If the distro maintainer wants to offer those packages, they either have to use systemd, excise the dependencies from all of the packages themselves (and then maintain all of those forks in perpetuity), or not include the package at all. No distro maintainer has those kinds of resources, so they're basically being forced to include it if they want to keep current on package releases.

Re:Critics should take positive action

[sjames]

What do you think Mate, Cinnimon, and Uselessd are?

Re:Critics should take positive action

[NormalVisual]

Personally, I will happily forego both systemd and Gnome 3.

I think this is probably what will end up happening. People will either switch to systemd-less distros and find a way to do without packages that have dependencies, or switch to other non-GNU systems like FreeBSD.

Re:Critics should take positive action

[rl117]

I'm also one of the people migrating to FreeBSD, and I'm not happy that I had to do so having 15 years invested in Debian as a user and developer. Not that I'm unhappy with FreeBSD, it's really very good. I'm unhappy with the fact that a small number of arrogant and abrasive people can steamroller in a large number of very controversial changes and in doing so removed many of the reasons I was using GNU/Linux in the first place. If the system has rapidly become something you find pleasure, satisfaction and utility in using and developing it, you're not going to continue using and developing it "just because", you're going to find something to replace it. And having to make that choice was not pleasant.

Re:Critics should take positive action

[PhilHibbs]

If you have skill to contribute, put the work in, if you don't have skills, put some work in and gain them.

Or, just support the people who are doing it the way you want it done. Not everyone has the time to get personally involved in the free software movement, but most of us can throw a few zlotti in the direction of the people that they like.

Re:Critics should take positive action

[CRCulver]

People fork distros all the time, it's not as dramatic as you make it sound.

Forking distros based on systemd would be dramatic. In the past, the Debian base was easily extendable to new needs, so one got a proliferation of distros like Ubuntu, Mint and Bodhi. However, someone today looking to extend Debian cannot simply remove systemd and keep everything else. Systemd is so integrated into the new Debian architecture that systemd opponents would have to start their own distro from scratch.

You also have Gentoo and other distros based on it not using systemd, like Funtoo.

While I've used Gentoo and enjoy some aspects of it, it hardly compares to Debian. Gentoo has never shaken off its reputation as at best a distro for people who want to spend a lot of time getting to know the internals of their system, and at worst as a ricer community. Debian and distros derived from, on the other hand, were able to make major inroads in the government and corporate sector.

You could also work with uselessd, whether on the project itself or work on adapting a distro to use it.

A few days ago the Debian administration ruled out any use of a systemd "substitute" (cancelling its own systemd-shim project for desktop users) and now requires systemd whole hog.

Re:Critics should take positive action

[Electricity Likes Me]

So what's the problem then?

Re:Critics should take positive action

[TangoMargarine]

When the entire software ecosystem is adopting it, yes.

How would you like it if the top 20 automakers in the world all suddenly decided to stop putting cupholders in vehicles?

Re:Critics should take positive action

[sjames]

The tons more work still required to replace the divot some rude asshole left in the fairway.

Re:Critics should take positive action

[BasilBrush]

No, those are your flimsy arguments. I asked why you think you know better than the developers of Gnome what components they should use.

Since you won't answer that, I'll answer for you: You don't.

Re:Critics should take positive action

[sjames]

I thought I might avoid writing a novel length answer tyhat way. If you are unable to follow my references to well understood principles that are violated by systemd, that's not my problem. I'm not going to spoon feed you.

Re: Critics should take positive action

[allquixotic]

Please stop linking to that website. I have taken in all the information on it, and yet I find systemd to be significantly easier to use than almost every other init system except Solaris' SMF (which has significant tradeoffs compared to systemd, so I'd consider it neither better nor worse). In both the RHEL7 and Debian Testing implementations, I find my system easier to diagnose, and I find it easier to set up new services when installing stuff (both from the package manager and from source).

I use GNU/Linux both as a desktop/laptop distro and for (headless) dedicated servers, and systemd has never once stood in the way of me getting shit done. In fact, it is better at that than any other init system I've ever used, and I distro shopped for a decade before I started to settle on Debian and CentOS as my main two (I also tried out all three main BSD variants -- Free, Open and Net -- and OpenSolaris).

Most of the criticisms on that site are completely immaterial to me because they're either philosophical, or the typical crybabying of "what about BSD?????". Well, now even the BSD folks can shut up, because uselessd is bcoming an actually useful piece of software that hopefully will maintain some degree of compatibility with systemd, as far as the integration points to systemd that other packages have to support. This should at least fix upstream GNOME3 on BSD.

The few valid technical arguments go along the lines of, "there are too many GNUisms in the code". Compiler and libc compatibility matters, so I can get behind that. But really, if you solely use GNU/Linux like I do, (and it's not even a "Red Hat" thing anymore with so many distros on the uptake), it's hard to consider this a priority. I'm glad that some people do, and have created uselessd as a result. Uselessd is the opposite of a parody, in my opinion: it's a confirmation that systemd is fundamentally useful and innovative; is here to stay; and is so useful that people want to implement at least some pieces of it on other OSes. More power to them!

Hopefully the uselessd developers will take their project in a direction that is pragmatic, resulting in a better overall init system. If they pull it off, the systemd developers might consider merging their work upstream, which is the ultimate compliment -- this happened with gcc, and now the gcc community is one big happy family. Mostly. Or at least a lot happier than before.

The work they're doing on uselessd is infinity percent better and more constructive than all you imbeciles sitting around complaining about something being "forced down your throat". FOSS, where forced obsolescence doesn't exist and licenses are free as in beer, and you talk about things being *forced* upon you? Fuck me. Go live in an actually oppressive society for a decade or so, and THEN you'll know the true definition of having something forced upon you. Everyone who thinks there is any sort of enforcement going on about using systemd needs to live in North Korea until they actually understand the words that come out of their own mouths.

Re: Critics should take positive action

[Em Adespoton]

The problem is that the Debian folks (along with a lot of other distro maintainers) don't really have a choice. Recent versions of a lot of popular packages simply won't run without it due to a LOT of lobbying by Poettering and Red Hat, and most maintainers simply don't have the resources to fork everything that has those dependencies.

The point is... they DO have a choice. Recent versions of popular packages won't run without it? Recent versions don't get included in Debian. Suddenly, recent versions get tweaked by their maintainers so that they'll get included in Debian/Ubuntu.

Really... if Red Hat is going to pull a Wal Mart, Debian can do the same thing, and be much more effective about it.

Re: Critics should take positive action

[NormalVisual]

Recent versions of popular packages won't run without it? Recent versions don't get included in Debian. Suddenly, recent versions get tweaked by their maintainers so that they'll get included in Debian/Ubuntu.

In an ideal world, yes. I think what's more likely is that people will move to a distro that *does* include the packages they need, and it seems the distro maintainers believe this as well. Otherwise there would be a lot more pushback regarding systemd dependencies.

Re:Critics should take positive action

[jwhitener]

Just out of curiosity about JonhFen and rl117, what size of environment are you moving?

I haven't found any 'enterprise' level operations switching away (say, over 200 servers). All the sysadmins I talk with basically said "Eh... stuff changes, I'll deal with it.".

Re:Critics should take positive action

[rl117]

I'm a programmer rather than a sysadmin so I don't personally maintain many systems, and it's not my primary interest. I'm mainly using them as a platform for software development.

At home I have a small number of systems used for Debian work: a fileserver and several development/test systems of different architectures. The fileserver is FreeBSD10/ZFS. The rest now all run FreeBSD, some also dual booting with Debian or run Debian kFreeBSD or regular FreeBSD in jails for various tasks, mainly clean build envs.

At work we've recently set up a FreeBSD10 jenkins node for CI building/testing under vmware, but this is primarily to test the llvm/clang toolchain since we test on a wide number of platforms (it's also a good proxy for MacOS clang testing since it can run the debugger over ssh which is no longer possilble on MacOS without jumping through many annoying hoops). We primarily use CentOS6/RHEL6 and Ubuntu LTS for all the other physical and virtual machines, and I don't think there will be any move to FreeBSD at present (I'm sure we won't be adopting CentOS7/RHEL7 in a hurry, though we may deploy it in a VM in the next few months for compatiblity testing, but not for anything serious).

Butt-hurt

[buckfeta2014]

He's just butt-hurt that Gentoo won't make systemd it's default init manager.

Re:Butt-hurt

[rwven]

Yes, I'm sure he's very upset at the rejection by all 10 people who use Gentoo.

Re:Butt-hurt

[arth1]

Unfortunately, even in Gentoo it is now hard to avoid systemd. It sneaks in through dependencies.
At the very least, you need to add sys-apps/systemd and sys-fs/udev to package.mask, and add -udev to the use flags of x11-base/xorg-server. And if memory serves me right, stay at an older version of nfs-utils that won't try to integrate with systemd.

Re:Butt-hurt

[gweihir]

Indeed. And with good reason. As soon as long-term support for the last Debian versions without mandatory systemd runs out, I am going to move my servers over. Already have a test installation.

Re:Butt-hurt

[SlashdotOgre]

I disagree that it's hard; all it really takes is a USE="-systemd" in make.conf and a hard mask of systemd in package.mask

Also you're misinformed about udev, xorg-server, & nfs-utils; I am running the latest in ~amd64 with the following use flags and no issues:

[ebuild R ] sys-fs/udev-216 USE="acl firmware-loader gudev kmod -doc -introspection (-selinux) -static-libs" ABI_X86="(64) -32 (-x32)" 3530 KiB
[ebuild R ] net-fs/nfs-utils-1.3.0-r1 USE="ipv6 libmount nfsidmap nfsv4 tcpd uuid -caps -kerberos -nfsdcld -nfsv41 (-selinux)" 0 KiB
[ebuild R ] x11-base/xorg-server-1.16.1:0/1.16.1 USE="glamor ipv6 nptl suid udev xnest xorg xvfb -dmx -doc -kdrive -minimal (-selinux) -static-libs -systemd -tslib -unwind -wayland" 0 KiB

The only systemd related issue I can think of is that upower (used for suspend/resume from a desktop environment by a non-root use) had been displaced by systemd. This issue was quickly fixed by the Gentoo team by replacing upower with upower-pm-utils (more info here which fixed the issue.

Re:Butt-hurt

[remi2402]

As a Gentoo dev, your comment made me chuckle (though I'm sadly out of mod points). I know we're a small community - both dev and user - with an ever sticky reputation of having ricer users (http://funroll-loops.org/ anyone? though the site looks dead).

Back on topic, he does seem to like singling Gentoo out, and has done so on numerous occasions (including TFA).

Why Gentoo in particular? Beats me. Maybe it's because of eudev (I don't know anyone running it)? Maybe it's because OpenRC is still the default? Maybe it's because he's been trolled by someone "representing" the entire Gentoo community? I really don't know, but I definitely don't like have mud slung at the entire project/distribution when we have 200+ active developers.

Re:Butt-hurt

[TeknoHog]

Yes, I'm sure he's very upset at the rejection by all 10 people who use Gentoo.

Wouldn't it be simpler to say "both" rather than "all 10"?

Re:Butt-hurt

[arth1]

[ebuild R ] sys-fs/udev-216 USE="acl firmware-loader gudev kmod -doc -introspection (-selinux) -static-libs" ABI_X86="(64) -32 (-x32)" 3530 KiB

You're using the systemd udev, patched to remove most (but not all) of the systemd integration. You also get goodies like UnpredictableNetworkInterfaceNames with that one.

eudev is the non-systemd alternative.
# qfile $(which udevd)
sys-fs/eudev (/sbin/udevd)

Re:Butt-hurt

[Rich0]

++

It does feel like we get a lot of anti-systemd types on the lists, and perhaps that is because they don't have too many other places to go. The trolling really isn't welcome either way, but it is a pain to deal with.

I do think that singling out Gentoo is a bit unfair. Really, Gentoo is about choice and diversity, so we end up with users who don't want to use anything GPL, users who don't want to run glibc, users who run prefix on OSX, and so on. Basically you end up with a lot of non-mainstream users, because we're about the only show in town which makes being non-mainstream a practical option.

Re:Butt-hurt

[Rich0]

If you're going to take the line that "udev is systemd" then sure, it takes more work to avoid it. Of course, Gentoo is about the only distro that even makes that an option on Linux.

Honestly, eudev isn't really all that different from udev. The build system is different, and it has some preferences codified as defaults like not having the new network names. I don't really get the excitement, but whatever floats your boat - Gentoo is used in a bazillion one-off configs which is basically its raison d'être... :)

In the spotlight

[just_another_sean]

Most of what he's complaining about is undeserved (hiring a hit on him, WTF?) but he's not exactly known to be very diplomatic in his communications. He is, with a heavy hand, changing the fundamental landscape of a lot of people's favorite OS. This is upsetting people, in a big way in some cases. Again, constructive criticism is the way to handle dislike of systemd and his other projects, not death threats or even simple, juvenile insults.

But he shares some of the blame when it comes to the vitriolic nature of systemd discussions. He can't just brush off a large percentage of the community and not expect people to get upset.

What blows my mind is that every single major distribution seems to be hopping on the systemd bandwagon. I'm looking squarely at Debian. The short time systemd (relatively speaking) has been around and has been worked on and debugged does not justify it's inclusion in a system that's known for stability and correctness over latest/greatest.

Oh well, for me it was the kick in the head I needed to finally getting around to 100% embracing *BSD as a server system and not as something to play around with in my free time.

Re:In the spotlight

[jbolden]

Since when did Linux become known for stability and avoidance of latest/greatest? When exactly was it that Linux became a legacy style OS? Linux has generally seen itself as quite progressive. In fact all of Unix has.

You would be much happier with: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/...

Re:In the spotlight

[amorsen]

He is plenty good at dealing out abuse himself. Interacting with him is not a pleasant experience.

Re:In the spotlight

[suutar]

That is, as it happens, part of the issue: Poettering's view of Linux is not Unix-y.

Re:In the spotlight

[Kielistic]

So you started your post claiming that stating he "shares the blame" is victim blaming and ended it with "responsibility isn't a zero-sum game". Which is it?

Re:In the spotlight

[AmiMoJo]

I'm pretty sure he never tried to raise funds for a hit on someone though.

Re:In the spotlight

[buchner.johannes]

Since when did Linux become known for stability and avoidance of latest/greatest? When exactly was it that Linux became a legacy style OS?

He was talking about Debian, which is generally a long-term, server operating system, unless you use the unstable/testing branches.

Re:In the spotlight

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is another way of saying you don't know, so why are you bothering to comment?

Re:In the spotlight

[geminidomino]

I'm sure that no one tried to take out a hit on him either.

Welcome to the internet, where stupid people say stupid shit, and, protip: not all of it is actually true.

Re:In the spotlight

[radish]

He wrote some software, you weren't charged for it and it's existence doesn't affect anyone. Your anger, if it exists, should be directed to those forcing you to use it. Who are "no-one" or "your distro maintainers" depending on your POV.

Re:In the spotlight

[ustolemyname]

I apologize, I didn't make myself clear enough to justify that paradox, that apparent contradiction. My point about responsibility being a zero sum game was more about how even though A did actions that enabled B to do C does not mean B is not wholly responsible for C (Though A may also be partially, or wholly responsible. Or not).

Let me give you some other examples of non-zero sum responsibility. One can:

• Prevent theft by being poor.
• Never be cheated on by always being single.
• Not die in a plane crash by never flying.
• Avoid criticism by never doing anything noteworthy.

  • In the first three situations it would be common to blame the thief, the unfaithful, and the airline. But one can't deny the theoretical control the first party has. Just because one can be responsible for an end result (here, rubbing people the wrong way) does not imply one is accountable for the negative consequences of same (reciprocation with hateful, and harmful actions).

    Really I just found how the structure of this conversation parallels conversations I've been involved in recently regarding gender and IT, and was trying to explore the "Maybe sexism would be a step in the right direction," angle, as it at least implies acceptance of an external group of people. I think often people of our ilk tend to be dismissive and derogatory toward those who reach a different conclusion based on values we disagree with, such as the creators of systemd and their opponents who clearly value different things at this point, to the point where they can't even agree on what those different things are).

Re:In the spotlight

[Anonymous Coward]

> old SysVinit scripts are still supported unaltered

Except of course ... when it ignores the SysV init scripts. But I'm sure that was just a small technicality, and on the 6th boot they would have ran.

Re:In the spotlight

[jmv]

There's a difference between attacking a piece of software and attacking the author. I personally have no opinion on systemd (hell, I don't even know what init system I'm running atm), but I feel like any complaint people have should be directed at whoever *chose* systemd, rather than who wrote it. You can't blame someone for writing software. If you don't like it, don't use it and/or tell distros not to use it.

Re:In the spotlight

[phantomfive]

What blows my mind is that every single major distribution seems to be hopping on the systemd bandwagon. I'm looking squarely at Debian.

SystemD has features that people (especially distro builders) want. The main problem is that the SystemD design is horrible.

However, the features are good enough that even with a horrible implementation, SystemD has been adopted (by people with no taste, but that is my opinion).

Re:In the spotlight

[jbolden]

OK well if it is Debian specifically, Debian has been an advocate for Gnome since its creation. Debian has been a meta distribution behind the big desktop operation systems: Ubuntu, Mint, KNOPPIX, Kantonix, Mepis.... The meta distribution aspects have been more important to Debian than the distribution itself for at least 15 years.

So even with Debian the statement is untrue.

Re:In the spotlight

[gweihir]

He is not a victim. Quite the opposite. He executes (so far successful) a rather problematic embrace-and-extend attack on a major critical component of most Linux distros. It is absolutely no surprise some people go overboard in attacking him, juvenile as that may be.

Re:In the spotlight

[jbolden]

Gnome 3 is stable and including Gnome is not going to make Debian unstable.

Re:In the spotlight

[jbolden]

The family of Linuxes in general is not a highly stable OS. Some are more stable than others but none are terribly stable. They are mostly less stable than the commercial Unixes which are mostly less stable than other server OSes.

Re:In the spotlight

[bingoUV]

No, Ubuntu, Mint, KNOPPIX.... are meta distributions based on Debian - as they are distributions of the distribution called Debian. Debian is just a distribution.

And no, they have never been more important to Debian than itself as a distribution. They merely acknowledge the meta distributions - which some other base distributions don't.

Re:In the spotlight

[jbolden]

The sheer size of the distribution can be inconvenient: it is really unreasonable to distribute 70 CD-ROMs to install a complete version on a standard PC This is why Debian is increasingly considered as a “meta-distribution”, from which one extracts more specific distributions intended for a particular public: From Debian handbook: http://debian-handbook.info/br...

Re:In the spotlight

[jbolden]

Linus' point there was that the API should be stable for Linux but he was not going to support stability in the ABI. It was a revolt against stability per Sun, Microsoft... who worked hard to make sure binaries were stable. It was the exact opposite.

Now two errors on top of that. Things in UserSpace break other stuff in UserSpace. Like upgrading GCC versions.

Second in general Systemd doesn't break UserSpace applications. Init doesn't support advanced functionality. So for most applications the distribution simply removes or ignores the init file and creates a systemd entry. For those that do invoke advanced functionality it might require a bit more work, but they are the ones getting the features from systemd and enjoying its good points.

Re:In the spotlight

[AmiMoJo]

There was a site on Tor that allowed you to set up a hit on someone and take BitCoin donations towards it. Whoever carried out the hit with proof could then claim the coins. I don't know if it is still running, but his name was definitely on it, along side Obama and many others.

Re:In the spotlight

[Kielistic]

The parent post was pretty clear that death threats and juvenile insults were not okay. Merely that he behaved in a way that was sure to increase tension. It isn't about doing or not doing something noteworthy.

Sometimes the best way to refute ideas is by showing how absurd they are with humour by making fun of them. I can certainly see an idea about increasing sexism being one of them.

Re:In the spotlight

[bingoUV]

From third party derived distributions point of view - Ubuntu, Knoppix etc., Debian is not meta. From Debian owned branches like educational, media etc., it is.

And third party derived distributions have never been more important than Debian (including sub-projects, of course) itself.

Re:In the spotlight

[jbolden]

Debian abstracts the particular distributions. Ubuntu doesn't abstract Debian. And supporting the 3rd party distributions like Ubuntu has been Debian's primary mission for about 17 years. One can argue about whether Ubuntu is more important or not, but no question in the aggregate they see the distribution support as more important than direct support. They are happy to have people using Debian as a distribution, but if Debian the distribution ceased to exist and Debian just became a service arm for downstream distributions that wouldn't be a total loss for them.

Re:In the spotlight

[TangoMargarine]

If (the software was actually good) or (it was opt-in) or (he listened to people) this wouldn't be a problem.

It sounds like the reason for the furor is that A ^ B ^ C = false.

Re:In the spotlight

[TangoMargarine]

Gah. Just totally shot my point in the foot.

*A | B | C.

Re:In the spotlight

[just_another_sean]

Anger would be too strong a word. I am, disappointed, yes, that's the word I'm looking for, in Debian as I already expressed in my post.

My solution is not to bitch at LP or the good folks at Debian who faithfully donate their time and effort. My solution is to switch to BSD. Specifically, for now until I get more time to play around and test my needs against the OS, that's OpenBSD.

How did you get that I was angry in my post?

Re:In the spotlight

[bingoUV]

And supporting the 3rd party distributions like Ubuntu has been Debian's primary mission for about 17 years.

You have repeated this lie multiple times now. But it remains a lie.

Re:In the spotlight

[F.Ultra]

And when does this happen? I haven't experienced it.

Normal everywhere

[John Jamieson]

Well, as someone who seems to pride himself on being unconventional and breaking the status quo, you would think he would understand the position HE put HIMSELF in.

This happens everywhere, I architect'd some stuff for a company using SQL Server and SSRS that was almost free, others in the organization wanted to continue using DB2 and Cognos for millions more $$. Do you really think I had an easy time? I had subtle threats, and plenty of well connected people trying to get rid of me.

So what? If you can't take the heat, keep with convention!

Re:Normal everywhere

[Jason Levine]

There's push back and then there's going over the line. People saying "X should be fired for advocating this position"? Fine. They are expressing their opinion. People saying "I'm never using SOFTWARE_PACKAGE again because of the changes X made"? Also fine. Calling for someone to physically hurt X? Not fine at all. I don't mind if this person is calling for Linux to be sold to Microsoft, raising money to hire a hit-man to take him out is NOT acceptable. Anyone who thinks it is, has a serious bug in their moral compass.

Re:Normal everywhere

[Provocateur]

raising money to hire a hit-man to take him out is NOT acceptable

What made it extreme was the use of bitcoin *ducks*

Re:Normal everywhere

[sjames]

Yes, the whole hitman thing is over the top (and in fact is a crime if they move beyong the internet tough guy stage).

Re:Normal everywhere

[Jason Levine]

I'd say actively raising money qualifies as moving beyond Internet tough guy into actual law breaking. Even if they say "we're going to use this money to hire a hit-man to kill him" and don't actually do it (using the money for pizza and computer equipment instead) then they're likely breaking laws by raising money under the guise of using it to harm someone. The people contributing are likely breaking the law as well.

Granted, knowing how tech-savvy your average police department is and that they are using bit-coins, I doubt any of the people contributing will be charged. Unless they go around bragging online about it though. (Which they just might given the online climate.)

Re:Normal everywhere

[sjames]

I agree. Those people crossed the line.

Re:Normal everywhere

[Bite The Pillow]

My most recent sporting event was filled with people expressing their anger and frustration by asking one team to "crush", "kill", "smash", and other unpleasant things to the other team.

Is one expression metaphorical and the other obviously not? Is it a serious threat just because someone took the time to write it as opposed to shouting it? Is rage forgivable simply because people are in a group setting where it could develop into mob behavior, and not forgivable because an individual is ranting from his mom's basement?

I'm not going to defend raising money for a hit-man, but I'm also not going to assume the person raising money would have been able to 1) raise the money or 2) find a hitman who isn't law enforcement or 3) complete the deal.

Linux advocates are as much about faith and anger as religious nuts calling for God to strike down anyone they disagree with. It is religious level belief, and you can read the same level of fervor in the replies to Lennart, as you can in Christian replies to pro-Islam, or even pro-tolerance. The glee in response to the Left Behind trailers, and Christians celebrate all of the non-believers suffering is exactly the same as the blind rage towards someone replacing core functionality of major linux distributions.

So, considering that most sports fans, many religious people, basically a huge percentage of people have the same defective moral compass, where does that leave us? Anger is anger, and venting is venting, and it will continue because people don't know when to stop talking, or stop typing, and they say things they don't mean.

How would I feel if I were Lennart? Understandably frightened, and I would feel a responsibility at exposing the poor manners of the community. But that's emotion again. As an impassive observer, I have to note that it is statistically very unlikely that anything would come of this, and very confident that all of this is just venting and bluster.

Are open source community members assholes? When you are the object of anger, yes. In other words, the open source community is full of people. Real people, with real emotions, and a real inability to rationally discuss what they are most passionate about.

To be clear, actually raising money for a hit man is not acceptable. Claiming to raise money symbolically is not the same as actually raising money for a hit man, but it can be a very effective way of bluster. As the money piles up and the anger cools, I'd be more likely to believe in a plot I hadn't heard about, than a plot I had heard about.

Re:Normal everywhere

[Electricity Likes Me]

To be fair Bitcoin people are there own special brand of crazy. There's a whole bunch of "bitcoin to kill X" schemes out there. One can only hope that law enforcement crushes them for conspiracy to murder (would be an interesting prosecution to say the least).

Re:Normal everywhere

[TangoMargarine]

Hopefully they'll raise the whole total and then donate it to some kid's ass cancer charity at the last moment. Then they get arrested for the reasons you gave.

Hail Eris

Stay out of our business then.....

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't be neutral here....

Neutral people aren't the ones getting flack......

YOU came in and wrecked OUR init system. We tried telling you we didn't want it. Still you persevere.

Back when I did development using libMicroHttpd (a C-library for an embeddable webserver) I was finding code snippets while googling with libmicrohttpd inside of systemd repositories. I realized without even looking at SystemD that it was retarded to put a freaking embedded webserver inside the init system..... You really think there's no vulnerabilities in that library?

All I wanted is to avoid using stuff that has no track record of security or audits. I don't want to just "trust you". But you ran and got your stinking pile integrated with RedHat which means now all my C++ code in linux has to account for your stupid init system because RedHat is everywhere and I always find new clients using it.

So now thanks to you, I have to start working on migrating big fortune 10 customers off of RedHat because frankly I'm going to refuse to support it moving forward. Not from thinkheaded people who PUT WEBSERVERS INTO THE INIT SYSTEM! Do I even need to say more?

We want you to quit trashing things we all love and share. SystemD folks have this idea that I'm wrong if I don't want to change everything I have documented and validated on MISSION CRITICAL systems that literally dictate life or death in some circumstances. But you are happy to come in and throw 20 features I never wanted but now are liabilities.

Also I am a Gentoo user as a developer and even though I use OpenRC I recently had to rebuild a Gentoo box due to @world updates pulling in systemd so you've personally fucked me on an OS that doesn't even run systemd by default. That was YOUR fault. Thanks.

For that I can clearly say FUCK YOU.

Re:Stay out of our business then.....

[jbolden]

fortune 10 customers off of RedHat because frankly I'm going to refuse to support

Yeah I'm sure you are the ones setting governance IT standards for the worlds largest companies.

Re:Stay out of our business then.....

[F.Ultra]

And the reason for including libmicrohttpd is so that people can get http access to their log files. This is only used by the journald gateway deamon (so not by systemd at all) and also only if you explicitly enable it with "systemctl enable systemd-journal-gatewayd.service". I think you have to practice your Google-fu a bit there pal.

Re:Stay out of our business then.....

[TheSunborn]

Sorry, but that is just wrong. He wrote a better(Or worse, depending on who you ask. I would say better) init system, but the decision to use it and thus to wrack your* init system was taken by the different Linux distributions.

*And no it's not your init system. Using something does not make it yours. It would only be yours if you had your own distribution, and in that case you could continue to use what ever backward init system you wanted.

Re:Stay out of our business then.....

[Cramer]

Right, the "journal"... a f'ing binary log version of syslog. The issue isn't one of enabled or not, but that the systemd init system (and journald is part of it) CONTANS A FUCKING WEB SERVER! What better evidence of bloat do you need?

And why did RedHat "choose" systemd? Because they had very little choice... udev has been eaten by it, and GNOME requires it. Why is everyone else joining them? Because RH is so huge, everyone is now tooling their init support for systemd and dropping the old sysvinit shell scripts, so you become one with this crap or build your own little universe where you have to maintain init scripts for *EVERYTHING* and a mountain of growing systemd removal patches.

(And then in a few years LP will grow bored of systemd and find something else to ruin, leaving yet another steaming pile for others to clean up, rewrite, or hopefully just f'ing abandon.)

Re:Stay out of our business then.....

[grcumb]

And the reason for including libmicrohttpd is so that people can get http access to their log files.

I read that a few times and I still do do a Poe's Law double take at the end.

This is only used by the journald gateway deamon (so not by systemd at all)

But by 'not systemd at all' you mean, 'by one of the few core packages that cannot be removed from systemd?

and also only if you explicitly enable it with "systemctl enable systemd-journal-gatewayd.service".

Yes, because unsafe code lying available on the system has never been made part of a compromise originating from another source. Or are you okay with losing the crown jewels as long as someone else takes part of the blame?

I think you have to practice your Google-fu a bit there pal.

Google can't cure your brand of refusal to come to grips with reality, chum.

Re:Stay out of our business then.....

[cas2000]

And why did RedHat "choose" systemd? Because they had very little choice... udev has been eaten by it, and GNOME requires it.

No, it's exactly the opposite. RedHat owns systemd and gnome and udev. udev was merged into systemd and gnome depends on systemd because RH wants to own linux.

Why is everyone else joining them?

because they want to use udev and gnome and have little or no choice.

Re:Stay out of our business then.....

[TheDarkMaster]

I never have mod points when I find the really good comments. But, well said.

Re:Stay out of our business then.....

[reve_etrange]

I realized without even looking at SystemD that it was retarded to put a freaking embedded webserver inside the init system...

This made me wonder if the AC was full of it or not. But, yes, it's true. Systemd embeds a webserver and a QR encoder.

Despite the fact that the there is a "risk of enabling the service by mistake (which, given that journal-gatewayd will happily serve private log data to the whole internet AFAICS, is has a pretty bad impact in this particular case)," (emphasis mine) the thread is quickly derailed to a series of unrelated discussions ignoring the issue raised by the user in the first message.

I guess this is a microcosm of what is pissing people off about systemd and its development...

Re:Stay out of our business then.....

[F.Ultra]

The init system is not not a part of it at all. The journald gateway deamon is a separate binary that does one thing and only one thing: it allows http access to the local log files. If the daemon does not run, which it doesn't unless it's manually activated, then it has no impact what so ever. So NO, the init system or even journald does not contain a web server.

Re:Stay out of our business then.....

[F.Ultra]

So you just do not have a clue do you? If you even bothered to do any form of search you would have found out that it works exactly like I wrote. There is no httpd server in the systemd binaries, none in the journald binaries. But in a very specific binary called the journald gateway daemon, which have a single function (i.e expose the local logs via http). If you don't run that daemon (which is the default) then you won't run any http server at all no matter how much you cry about it. And if an attacker could start this daemon to get acccess to your holy log files, then you have other security issues with your set up that is way way worse. But don't let reality get in your way pal.

Re:Which is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the majority of people aren't assholes and, presumably, don't enjoy this treatment, why do they keep the assholes around?

Cuz madz codingz skillz brah.

Lennart Poettering: Take a read... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

Go easy man - those doing that to you are unskilled little wannabes, nothing more.

That's all I've got to say to the guy that wrote that crap to & about you (other than Linus T., whose style I actually LIKE & RESPECT - there's no political correct bullshit involved in it that's why, & IF you get it from him? You'd only have to PROVE HIM WRONG, conclusively - he'd eat it & shut up):

So, I suppose it all boils down to this (regarding your detractors):

Consider the source (those doing the crap you noted Lennart)!

Hey - Happens to me HERE on /. ALL THE TIME (lol, well, quite a lot) http://news.slashdot.org/comme... calling me a pedo, saying I ought to be hanged etc. from "trolls" (worms is more like it that post by ac since I've obviously ANNIHILATED them before with logic &/or facts - so that's all they have - showing us all they're effete punks).

* So, do I *like* it? No - NOBODY likes to be libeled, after all...

Still, however, it helps me prove a point: That THAT type of crap directed MY WAY by those doing it means that's "The best they've got" (which ain't much)...

APK

P.S.=> Source of that type of crap that occurs for me here QUITE A LOT? (e.g./i.e. from the link above, in calling me a pedophile etc. & that I like to rape children, all lies/false bullshit from some PUNY WORM, lol)?

It was merely due to my posting on the efficacy of hosts + their superiority over competing "so-called 'solutions'" that suck in "Almost ALL Ads Blocked", here on downwards http://news.slashdot.org/comme...

(Where all I did was post facts - ones SO well thought-out, that libeling me is the BEST my "detractors/naysayers" have - which prove MY points solid & unassailable... & THAT? Is all I need to know, & the trolls' effete "reactions" show it & prove that to me)... apk

Re:Lennart Poettering: Take a read... apk

[Delicious Pun]

+1 Funny

in the spirit of open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Please RTFA, he is saying people even make life threats. Tell me, how making your own community makes you immune to threat from people in other communities? Does Red Hat not have it's own community and it fights with Ubuntu people sometimes? Aren't religions different communities, yet you see extremists from one community do horrible things to others because they are NOT of their community? It's not a thing of "I want to be married by church but they don't accept gay marriage", it's "The KKK burned down my house because I kissed my significant other in the park".

This has been a long time in the making...

[davydagger]

This post has been a long time in the making, as Leonart is easily the most hated programmer in Free software, despite being one of the more competant and forward thinking of the bunch, he pulls a disproporiate amount of hate until he has become a running joke. Most of his haters are misguided luddites who are too obessed with the past, and cannot look towards the future.

I am supprised we haven't seen anything like this previous, and I don't know how the man deals with just being leonart poettering.

Re:This has been a long time in the making...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because he's an egotistical ass. He loves the attention, and he loves rubbing his superior coding skills in the face of his detractors.

Re:This has been a long time in the making...

[DamnOregonian]

I don't know. Certainly he doesn't deserve what is being dealt to him, but I find it a stretch to call him one of the more competent and forward thinking. Whatever prof gave him his CS degree should be punched in the balls, metaphorically speaking.

Hey may be competent at writing instructions into an editor and making it do what he wants, but as a software engineer, he is miserable. He's also a pretentious douche bag to deal with.

Re:This has been a long time in the making...

[davydagger]

He's also a pretentious douche bag to deal with.

I guess its hard to keep a level head when half the scene hates you.

Re:This has been a long time in the making...

[DamnOregonian]

You are probably (I'd like to hope) right. I can't honestly say if he was that way before the controversy started.

Re:This has been a long time in the making...

[JohnFen]

despite being one of the more competant and forward thinking of the bunch

Wait, he is? What do you base that on? From my experience with his major projects, it's hard to find either great competence or effective forward-thinking...

Re:This has been a long time in the making...

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

I don't know. Certainly he doesn't deserve what is being dealt to him, but I find it a stretch to call him one of the more competent

It does if by competent you mean start a project, convince enough people to make it standard in linux distros then leave it half finished...

Re:This has been a long time in the making...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Most of his haters are misguided luddites who are too obessed with the past, and cannot look towards the future.

Most of his haters are well informed old timers who are too well versed in what works, and sound engineering principles to be blinded by mindless and poorly architected futurism

Re:This has been a long time in the making...

[Trogre]

Please don't confuse disruptive innovations with forward-thinking ones.

Re:This has been a long time in the making...

[gweihir]

"More competent"? Have you looked at what he currently creates and what he has messed up before? Seriously, this guy is doing it wrong and people with actual technical understanding (unlike the fanbois that will cheer for everything "new") have a major issue with handing a major part of the critical infrastructure of most Linux distros to a megalomaniac with mediocre technological skills.

Re:This has been a long time in the making...

[Zontar The Mindless]

He's a prima donna who thinks he knows more than what a few million developers and sysadmins have learnt since before he was a zygote.

He also makes it clear he wants to toss POSIX out the window in favour of "whatever I decide is best", which doesn't sit well with lots of folks. Including me.

Re:This has been a long time in the making...

[AntiSol]

10 projects looks a hell of a lot better on your resume than 1 does. HR people are not going to look at your bugzilla.

"The Internet is full of deranged people, ..."

[rstanley]

And this individual is obviously one of the worst! I was not familiar with the name before this, but am familiar with the projects he has worked on. Linus may have his temper, but he has good intentions, and is usually right when he does yell at someone! Poettering just rants. I don't advocate physical violence against anyone for any reason, even him. I have NEVER heard of physical threats against ANYONE in the Free software/Open source community until now. If he has been threatened, he brought this upon himself.

"I have no intentions to ever talk about this again on a public forum." Thank goodness for this!!! ;^)

If he feels this stongly against Linux, and the Open Source community, then perhaps he should leave Red Hat and move to Redmond Washington. He might be happier working for a certain company located there! ;^) I am glad I don't work for Red Hat, and don't have to deal with him, or listen to his rants on a daily basis, as I expect some have to endure.

Nothing to do with Open Source

[tuppe666]

This is entirely to do with breaking something popular; something that worked well. In truth I think pulseaudio is wonderful...but I haven't forgotten the breakages for many, even if the fault laid elsewhere(Ubuntu and Audio) drivers. I am pretty ambivalent about systemd, but I understand why *faster* startup is important. Overall my experience is better for Lennart, but again this is not about Open source, but major changes/regressions for little gains...worthwhile only historically. It pisses people off.

This really raises questions why Apple under Jobs an obvious competitor can release irreparably faulty(Antergate,Bendgate...a little thanks to Verge, Camera problems) buggy products and have it defended, Releasing Buggy/Incomplete Products(Maps/iOS8) or even slowing down products that worked to unworkable(every version of iOS on every iPhone)

Maybe the real problem is Marketing or transparency or community involvement whatever stops the users(Developers) feeling helpless (Jobs would smile in a turtleneck and say you don't want those droids) to being forced to suffer major inconveniences. I object to Lennart kicking back at what seems like an ungrateful community(sic), but really its a cry for support in an area he (and Mr Cook) don't have.

That said what a man.

It's not the open source community ..

[Kardos]

it's people in general. Anyone remotely famous gets plenty of "internet abuse". It's a side effect of being known. Politicians? check. CEOs? check. Bankers? check. Celebrities? check. Religious leaders? check. Reporters? check. Whistleblowers? check.

Re:Well.. That sucks

[0dugo0]

Yes we care, too bad the bitcoin address isn't in the summary.

Re:Because you suck

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey now! This is /., the only suckage you're allowed to discuss is /.beta

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Dearest Lennart,

You can always go to work for those who adore your thinking - Microsoft and Google.

If it looks like the whole world is hurling itself against you? Maybe your headed the wrong direction into oncoming traffic.

I don't excuse boorishness or violence - but Linus and Alan Cox never got this level of treatment. Not even Hans Reiser for his obtuseness, nor Bruce Perens for his ability to scrap in an argument.

Look at the problem in the mirror. Before your friends need to call an intervention.

bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[Thud457]

He's defiling everything we hold dear.
Are you sure he doesn't work for Microsoft?

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[Barsteward]

you don't have to use it, its just the default for a lot of distros

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[qpqp]

you don't have to use it, unless you want to use anything gnome...

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[exomondo]

you don't have to use it, unless you want to use anything gnome...

Then fork Gnome, that's the whole point of open source! If there really are that many people upset about this and it isn't just a vocal minority then a fork would quickly supplant the systemd-dependent version.

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[qpqp]

You seem to misunderstand that this whole story goes against the unix philosophy and that's what makes people so upset.
You need gdm? Too bad, now you need systemd too. You just want to use the GIMP? Better have systemd. Wanna start systemd as a user instance to handle the hard dependency? No, fuck you user, you need to boot from systemd to do that.
I personally care little about this as my GUI of choice is Aqua, but it's a sad chain of events.
Want to push systemd for the desktop? Fine, but leave the users a choice. That's the nice thing to do.
But don't you ever even think about imposing this bloated piece of crap on my servers, or I'll just switch to something that works (slackware, gentoo, xBSD, etc.).

I don't have the time to fork, I'll just switch to something that works. And many others will too, and this is what's bad for the community.

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[exomondo]

It does leave users a choice, it's the same choice the users always had when the developer of the software they used moved in a direction they didn't like. But from an average user's perspective I doubt very much they would even notice change to systemd much less have an opinion on it.

I don't have the time to fork, I'll just switch to something that works.

And this is why the user is still effectively just as trapped with open source software as they are with proprietary software, the whole philosophy is built around the user having control but in reality the task is not practically achievable and people can't be bothered so when it doesn't work the way they want to they switch to something else rather than doing work to change it.

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[qpqp]

switch to something else rather than doing work to change it.

All because of some assholes that wanted to decide for everyone else.

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[exomondo]

You mean the systemd guys, the gnome guys and distro guys? They didn't decide for everyone else, in fact some of the biggest distros (Slackware and Gentoo for example) don't use it or have it only as an option.

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[qpqp]

Did they ask their communities, or did they decide over their head? Come on now. Why should I have to switch systems, just because someone decided to break things, instead of going with the philosophy that built these communities?

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[exomondo]

Did they ask their communities, or did they decide over their head?

You should already know the answer to that question.

Why should I have to switch systems, just because someone decided to break things, instead of going with the philosophy that built these communities?

Obviously because it is not your project, you are just a user. What exactly do you provide to them such that they should do what you want?

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[qpqp]

How do you consider this even an argument? Why do I have to provide them with something? There's a huge userbase that doesn't want this change. Whether it's huge in numbers, or huge in brain-power I can't tell you, but a lot of smart people don't like this change. You can read all about it on the internets, hear about it on the IRCs, or and see elaborate discourse on the place we don't talk about, due to Rule #1 of this place we don't talk about, as well as other venues and forums.
I'm sure you can find some examples around.
To come back to your question, and not be rude to you by replying to it with mine, they should do what the userbase needs, because that's what these projects (and certain news sites, by the way) used to be about, and the reason these communities thrived.
This guy and his sith-like-alliance are bringing about a variant of the eternal september instead of the year of the linux desktop, they're the VHS in Betamax vs. VHS, the cheap - not good, the easy - not right way, the hack - not engineer, the symptom - not the cure. Understand? On top of all that, he's also a fucking jerk! [Pardon for this being the only reference.]

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[F.Ultra]

It's more like the 10 people who hates LP have a way of sounding like 10 million.

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[exomondo]

How do you consider this even an argument? Why do I have to provide them with something? There's a huge userbase that doesn't want this change.

But the authors want this change, if you don't like it then don't use their code but you can't tell them what to do. That huge userbase should then reject the changes, fact is these changes are valuable to their business and therefore to their paying customers.

To come back to your question, and not be rude to you by replying to it with mine, they should do what the userbase needs, because that's what these projects (and certain news sites, by the way) used to be about, and the reason these communities thrived.

No, these corporations are for-profit, they contribute things that are valuable to them. If a lot of smart people don't like the change then a lot of smart people should reject those contributions.

This guy and his sith-like-alliance are bringing about a variant of the eternal september instead of the year of the linux desktop

I'm not disagreeing with you on Poettering or on systemd, just that if Red Hat wants it they are free to use it but just because the community was silly enough to create a dependency on a for-profit corporation with some incredibly naive idea that said corporation should act in the interest of the community rather than themselves doesn't mean you get to dictate what Red Hat does and does not do.

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[qpqp]

Then we misunderstood each other, because I don't give a shit about redhat. Haven't used them since 5.x-6.x and never looked back since.
I was specifically talking about the over-the-community's-head decision in Debian, which so many other distros depend upon. It's basically a coup d'etat, IMHO.
Redhat's a different story, of course they should do whatever creates value for their customers (though I doubt systemd does that, as it's a short-term hack vs. a long-term solution and thus represents everything that's wrong with our world).
Debian on the other hand serves the community, and introducing a hard dependency on systemd without providing an officially supported alternative is a by all means a disservice to a lot of people.

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[exomondo]

Then we misunderstood each other, because I don't give a shit about redhat. Haven't used them since 5.x-6.x and never looked back since.

Yes but Red Hat is one of the members of the GNOME foundation and Debian has a reliance on GNOME so in turn if Red Hat contributes its changes to GNOME then the Debian project has the choice to use a different DE (in the same way Slackware avoids systemd and uses KDE) or fork GNOME.

I was specifically talking about the over-the-community's-head decision in Debian, which so many other distros depend upon. It's basically a coup d'etat, IMHO.

That's up to the Debian contributors, if enough of them wanted the change then the change gets implemented, if the change was poor then users can switch to Slackware-derived options or Gentoo instead. Enough of them supported the change, most users won't notice, many who do notice don't object and a vocal minority do object. You can't force people to do what you want them to do, if you don't like it then don't use it and instead support Slackware or Gentoo.

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[qpqp]

if you don't like it then don't use it and instead support Slackware or Gentoo.

Of course, this is what it's all boiling down to, this group of people are forced to switch. But this group of people is the one going to be laughing when SHTF with systemd and consorts, and certainly, at some point we won't give a fuck, but it's still a hassle and it's the community at large that suffers due to the segregation. Eventually, this "vocal minority" as some people call this group, is the one who's got the brains, apparently.

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[exomondo]

Of course, this is what it's all boiling down to, this group of people are forced to switch.

Yes that's true, but most Linux users won't even notice.

But this group of people is the one going to be laughing when SHTF with systemd and consorts, and certainly, at some point we won't give a fuck, but it's still a hassle and it's the community at large that suffers due to the segregation. Eventually, this "vocal minority" as some people call this group, is the one who's got the brains, apparently.

You say that but Arch, Core, Fedora, Mageia and openSUSE have been using it for years and RHEL recently did it's release as well, all the fear-mongering has amounted to pretty much zero of anything. Also FWIW here is the summary debate page for Debian's adoption of systemd and there's a bunch of linked documentation there as well.

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[qpqp]

Yeah, that position paper is full of FUD and utter BS. Some gems:

Systemd is well designed.

no comment... No, wait, I've got one: LMFAO!

[insert distro here] have already made the choice to use systemd

Great argument. Really! Wow, I'm totally convinced now. Did they jump out of the window too?

Systemd is not just init.

No shit, it's also a DHCP server/client, has NTP, PAM, (auto-) mount handling, system snapshotting, a GUI (WTF?!?), ...
That's so totally in line with the unix philosophy and makes so much sense... We all learned in school that tight coupling is what achieves true modularity, which is totally unnecessary anyways. Not!

And then, a third into the page, the limitations start...
GNU/kFreeBSD? Oh, sorry, doesn't work. Corrupted logs? Sorry, won't fix. Etc. etc. etc.

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[exomondo]

Ok but where is your contribution, there were extensive debates in the mailing lists and various places online so where is your well-reasoned objection? I hope it wasn't just "LMFAO".

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[qpqp]

I'm just a user in this case, my contributions to the FLOSS community lie elsewhere.
Now I'll probably have to become a user of another distro, or finally switch my servers to BSD (as I intended a long time ago, before Debian became so convenient).
I'm not the only one, so when you start seeing more and more of the really interesting software come packaged (or documented) for BSD first, you'll understand ; )

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[exomondo]

Well this is the point, they had lengthy community debate so either get involved or accept the repercussions of your decision to not be involved.

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[qpqp]

The politics didn't quite work out in our favor. There's no point, when the decisions are made elsewhere.

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[exomondo]

Yet oddly you've spent a lot more time discussing it with me than you have actually putting your voice to the issue, the outcome is unsurprising.

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[qpqp]

There's this dimension called time, you might have heard about it. There's a right time to do something and I was busy during that discussion. Yet, oddly, though unsurprising, no one asked me about my opinion. Maybe you want to tell me why you're such a fan of SystemD, or, if not, why you're still trying to troll me, 'cause I honestly don't give a fuck about your parenting attempt on democracy.
This is not about me, it's about a piece of shit software that got pushed down everyone's throat.
So if you think you've got me on the defensive by trying to prove to me that all would have been different, if only I would have voiced my opinion during that "discussion", you're wrong. The decision was made somewhere else, and most people opposing this change have been banned.

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[exomondo]

There's this dimension called time, you might have heard about it. There's a right time to do something and I was busy during that discussion. Yet, oddly, though unsurprising, no one asked me about my opinion.

Well what do you expect them to do? Get the contact details of all their users and ask them and wait until everybody has the time to respond?

Maybe you want to tell me why you're such a fan of SystemD

I'm not.

if not, why you're still trying to troll me, 'cause I honestly don't give a fuck about your parenting attempt on democracy.

Oh get off it, if you actually thought you were being trolled and had a shred of intelligence then you wouldn't even be replying, don't be an idiot.

This is not about me, it's about a piece of shit software that got pushed down everyone's throat.

It did not, there was a big, long, public discussion about it where some distros chose it and others didn't, you chose not to participate (and nobody cares why) so you go with their decision or you go someplace else.

So if you think you've got me on the defensive by trying to prove to me that all would have been different, if only I would have voiced my opinion during that "discussion", you're wrong.

No it's the desperation with which you're trying to argue against systemd when I'm not in opposition of your argument at all, I'm in opposition of your entitlist mentality where you think the distro developers should do whatever you want them to do. If you're not going to contribute then you are of no value to anybody else so stop acting like a spoiled child who's toy was taken away.

The decision was made somewhere else, and most people opposing this change have been banned.

Citation? I haven't seen anybody banned outside of those that are angry at themselves for their own inability to make a coherent argument and so instead resort to childish ad hominem attacks and foul language.

For the record I think the systemd methodology is more loss than gain so it's better to not have it but I'm not going to whine and bitch about it because I am not a distro developer, I don't contribute to the distro and I didn't contribute to the decision on it. So if I find it unappealing I'll switch to Slackware, Gentoo or a BSD, no big deal. How do you think they should have realistically approached this?

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[qpqp]

I'm in opposition of your entitlist mentality where you think the distro developers should do whatever you want them to do.

So, are you also one of the people that block the passing lane on the highway, because the sign says 55? And I'm in opposition of (stupid) knee-jerk decisions of a distro oriented more or less towards the knowledgeable crowd of users, unlike e.g. Ubuntu.

Let's have a look at the social contract (http://www.debian.org/social_contract), which was recently "upgraded":
First of all, Debian is no longer GNU/Linux. It's just "the Debian system" [1]. Debian doesn't promise to remain 100% Free software anymore, just "100% free." (Yes, yes, according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG), but these may change at a later point).
It's now "free works" instead of "free software" and new developments are to be published according to the DFSG, instead of unambiguously as free software.
They now "provide an integrated system of high-quality materials with no legal restrictions," instead of "an integrated system of high-quality, 100% free software [...]"

The choice should have been based on technical merit vs. political lobbying and that is what pisses me and many others off.
No, circular reasoning a-la we want gnome, because "think of the children/kittens/whatever", gnome wants systemd, so we want systemd shouldn't have been applied as the technical argument.
It's a shame that the init choice is being taken away from the users.

Since you've given me that systemd link, here's some more (I'll skip upstart):
https://wiki.debian.org/Debate...
https://wiki.debian.org/Debate...
https://wiki.debian.org/Debate...

Citation?

"I have decided to not write anything in this section, considering the aggressive tone I'm getting in return, which is all but fun. Anyway, the problems with Systemd have been debated a lot already, so it is useless to list them here again." (https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/initsystem/openrc)

http://www.debianuserforums.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=3031
https://groups.google.com/foru...
Everything else is a google search away.
Oh, and here's the vote, btw: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bi... (the actual vote starts at #6236) "Please decide, because not having systemd as default is a bug"

Some more arguments:
http://ewontfix.com/14/
http://boycottsystemd.org/

G2G, got more important matters to attend to.

I'm not going to whine and bitch about it because I am not a distro developer

That reads to me like: "I'm not going to oppose a government decision, because I'm not a politician."

How do you think they should have realistically approached this?

Simple, choose the UNIX way, let the systemd/gnome people create another downstream distro, and let their users have the choice.

[1] Why make the change, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD (or HURD) is basically out anyway, so why change to "Debian system", instead of a more conservative wording?

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[exomondo]

So, are you also one of the people that block the passing lane on the highway, because the sign says 55?

No, you are free to do whatever you like, nobody is stopping you. What you are complaining about is that other people won't do what you want done for you.

And I'm in opposition of (stupid) knee-jerk decisions of a distro oriented more or less towards the knowledgeable crowd of users

Then get involved with it.

It's a shame that the init choice is being taken away from the users.

You have a choice! You just want it all done for you. You can maintain it yourself or move to another distro, but you have this entitlist mentality that all these people should do all this work for you when you contribute nothing to them.

Since you've given me that systemd link, here's some more (I'll skip upstart):

Yes there are many debates on the init systems, none of which I am interested in, including systemd.

I have decided to not write anything in this section

Are you dense? I'm not in opposition of or support of systemd, I couldn't give a shit either way, I've already explained this. Why are you so desperate to debate systemd with me when I have no position on it but so desperate to avoid debating it with the people who make the decision on it?

That reads to me like: "I'm not going to oppose a government decision, because I'm not a politician."

Yes it would if you selectively comment, whether you did that or you just didn't read the sentence: ", I don't contribute to the distro and I didn't contribute to the decision on it."

See unlike you I'm not going to whine about a decision that was made that I chose not to contribute to the making of. You are just a lazy person who wants everything your way but without having to actually contribute anything.

Simple, choose the UNIX way, let the systemd/gnome people create another downstream distro, and let their users have the choice.

No, how should they have gone about the process of considering the change? Or are you just saying nobody should ever change from the UNIX way of doing things? It isn't your decision to make, they asked for feedback and you chose not to give it so you lose out of pure laziness.

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[qpqp]

Get off your judgmental trip, please!
I already said that I contribute at other places, most notably *way* upstream.
Also, Debian is my distro of choice that I was *actively* advocating whenever there was a choice to be made and a situation, where Debian would make sense (almost all of them).
Seeing myself as part of a greater community, of course I am pissed off, when decisions are made that make no. fucking. technical. sense. at. all!
I don't care about redhat, ubuntu, mandriva, whatever. But I do care about Debian.
I'm happy there are still some distros available that know what the fuck they're doing and what they're supposed to do and who they serve (hint: it's their users).

This is not a commercial venture. It's for the greater good and as such should be bound to sound (technical) decisions.
See, when people talk about MS fucking someone over, even though users pay money, no one ever get's this idea of telling them that "you don't contribute so go fuck yourself!"

I'd also recommend you to stop trying project your own flaws onto other people (me, in this case).
As you don't know who the fuck you're dealing with, you are committing a grave error to think of me as lazy, clinging to your "I don't like entitlist people" bullshit.
You have absolutely no clue as to who I am, or what I did/am doing.
For all you know, I could be RMS, Linus or Tannenbaum, or making software that will create a cure for cancer, or prove that "fracking is bad m'key?" so you can live in a safe environment, or making sure that you have healthcare/electricity/whatever.
It's very questionable to jump to such a conclusion (i.e. "bohoo, you're lazy-lazy, bad boy"), because maybe, I was working on something more important than an init system [oh wait, it isn't an init system, it's so much more, it even makes coffee] at the time?
Of course, this is just a recommendation and you can do whatever the fuck you want as long as you respect the rights of other people (or not and face the consequences).

No, how should they have gone about the process of considering the change?

Please tell me why this change was necessary in the first place? Oh you can't? Because it wasn't! What this change does, however, is force thousands of people to work more, instead of being able to rely on a proven, working system and spend time with their families/hobbies/etc.

you chose not to give it so you lose out of pure laziness

It. doesn't. matter. whether. I. voted. or. not!
If you want to insist on your argument, please prove to me that it did.

Yes it would if you selectively comment, whether you did that or you just didn't read the sentence: ", I don't contribute to the distro and I didn't contribute to the decision on it."

Well, I did contribute to it, and I don't identify with your opinion. Your sentence still sounds like it. You do contribute to society, don't you? So you're entitled to be heard, right? What you're saying sounds to me exactly like: "I'm not a politician, so they should do whatever they please." If you're really so submissive/obedient, it doesn't mean that everyone is.

Or are you just saying nobody should ever change from the UNIX way of doing things

No problem, go and make your SystemD/Linux, or SystemD Debian/Linux or your other project or downstream distro but LEAVE US THE FUCK ALONE WITH YOUR BLOATED SHIT, LENNART!
If it's so good, prove it by merit, not politics, marketing, and propaganda.

you have this entitlist mentality that all these people should do all this work for you when you contribute nothing to them.

You remind me of many Germans, maybe you should move here? You'll probably feel happy, most people here want money for everything they do/say/think, and many people adhere to the mentality that if you didn't pay

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[exomondo]

See, when people talk about MS fucking someone over, even though users pay money, no one ever get's this idea of telling them that "you don't contribute so go fuck yourself!"

No, with Microsoft you cannot contribute, with a project like Debian you can.

As you don't know who the fuck you're dealing with, you are committing a grave error to think of me as lazy, clinging to your "I don't like entitlist people" bullshit.

Bitch all you want, the fact is you're complaining that others didn't do what you wanted them to, you have no power over what others do nor should you, the fact that you think they should have done what you want them to do is offensive.

Of course, this is just a recommendation and you can do whatever the fuck you want as long as you respect the rights of other people (or not and face the consequences).

Except you don't do that, it is their right to do what they want, not yours!

Please tell me why this change was necessary in the first place? Oh you can't? Because it wasn't!

I don't know, frankly I don't really care nor is that in any way the point, but that is precisely why you answer my question with another question.

It. doesn't. matter. whether. I. voted. or. not! If you want to insist on your argument, please prove to me that it did.

Ah yes, "my candidate didn't get in so I'm angry even though I didn't vote because my vote doesn't matter".

Well, I did contribute to it

Then show me.

What you're saying sounds to me exactly like: "I'm not a politician, so they should do whatever they please."

Then you aren't reading, if you read the whole sentence it is about them making a decision, publicly debating it and you only complaining after the fact. Look at how much effort you've gone to and continue to go to in continuing to complain to me about this.

If you're really so submissive/obedient, it doesn't mean that everyone is.

Actually the submissive is you, ultimately you complain to me rather than to the people responsible. Frankly I don't care, I have no horse in this race, but you do, you have an issue with it but refuse to bring it up with people that actually make the decsions...why is that?

No problem, go and make your SystemD/Linux, or SystemD Debian/Linux or your other project or downstream distro but LEAVE US THE FUCK ALONE WITH YOUR BLOATED SHIT, LENNART!

Holy crap this is really too much for you, a projecting emotional response to your own failure at reading comprehension. Let's try this once again:

I don't care about Linux init systems whatsoever this is not about init systems but rather about the right of the Debian foundation to make their own choices and not be beholden to people like you who think they should be in control of others.

If it's so good, prove it by merit, not politics, marketing, and propaganda.

Are you actually retarded? I already told you multiple times that I don't give a shit about systemd in any form. Stop projecting, you so badly want me to be some systemd proponent but I'm not.

I wonder how many times a mental defective such as yourself requires this to be told to them before they understand.

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[qpqp]

Then show me.

I only show it to hot, nerdy red-heads I wanna impress. You don't sound like on, nor are you sitting across. Tough luck, friend.

Except you don't do that, it is their right to do what they want, not yours!

Who's they? The Debian community, or the couple of fuckwads deciding for everyone else?

Then you aren't reading [...] Are you actually retarded? I already told you multiple times that I don't give a shit about systemd

Uhm, dito. I was talking about Lennart ; )

I wonder how many times a mental detective such as yourself requires this to be told to them before they understand.

FTFY.
Thx. Bye : )

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[qpqp]

Oh yeah...

people like you

Fuck you too ; )

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[exomondo]

Ok obviously you're getting very very angry so how about I try this a different way for you. Since I don't have an opinion on this systemd debate and I don't care about Linux init systems - something you have had exceptional difficulty understanding - I'll take your arguments, yes they were just ad hominem attacks and not very informative but I don't care so I'll accept your position on this:

systemd is terrible and should never have been implemented by anybody.

Ok? But that still does not give you any right whatsoever to tell the Debian developers what they should or should not do. You don't like that choice? Well tough luck, get over yourself, it's not your choice to make.

Who's they? The Debian community, or the couple of fuckwads deciding for everyone else?

"They" is indeed whoever is in charge of that area of development, if it's only a couple of people and the rest of the community is against them then the solution is obvious: stop being a submissive and knuckling-under to what those "couple of fuckwads" have decided, drop those people and carry on as normal.

I expect if you reply your sanity will be overwhelmed by your emotional attachment to the issue and you'll be all angry but try to keep a level head and understand?

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[qpqp]

I'm sorry, but I just have to pull your moral mountain on which you seem to be standing from under your feet. *pulls*

But that still does not give you any right whatsoever to tell the Debian developers

I *am* a developer. This was not the Debian "developer"'s decision. That's what a GR would have been for, for example. What happened there was pure politics, but you're too preoccupied with proving your silly point that no one has a right to complain against that decision, because everyone's lazy to understand that.

very very angry

Very very angry, very very lazy, go fuck yourself.

I don't care about Linux init systems

You keep riding around on this for 3 or 4 posts already, you are trolling. Also, You're not an admin obviously and don't have anything at stake here, so why do you keep talking to me about something you don't understand in such a condescending tone, as if you're the fucking light of the world?

something you have had exceptional difficulty understanding

Something you have exceptional difficulty understanding is what Debian is, what it's community is, and what a big part of the userbase needs.

drop those people and carry on as normal

You seem to not quite understand the issue, maybe you should check out a couple of the discussions?

they were just ad hominem attacks

SystemD is not an init system. Go have a look at one of the links I supplied to you.
I'm done with this discussion. We're talking about totally different things. I have the right to do whatever I fucking feel like, if you don't agree, it's your right to do so. If you don't like my "entitlist attitude" go speak to someone else.
I for one know that this change is detrimental, because I'll actually have to deal with it, as part of the Debian community I also have the right to voice my opinion on this matter and demand that they continue on the path that they've been for the last decade and more. I also have the right to tell them to fuck off and go somewhere else (along with many others), which I'm gonna have to reluctantly do, if they don't solve this issue (which they probably will anyway).

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[exomondo]

I *am* a developer. This was not the Debian "developer"'s decision. That's what a GR would have been for, for example. What happened there was pure politics, but you're too preoccupied with proving your silly point that no one has a right to complain against that decision, because everyone's lazy to understand that.

Complain all you want, but complain to the people responsible, it was their decision to make, not yours and not mine.

You keep riding around on this for 3 or 4 posts already, you are trolling.

No, I'm not and you don't believe that, you've claimed to leave the discussion several times and you keep returning which confirms you know I'm not trolling.

Also, You're not an admin obviously and don't have anything at stake here

Right, I don't have anything at stake here which is why I can view this objectively, unlike you.

Something you have exceptional difficulty understanding is what Debian is, what it's community is, and what a big part of the userbase needs.

No I'm perfectly aware of that.

You seem to not quite understand the issue, maybe you should check out a couple of the discussions?

I understand the issue fine, the Debian developers are not ruled by a dictatorship or forced to do anything, it's the submissive attitude that stops them from going their own way.

SystemD is not an init system. Go have a look at one of the links I supplied to you.

I didn't say it was, but part of it is.

I'm done with this discussion.

Yes as you have said multiple times already, yet you're still here.

We're talking about totally different things.

Oh hooray! He finally gets it!

I have the right to do whatever I fucking feel like

Of course you do, as does everybody involved in Debian development and those pushing systemd.

I for one know that this change is detrimental, because I'll actually have to deal with it, as part of the Debian community I also have the right to voice my opinion on this matter and demand that they continue on the path that they've been for the last decade and more.

So do that! This is what I said from the beginning, if you aren't a contributor and you aren't voicing your opinion to them in the discussions on this topic then how exactly do you think you're going to get your way?

I also have the right to tell them to fuck off and go somewhere else (along with many others), which I'm gonna have to reluctantly do

Yes, that is one of the choices. Unfortunately for all the "freedom" of free software ultimately the effort involved means it isn't really free in any practical sense.

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[qpqp]

you keep returning which confirms you know I'm not trolling.

Stop pinging me and I will be able to. Leave it. You're not proving anything, neither am I. I'm not complaining to you though, we're on /. for god's sake. We discuss and complain about things like these here. Like we do about, you know, beta for instance.

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[exomondo]

Stop pinging me and I will be able to.

I'm not "pinging" you, what the hell are you talking about? Even so, you see a notification you lack the self control to not reply? ... I guess we'll find out shortly.

You're not proving anything, neither am I. I'm not complaining to you though, we're on /. for god's sake.

Exactly, you think anybody involved in the decision making process is actually reading this and taking notice that some random on the internet doesn't like systemd? No, of course not.

Re:bolt the temple doors, brothers!

[qpqp]

Even so, you see a notification you lack the self control to not reply?

I always have the last word. Let's see who's got more endurance. Game on! ; )

Less static hardware.

[Animats]

UNIX, and Linux, were designed with the concept that the hardware configuration was static during operation. So "startup" and "configuration" occured at the same time. Now that many peripherals hot-plug, that model is obsolete. Many people find it painful to switch to an "everything is dynamic" model, especially since, for many server applications, there is no hot-plugging.

Hence the unhappiness with a redesign.

This is a more general problem with UNIX/Linux. Many programs are designed on the assumption that they read a static configuration file in text format, and will be restarted if the configuration changes. Various hacks have been added to some programs to allow dynamic reconfiguration (often involving sending a signal to the process to tell it to re-read a text file). Real dynamic configuration models usually involve storing the configuration in a database, which a lot of UNIX/Linux types don't like.

Re:Less static hardware.

[0123456]

Redhat, who I believe are funding systemd development, is a server OS company. Guess what doesn't happen on my server? Yes, random hardware appearing and disappearing while it sits there for years running one app.

Systemd has no obvious benefit to servers, but Redhat are pushing it anyway. It could be useful on embedded systems, but, in my experience, they're either massively cut down and use traditional init to start the two or three things they run, or they use some custom init system of their own. Could be useful on desktops, but about the only things I can plug in dynamically are USB devices, which can be handled without much hassle. Faster boot time? Well, my laptop already boots in a few seconds, and my servers spend six minutes in the BIOS before they start booting. Tablets? Maybe, but does Android actually use init scripts, or did they roll their own startup?

It just looks like a solution in search of a problem, with a ton of complexity that 99% of users don't need. But it's being pushed on everyone, anyway.

Re:Less static hardware.

[0123456]

Today, yes. But I'm pretty sure that Linux originated with the old Unix idea of all drivers being compiled into the kernel. I remember years on my Sun workstation of the same vintage as the first Linux releases, having to edit a C file to add new driver entry points and then compile it and relink the kernel in order to support a new device.

Re:Less static hardware.

[wagnerrp]

The trouble is that init is something that absolutely cannot fail, and the more dependencies you bring into it, the greater the likelihood you are going to have bugs and failures. It's a system in which increased capability is not necessarily a good thing.

Re:Less static hardware.

[GerryGilmore]

Actually, while working at Intel, I saw quite a few scenarios where hot-plugging of hardware is a critical requirement for long-uptime servers. Think adding storage, additional networking interfaces, and - for cPCI chassis - telecom interface cards. With systems that need to stay up all the time - and expand capacity - hot-swap is a great feature.

Re:Less static hardware.

[Anonymous Coward]

> With systems that need to stay up all the time - and expand capacity - hot-swap is a great feature.

Not just great, mandatory. It is how companies like IBM and HP get that 99.999% uptime (aka five-nines) on their high-end systems. I don't know dick about systemd, but I do know about hot-plug on big iron.

Re:Less static hardware.

[Trogre]

Guess what doesn't happen on my server? Yes, random hardware appearing and disappearing while it sits there for years running one app.

Really? You don't change disks in your server or plug in USB keyboards? That must be nice for you, but there are cases where the state of a server will definitely change. Think hot-swappable CPUs, RAM, USB-controlled UPS's.

Look, I think systemd is a terrible kludge and the wrong solution to the issue but I do not think assuming a constant-state computer is a realistic or particularly useful design objective.

Re:Less static hardware.

[BitZtream]

Just for reference, multiple UNIX variants supported hot plug before Linux was a thought in Linus's mind. Its not like it hasn't been around since the very beginning of 'UNIX', and really before that. Have you even used a real UNIX? Just because you're used to using desktop hardware on the x86 platform doesn't mean anyone else does it that way.

It doesn't require anything different than a static text file, and hasn't for the last 30-40 years that UNIX has been dealing with dynamic hardware.

I'm not sure why you seem to think that just because startup and configuration happen at the same time (name one OS that doesn't do this? All UNIX variants do, as well as Windows and Linux, I guess embedded ones don't in some specialized cases) that reconfiguration can't happen later?

Hacks? You mean design. Sending signals is the way its intended to be done. You think because someone invents a new way to do the same thing using much more complex code that its magically better?

Let me guess, you also think virtualization and 'hypervisors' are new too?

Re:Less static hardware.

[MrNemesis]

I don't know if I'm alone here but I've been hot-plugging CPUs, RAM and even, shock horror, keyboards and mice on linux now for at least five years without having to use systemd to do it. Linux has had awesome hotplug support for years, even in the bad ol' days of static devfs.

Not trying to denigrate the GP - I suspect they've just never had to deal with a server environment that changed much. But rest assured linux has been capable of dealing with radical changes in hardware for at least five years, and changes to peripherals (disc, network, keyboards, USB, blah) for at least a decade. That people think this sort of thing is only possible with systemd is all just mirrors and wires.

Re:Less static hardware.

[The Raven]

To be perfectly honest, databases make sense when you access thousands of records multiple times a second.

Computer configuration is accessing a couple dozen records multiple times a day. There is NO performance reason that this can't be done with the same text files we have used for years.

Please note: I'm only addressing the last sentence of your post. I do agree that existing tools handled dynamic configuration poorly. I simply take exception that 'dynamic' must automatically mean 'database'.

Re:Less static hardware.

[Barsteward]

mmmm seems like you are the kind of twat LP was moaning about

Re:Less static hardware.

[Barsteward]

"Systemd has no obvious benefit to servers," - i doubt Red Hat would push it if that was the case, they must see a use case for it

Re:Less static hardware.

[Barsteward]

"If you want to use Gnome, you have to use systemd. " - i think they working to get rid that dependency http://news.softpedia.com/news...

Re:Less static hardware.

[Trogre]

For the record, I agree with you. I was more criticizing the mindset that said a Linux server could be considered static between boots.

Linux still has a long way to go in terms of hot-plugging (USB graphics cards, additional monitors, NICs), but systemd is not the solution.

Re:Less static hardware.

[arth1]

For the record, I agree with you. I was more criticizing the mindset that said a Linux server could be considered static between boots.

I think it's more of a mindset that you, the system administrator is the one who decides, and unless you say otherwise, it's static
Yes, you can hotplug, but may not want an init process deciding that since you plugged a cable into a network card, it should automatically probe it and change your network settings, and restart processes that depends on networking.

No one should make hardware changes without the blessing of the system administrators, and they - not a piece of software - are responsible for the decision of how to deal with the change, and when.
Yes, we sysadmins tend to be control freaks. For very good reasons.

Re:Less static hardware.

[thegarbz]

But actually incorporating udev (which was fine) into PID1 seems really stupid, doesn't it? Why is this needed?

It's not. That's also why it isn't. Systemd's PID1 footprint is very small. udev most definitely does not run in PID1.

Re:Less static hardware.

[strikethree]

Now that many peripherals hot-plug, that model is obsolete. Many people find it painful to switch to an "everything is dynamic" model, especially since, for many server applications, there is no hot-plugging.

You are normally not a moron, so it pains me to say this: You are being intentionally obtuse.

If systemd ONLY did what you are claiming everyone is so unhappy about, then NOBODY would be unhappy about systemd. Have you not been listening to the expressive and coherent descriptions of why people find systemd so fundamentally objectionable?

A shame. Despite me not liking your position/ownership on patents concerning ragdoll physics, I have always thought you were a reasonable person... but this intentional blindness, this willful ignorance of what makes people reject systemd at such a fundamental level... I just don't know man. I just do not know. I am sad.

Re:Less static hardware.

[gweihir]

My take is that this is actually a move to create vulnerabilities in the Linux init system by making it as complex as possible. I am not saying Poettering is in on it, I rather suspect the NSA by way of the US military (by far largest customer of Red Hat) cooked up this plan, and found the perfect mediocre designer that has no clue how to do reliable, secure and low-complexity design, but with an ego huge enough to not know that in Poettering. The NSA TAO will live off the vulnerabilities in systemd for decades.

Re:Less static hardware.

[Kabukiwookie]

Colour me surprised, but all of my 'hot-plugging' of hardware is done virtual.

Want extra disk, add extra disk to the SAN and present it on the fly to my VM. Want an extra interface, just add it on the fly. How many people are still actually doing this on the fly on physical hardware?

Systemd does not add any substantial benefits over sysV init and if Lennart acts like an ahole and completely disregards a large user base, he can expect people to react back in a similar way as well, even though I feel that the kickstarter thing was a bit over the top.

This is a reaction to previous action though and essentially is a sign of the feeling of helplessness a large user base has, when they feel they have to resort to these extreme measures.

Not saying it's good, but it's nevertheless unsurprising.

Re:Less static hardware.

[Barsteward]

they would eventually lose customers if systemd causes all the machines to fail regularly - so they would be shooting themselves in the foot. now do the arithmetic if they lose customers

Re:Less static hardware.

[Barsteward]

and that has what to do with systemd's reliability/performance?

Re:Less static hardware.

[devent]

Don't you realize that RedHat is a multi-million company that knows exactly what it needs on its servers?
That maybe, just maybe, RedHat needs systemd, and is funding it because of that?

Re:Less static hardware.

[ThePhilips]

they would eventually lose customers if systemd causes all the machines to fail regularly - so they would be shooting themselves in the foot. now do the arithmetic if they lose customers

RHEL is a golden boy of modern corporate Linux.

You can't replace them because corporate accountants know only the RHEL and RHEL corporate talk the same language as them. And just like the UNIX, you better not touch the RHEL, because RH might simply say (and often do) they do not support the configuration and you are on your onw.

I feel like I'm reliving the piece of the UNIX history. The only difference only is that nobody yet wrote the "RHEL Haters Handbook".

Re:Less static hardware.

[pantaril]

Guess what doesn't happen on my server? Yes, random hardware appearing and disappearing while it sits there for years running one app... Systemd has no obvious benefit to servers

Just because your server doesn't take advantage of hotpluging doesn't mean that other people don't use it on their servers. There is plenty of scenarios where hotpluging is useful for servers, please don't force your server usage pattern on everyone else. I for one welcome the changes which systemd brings even for the servers.

Re:Less static hardware.

[TangoMargarine]

You don't take the individual machine out of the active pool and then add the hardware? You just jam in the hot-swap and cross your fingers?

IANASysAdmin

Re:Less static hardware.

[Rich0]

They're talking about big iron here. There are two ways to generally go about this stuff.

The new way is what you're describing - build your application such that it is distributed and nodes can go down at will without serious failure, and the hardware is commodity hardware.

The old way is big iron - the software is very simple in design and does not tolerate faults at all, and the hardware ensures that there never are any faults. That means super-redundant everything. IBM's z-series mainframes can actually run redundant CPUs with a watchdog monitoring their execution for discrepancies - if they disagree then the failing CPU is identified and dealt with. Think of ECC or RAID taken to the level of insanity. You could probably carefully smash virtually any single component in one of those things and have your software not miss a beat.

The big iron way means hot-pluggability. You don't want to shut down your software just because one of the 47 CPUs failed.

These things are practically rented with their support models. Often they sell you a big machine and you pay for the parts that you use - it might have 50 CPUs that allow for full redundancy, but you pay to unlock 2 of them without CPU redundancy, etc. If you pay for the works then your software will basically never go down. If something goes wrong the machine will phone home, somebody will show up and hot-swap the bad part, and not a single instruction will be mis-executed.

The reason big iron is going out of favor is that it is REALLY expensive. It makes more sense to just design the software to be fault-tolerant, and then you can often have geographic failovers as well.

Re:Less static hardware.

[gweihir]

Nice. Obviously you are either a paid shill or your connection to reality is pretty bad. You are also late to the party, your reading comprehension is nonexistent, and you are not convincing at all. Pathetic.

Re:Less static hardware.

[TangoMargarine]

Ah. Thanks for the information; I was trying to figure out how hot-swapping a CPU made any sense and failing.

Re:Less static hardware.

[davidshewitt]

It may be a while before the hardware becomes available, but thinking ahead even further, wouldn't it be awesome if you could replace a DIMM or a CPU without shutting down the machine? For really critical servers, this might be a good option to have at some point. It would be quite a challenge to implement something like this since the CPU and memory are so integral to the machine but it doesn't mean it can't be done.

Re:Less static hardware.

[Hognoxious]

When you have two programs that don't speak the same language, throw some middleware at the problem.

You now have three programs that don't speak the same language

Not surprised.

[Truekaiser]

Troll dev complaining when he gets trolled?

I do not take people's word for it when they claim serious things like getting actual valid death threats online. If you have one the first thing the police tell you to do is shut up about it in public forums least you scare away the person before they catch them.

Re:Not surprised.

[cryptizard]

Ummm... I don't know about you but I would be fine with the person being scared off and, you know, not attempting to murder me. Especially if the alternative is being used as bait by an incompetent police force.

He is mixing legitimate and illegitmate things

[Anonymous Coward]

calling for a boycot of some software that he wrote is a reasonable thing to do.

the 'song' posted on lkml is not.

I hope the FBI is all over the site trying to collect bitcoins to hire a hitman as that crosses over to outright illegal actions

But by putting it all in one list, LP is trying to make it so that anyone disagreeing with him is lumped in with the people attempting murder. That's also not an acceptable way to engage with those that you disagree with.

David Lang

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Simple

[Delicious Pun]

Lennart Poettering: Open Source Community "Quite a Sick Place To Be In"

You've made your bed, now lay in it.

Linux Community Demographics

[Anonymous Coward]

I was with him until he went on his rant about the demographics of the Linux community. Seriously? Lennart, you sir, are a buffoon of the highest order. GFY.

Open Source is about ego

[Stonefish]

Open source software is primarily about ego, and Lennart is pushing a viewpoint through his creations that he's a player in this space. By the same token he also believes that he's better than Linus, hence the critique and comment that you don't live up to my standards. On the flip side Lennart could make some consessions himself, the thing that blows my goat is binary logging in systemd, given that he's generally demonstrated that he refuses to compromise why should others listen to his complaints which essentially boils down to "I don't like your style".
Lennart is essentially driving a view which has had an impact on the kernel and has been on the recieving end of some criticism and he finds this uncomfortable, the name calling is not the part of Linus' style that he finds most unsetting, its the direct nature of the outting relating to specific issues which have made Lennart complain about Linus's manners.
ps I think that both individual have provided some great software and deserve kudos but I think that one of them may fall from grace

Re:Open Source is about ego

[Zontar The Mindless]

Open source software is primarily about ego...

I'm guessing the rest of your post is just as wrong? Didn't bother going any further.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

"Lennart, I knew Hans Reiser. Hans Reiser was a friend of mine. Lennart Poettering, you're no Hans Reiser."

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[oik]

Dearest Copernicus, [...]

Re: Well.. That sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

How the fuck does calling for someone's death, even if it's "jokingly" get +'s? The fuck are you people smoking where "I dislike the guy's code and thin he's a twat" mean he must die?

This is nothing Like GamerGate

[tuppe666]

This happens online a lot. It's bad, it's stupid, most of us oppose it, but as GamerGate shows, it can do real harm.

This is nothing Like GamerGate which was as much about an educated woman calling a routinely demonised group a bunch of cunts...over and over again with a convoluted version of feminism for money championed by the verge...again.(There was some shit about that woman making a game about depression(Good for her) that got maybe more credit than it deserved, which I am really not sure about(Game about depression even if like a simple choice game is cool) and a sex scandal which I love...but nobody got and clearly by my description neither did I).

This is about making changes to the OS that are viewed as unpopular...ribbonbar, real names in youtube, removing reatures from nautilus. Gnome Shell, the list is endless.

Proof of LP being an asshole: Video included.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0

it's true

[slashmydots]

You screw with someone's project, even as a legit security researcher,. and you'll find out that a lot of volunteers in the projects are petty, angry, antisocial morons who do stupid shit like this. Then there's the irrational MS haters who make Apple fanboys look calm by comparison. Then there's the normal, stable, polite programmers like me that stay the hell away from open source because of the afore mentioned assholes.

Complain to choosers, not creators

[buchner.johannes]

Complain to your distributions!
When someone writes open source software, it is always take it or leave it. Systemd was taken up, because it was the better solution for distros.
Why on earth would you complain about someone adding another choice? Complain about the people not writing alternative packages!

Re:Complain to choosers, not creators

[grcumb]

Systemd was taken up, because it was the better solution for distros.

No it fucking was not. It was taken up because the pain of living with it was judged to be less than the pain of excising it. Other, equally wrong developers decided to make it a requirement, with the effect that in order to stay with init, we would have to retrofit core elements of GNOME, which would have required significant manpower.

Make no mistake: systemd integration is a textbook example of antidemocratic approaches, of how the commons can be soiled by a very small minority of the people using it. The fact that there was a closely split decision on whether to integrate systemd into Debian should have been read as a damning indictment, and at very least should have given the developers pause. But no, it got chalked up as a victory - which is exactly the kind of thinking that got this shit into our operating systems in the first place.

Any self-respecting developer would have realised that the best way to move systemd forward would be to take an incremental approach, to offer it as an optional component. Any reasonable developer would have had the fucking humility to accept that something so integral to the system cannot be made mature and robust except over the course of time. And until that time, he should perhaps quit fucking saying how sweet his shit smells.

Re:Complain to choosers, not creators

[exomondo]

Make no mistake: systemd integration is a textbook example of antidemocratic approaches, of how the commons can be soiled by a very small minority of the people using it.

So how is it there isn't enough manpower to maintain a fork with init rather than systemd? On the one hand you claim it's too much work to not use systemd but then simultaneously say systemd is pushed by a minority.

The fact that there was a closely split decision on whether to integrate systemd into Debian should have been read as a damning indictment

Hang on, the sentence before this you said it was antidemocratic because it was pushed by a very small minority now you're saying it was a closely-split decision.

Any self-respecting developer would have realised that the best way to move systemd forward would be to take an incremental approach

So why are you using distros produced by developers that don't do that? It's all well and good to say it's pushed by a minority but it appears many distros have jumped on board and switched from init to systemd.

Re:Complain to choosers, not creators

[Anonymous Coward]

Systemd was picked up because distro package maintainers spend a lot of time maintaining and tweaking initscripts which are custom for each distro. Unit-files can be maintained upstream and shared by all distro's, this frees up man hours to do other things. That is why distros picked it up. Init should have been declarative A LONG FUCKING TIME AGO. It isnt' potterings fault he's the first to do it semi competently and the distro's jumped at it.

Re:Complain to choosers, not creators

[grcumb]

Make no mistake: systemd integration is a textbook example of antidemocratic approaches, of how the commons can be soiled by a very small minority of the people using it.

So how is it there isn't enough manpower to maintain a fork with init rather than systemd? On the one hand you claim it's too much work to not use systemd but then simultaneously say systemd is pushed by a minority.

You seriously see a contradiction there? That a core part of a larger system has a new dependency, meaning that one is suddenly put in the position of considering whether it's more pain to keep it than to undo the damage? That this same core part could have been written by a very small group of people who have a track record of not playing nicely with the other children?

... Because if you can't even conceive of the nature of the problem, there's no point at all in responding to the rest of your quibbles.

As a gendankenexperiment, imagine one valve of your heart deciding it wants to change its rhythm. The others can choose to remain as they were, or adopt the new rhythm. Right and wrong are only peripherally part of the decision; what matters first and foremost is not falling out of step. The other components can reason all they like, but if the recalcitrant one doesn't budge, they're stuck either accepting the ultimatum or taking radical steps. The rest of the body parts are, for all intents and purposes, just along for the ride, no matter how the decision affects them.

And that, my child, is the choice the Debian had foisted on them.

Re:Complain to choosers, not creators

[exomondo]

You seriously see a contradiction there?

No, I said how is there not enough manpower to maintain a fork that doesn't have a dependency on systemd and uses init instead? I understand the issue but it seems nobody wants to maintain an init solution and would rather just let the systemd guys dictate it instead, it isn't that there is some technical issue or some lack of people it's just that it's a job nobody can be bothered doing yet there seems to be hordes of people expending huge amounts of effort complaining about it rather than doing anything.

Re:Complain to choosers, not creators

[grcumb]

You seriously see a contradiction there?

No, I said how is there not enough manpower to maintain a fork that doesn't have a dependency on systemd and uses init instead?

You're talking right past me. Are you now saying that you do NOT see any contradiction? Because 'one the one hand... on the other....', used as you used it, generally implies a perceived contradiction.

Read the analogy and you have your answer. It's not about manpower. It's about role.

Re:Complain to choosers, not creators

[exomondo]

You're talking right past me. Are you now saying that you do NOT see any contradiction?

I directly answered your question:

You seriously see a contradiction there?

No

See.

Because 'one the one hand... on the other....', used as you used it, generally implies a perceived contradiction.

It isn't a contradiction, it's that you said that to continue supporting init would require significant manpower and that systemd is pushed by a minority. It follows that there exists a majority - right there is your manpower - that doesn't want systemd who could take on the task of support init path.

Read the analogy and you have your answer. It's not about manpower. It's about role.

Yes but it's not like things are fixed like that, that "one valve of the heart" could have been replaced but there was an unwillingness by the majority to actually do that and instead there is a prevalent defeatist attitude of throwing arms up in the air and crying "it's hopeless".

Re:Complain to choosers, not creators

[grcumb]

It isn't a contradiction, it's that you said that to continue supporting init would require significant manpower and that systemd is pushed by a minority.

That's a fucking contradiction by any definition of the word (albeit a contradiction that you constructed, and that only you can see). You are clearly deficient in your capacity to conduct a conversation, so I'll just leave off here.

In parting, and just because reading comprehension seems to be a shortcoming with you: I never once alluded to manpower. I referred to the 'pain' involved in replacing it. But you needed 'manpower' in order to construct that thing which you are adamant is not a perceived contradiction, so you can have it. If you can find the place where it fits... outside of your own imagined version of what I'm arguing, that is.

HTH HAND

Re:Complain to choosers, not creators

[grcumb]

Oh fuck me. I'm wrong on that last point. I did say manpower. Sorry.

Re:Complain to choosers, not creators

[exomondo]

Yes I'm not saying you're contradicting yourself, just that you said the majority is not pushing systemd while the minority is so what I'm wondering is why the majority doesn't get to work on maintaining the init path especially when distros like Slackware and Gentoo haven't committed to systemd.

Re:Complain to choosers, not creators

[Zontar The Mindless]

Which distro is it that gives you a choice between systemd and init when you install it?

Please, we'd really like to know.

Re:Complain to choosers, not creators

[AlterEager]

you want your Linux box to "just work". And no, NetworkManager doesn't

Which is relevant to a discussion about Lennart Poettering's view of the "open source community" how?

Re:Complain to choosers, not creators

[Wastl]

I was now following this discussion thread for some minutes and I have to say, posts like this prove Lennart's point. Apparently many people are not able to argue without personal insult or abusive language :-(

The good thing with Open Source is: if sufficiently many people think there is something wrong, they can fix it themselves. Apparently, there are not sufficiently many people who think anything is wrong with systemd, only a minority that is very active in forums but not willing/capable of changing the situation themselves.

Personally, I liked SysV Init, but I have no problems learning or adapting to systemd. And I do like the fact my laptop and servers boot in a few seconds (even if this is just a minor feature of systemd...) ;-)

Re:Complain to choosers, not creators

[rochrist]

Dumb faggot. And there we have it.

Re:Complain to choosers, not creators

[allo]

The answer is easy:
forking gnome is hard, especially the parts, which are no longer designed to run without systemd, because if it would be easy to make them independed of systemd, they already were.
Forking a normal init is easy. Its little code and its there and it works and writing initscripts is easy as well.

so using a new init with old DE is easy, using a new DE which depends on a new init is hard to fork.

Re:Complain to choosers, not creators

[exomondo]

forking gnome is hard, especially the parts, which are no longer designed to run without systemd, because if it would be easy to make them independed of systemd, they already were.

gnome didn't have a dependency on systemd until recently.

Re:Complain to choosers, not creators

[allo]

Jep. And now they have and build features on it. So try to maintain these features with a no-systemd patch. Good luck.
On the other hand, i could imagine to maintain the sysvinit-system. This is not too complicated and a single person may do it, a small team can do it very relaxed.

Re:Complain to choosers, not creators

[exomondo]

Well then the problem is that the desktop Linux community has become reliant on a small group of entities that obviously act in their own interests. Now you can accept their contributions or reject them but you cannot tell them what to contribute, that is their choice not yours.

Troll Trolls Trolls, Stop Feeding

[Bob9113]

the Open Source community is full of a#@&oles, and I probably more than most others am one of their most favourite targets.

So he's a troll who specializes in trolling trolls. Why are we feeding him?

Do Not Feed The Trolls

Re:Hmmm

[AK Marc]

If one would say they are for Gun Rights and Anti-Abortion you could think that they are a right wing nut-job.

That and polarized topics are such that someone can paint even a moderate view as extremist. I'm anti-abortion and pro-choice. They are orthogonal. Some people think that abortion is a valid contraception method, to be used casually (see the abortion rates and stats from the Soviet Union). Others would wish that nobody needed one, but so long as they are needed, they should be legal. They are pro-choice and anti-abortion. The "pro-life" group is anti-choice. Anti-abortion could fit a description of people from both sides.

Same as gun rights. You can paint any opinion, even a middle one, as extremist, if you are a lying douchbag, and so many arguing those points are.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[drnb]

"Lennart, I knew Hans Reiser. Hans Reiser was a friend of mine. Lennart Poettering, you're no Hans Reiser."

For those that don't get the above:
"Hans Thomas Reiser is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and convicted murderer. He is the creator and primary developer of the ReiserFS computer file system, which is contained within the Linux kernel ... Reiser was convicted of the first degree murder of his wife, Nina Reiser, who disappeared in September 2006. He subsequently pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of second-degree murder, as part of a settlement agreement that included disclosing the location of his wife's body, revealed to be in a shallow grave near the couple's home."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[mooingyak]

Or, in car analogy terms:

If one guy tailgates you and then passes you on the right, he's an asshole.

If 50 people tailgate you and then pass you on the right, take a goddamn hint.

Wow

[epyT-R]

This guy's victim routine doesn't sound that much different than the anti-gamergate and atheism plus crowd. let's compare..(replying to his full google+ post)

1. Pretending to misunderstand hyperbole as legitimate threats. (the 'fandom' song he mentioned, and his statements about comments made by linus).
2. Labeling criticism of his effort as a systemwide cultural problem (implying all OSS devs are assholes, and he can't even bring himself to type out the word for fear of being 'offensive'). Then later he types out 'fuck'. Go figure..
3. Many appeals to political correctness; the main argument being that the OSS culture survived in spite of the targeted behavior as opposed to because of it.
4. He targets the gentoo community specifically. Of course, it's one of the only distributions that still gives users a choice in whether to use his software stack, so he labels them all as 'haters.' Again, par for the course in 'social justice' circles.
5. Attack on the internet community as a whole. Lots of groups like to do this now. I think the main reason for this is part of an increased trend against anonymous speech, mainly by people with poor arguments who feel first and (maybe) think later, and by those with something to gain or hypocrisy to hide. It's just more generalization, which is ironic considering that generalization is usually one of the behaviors they accuse people of.
6. Finally, he attacks straight white males, which he acknowledges he is, but then makes implicit and explicit appeals of "I'm not like the others, I'm a victim of them, so help me fight the evil horde!." His whole piece is evidence to the contrary.

Again these closely parallel the behavior of the social 'justice' warriors targeting the atheism and gaming communities. Like them, I suspect that poettering is trying to hide from criticism by calling himself a victim. Don't let him. Linus is correct in booting these people out (or at least putting them in their places) before they gain momentum. They are parasites who sap resources away from the original goal and refocus them towards building hugboxes and/or political platforms. Communities that cultivate the dynamics poettering takes issue with is what keeps these groupthink hugboxes from metastasizing into forces that block the objective (technical) truth for the sake of feelings, whether this groupthink spawns naturally or is fostered by people with agendas hungry for resources and control of the zeitgeist.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

This bullshit should be marked -1 Troll. User starts out by basically saying "those damn feminists".

Try being on the other side of those "fake" threats, and tell me you don't feel threatened.

I find it deliciously ironic that you are attacking the "social justice" crowd as a single entity, whilst decrying the same.

The real parasites are the assholes who blame the victim and defend the bullies. Fuck off.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Pretending to misunderstand hyperbole as legitimate threats. (the 'fandom' song he mentioned, and his statements about comments made by linus).

When someone takes active steps towards realizing a threat (e.g. finding out someone's address or names of family members), that is far beyond "hyperbole." That is ignoring actively soliciting donations towards an assasination attempt which I assume you forgot because if you didn't, WTF is wrong with you?

Mentioning less serious threats to show that this isn't an isolated incident but instead a point on the spectrum seems fair.

2. Labeling criticism of his effort as a systemwide cultural problem (implying all OSS devs are assholes, and he can't even bring himself to type out the word for fear of being 'offensive'). Then later he types out 'fuck'. Go figure..

It seems to me like he's simply testifying to his own experiences, rather than to other people's. I've heard other people complain, so he's not alone. The message I read was that there are more assholes than there should be, and people in the community are too tolerant of assholery. That sounds like a cultural issue to me, but doesn't mean that every OSS dev is an asshole or even assholery-tolerant.

Separately, the word 'fuck' is just a word. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. I'm pretty sure I didn't hurt anyone just now. Now if I indicated I wanted to "fuck" someone who was unwilling to participate, and conveyed that as a threat, that would be a different story, but the issues with that are unrelated to the word "fuck." (they would be just as inappropriate if I used the word "intercourse" or "copulate."

3. Many appeals to political correctness; the main argument being that the OSS culture survived in spite of the targeted behavior as opposed to because of it.

While I don't agree with everything in the message, it is at least worth considering. Do you think reducing the occurrences or viciousness of abusive behavior would really harm the open source community?

4. He targets the gentoo community specifically. Of course, it's one of the only distributions that still gives users a choice in whether to use his software stack, so he labels them all as 'haters.' Again, par for the course in 'social justice' circles.

I didn't see his complaint being about their design choices. It sounded like he was complaining about the commentary on the message boards. Can you provide a source for your "haters" quote?

5. Attack on the internet community as a whole. Lots of groups like to do this now. I think the main reason for this is part of an increased trend against anonymous speech, mainly by people with poor arguments who feel first and (maybe) think later, and by those with something to gain or hypocrisy to hide. It's just more generalization, which is ironic considering that generalization is usually one of the behaviors they accuse people of.

I believe firmly in anonymous speech. What is missing is people who shout down anonymous abuse.

If you ignore the fact that many people "feel first" I suspect it is going to hamper your communication efforts in the long run, but you make your own choices.

Other than that, I didn't see a direct reference in the article (though I read it yesterday and may have missed a detail; you didn't indicate which part #5 was referencing)

6. Finally, he attacks straight white males, which he acknowledges he is, but then makes implicit and explicit appeals of "I'm not like the others, I'm a victim of them, so help me fight the evil horde!." His whole piece is evidence to the contrary.

By "attacks," you mean references as a group in a non-positive fashion? I just want to be clear., because it seemed to me that he didn't say: "If you are a white cis-male between 30 and 50 I'm going to find you and kill you," which your first point described as hyperbole.

Re:Wow

[epyT-R]

Well, most of us have been.. How many of us have been on forums and NNTP? How many times have we all been flamed with stupid shit? Right. The difference is that most of us saw it for what it was and put it in perspective; let it roll off our backs with or without retorts of our own. As linus has shown, a well placed 'FUCK YOU' or comment about retroactive abortion gets the job done a lot more quickly, and with a lot less waste. The productive members of the project laugh about it and get back to work. The whiners do the same, or leave because they either have little to offer, or don't take criticism well, making what they do have to offer, irrelevant. This keeps the pool free of unwanted bacteria clouding the view and making the environment toxic to the goal.

I'm not blaming victims. People who whine like this online are not victims of anything but their own preachy arrogance (and, usually, badly framed arguments). They're perpetrators of bullshit pretending to be victims from any criticism thrown at them. Real victims are not interested in blabbing about their victimhood to feed their narcissism.

The 'social justice' crowd is quite consistent with their tactics regardless of the target organization, community, or government. A generalization is warranted here. The irony you pointed out is actually theirs. They have no problem using every oppressive dirty trick in the book (fake DMCA takedowns, shadow bans/special favors/lobbied for law etc) to silence criticism, labeling it all as 'hate speech' so they don't have to address flaws in their arguments. By and large this behavior is not seen by the opposing sides, but when it does happen, it is loudly generalized as 'proof' of systemic oppression.

Re:Wow

[epyT-R]

1. your name and address are public information. If you want anonymity, don't use your real info online. You are suggesting thought-crime, which is, for the moment, thankfully unenforceable. Someone publicly soliciting donations for murdering someone in irc is obviously a troll, or a complete idiot, not to be taken seriously, especially over some niche thing like init systems for linux.

2. Many people complain about OSS dev culture but at the end of the day, the slightly acidic atmosphere keeps the whining at bay. To use Linus as an example, he keeps lkml on task by preventing people from creating rifts along irrelevant boundaries. Otherwise, if people like sarah sharp have their way, the spot light and focus will ossify from the intended goal and move towards her priorities. His message is clear: do it right and you'll rarely hear from me. Fuck up a little and I'll chide you and provide a suggestion if warranted. If you're big time in the community and you fuck up big time, you get a public earful. Makes sense.

The definition of asshole is subjective. People who whine about their feelings over bad code are the assholes because they're shitting up the channel with their bitching. The answer is to shut up and fix your code, or explain why your code is not fucked up, which starts an on topic debate. Leaving little room for feelings is the way to keep the community on task.

The trick of it is not to give a shit about ad hominems someone hurled at you on the internet or in real life. If someone says "you should've been retroactively aborted" or "you should die", are you really going to take that seriously? Has the culture fallen this far, where we need pervasive, multipage "anti harassment" codes of conduct because the slightest banter creates irrational, morbid fear in most people?

3. There aren't 'that' many instances given the amount of projects out there and the number of people involved. Think about the personality types who code on these projects for a moment. Do you really believe that many of them are psychopathic killers because they threw a few one liners out there in the heat of frustration? I just think people are being conditioned to be hypersensitive to ANY signs of newspeak 'bigotry', 'oppression', 'hate', or 'violence', such that that a few cases out of tens or hundreds of thousands are equated to an epidemic. This last bit is a primary argument used by SJW types and it's bullshit. Honestly, what good is a community that is so humorless and spineless that they worry more about ensuring proper 'trigger warning' etiquette than they do getting anything done?

4. Read his full post on google+.. it's linked in the article.. Here is the quote from it..

On one hand there are certain communities where it appears to be a lot more accepted to vent hate, communities that attract a certain kind of people (Hey, Gentoo!) more than others do.

5. Just because there isn't a group shouting down 'abuse' of a particular side does not mean that side is the oppressed. I am well aware that people feel first, but that doesn't absolve them from using their frontal lobes either. The bottom line is others are not, nor should they be, responsible for your feelings. You are. If we changed this rule, it would be social, and probably legal suicide to do anything remotely interesting. Freedom would die.

6. lol 'non positive'. After your attacks on people who criticized others' criticism, you'll excuse it when it generalizes white males? SJW logic begs the question: are you a racist/sexist/heterophobe? (Note, I think the question is just as ridiculous now as when SJWs ask it.) If he has the same 'privilege' (as sjws define it) as the ones who attack him, then privilege drops from the equation. All he was doing here was trying to make tenuous links to the greater 'social justice' picture to lend credibility to his victimhood. Seriously, if you have the means to contribute to a project, few are going to give a shit what you are as long as

Some things are beyond the pale

[dskoll]

I am not a big fan of systemd and I find Poettering pretty abrasive. But if what he wrote is correct: Recently, people started collecting Bitcoins to hire a hitman for me (this really happened!). Just the other day, some idiot posted a "song" on youtube, a creepy work, filled with expletives about me and suggestions of violence. then that's beyond the pale. IMO, threats of death and violence should be reported to the authorities and the culprits, if found, should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

The Open Source development community is not a friendly place. You do need a thick skin. But threats of violence or death go way beyond just "unfriendly".

Re:Some things are beyond the pale

[sl3xd]

This.

Pottering comes off as an arrogant jerk, but the guy's trying to make Linux better.

Sure, many disagree with his vision, and he definitely could have been less of an ass in a number of documented situations... But he hasn't done anything to warrant the sort of things he's describing.

Some people carry on like he's demanding primae noctis.

Re:Some things are beyond the pale

[gweihir]

The hitman thing is not very believable. Doing this thing would be preparation for murder in various jurisdictions and punished just as actual murder.

Re:Hmmm

[DamnOregonian]

I've felt the same way- I've never thought to try to articulate it though. Kudos.

Quite a Sick Place To Be In

[PPH]

Welcome to the club. Here's your name tag and membership card.

This is one of the reason why I like to call it...

[Dishwasha]

OpenSores Software

Re:Not different from any other workplace

[JohnFen]

You must work in very strange places. In my 30+ years in the industry, I have never encountered this in any workplace I've been in. Yet it's very common with open source communities. This isn't a universal thing, this is peculiar to these communities.

Re:Open-source attracts religious nuts.

[epyT-R]

While things can change over time, this does not justify change for changes sake, especially when the problems being solved haven't changed much, and solutions you've already provided work quite well already. This is a lot of what people are angry about. Focusing on their 'hate' speech and vitriol as 'the problem' just reframes the narrative away from the initial actions that triggered the response. I guess developers like poettering decided they don't need user respect and let their egos drive development. That's ok as it's their software, time, and energy, but they don't get to demand respect from others or silence their expression.

I don't think anyone has said that recompiling the kernel in gentoo (or any other distro) makes one an expert kernel dev.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[Anonymous Coward]

[ . . . ] Not even Hans Reiser [ . . . ]

Did you just . . .

It would be nice if in the future, you didn't imply that even convicted murderers are better than Lennart, or imply that the people trying to hire a hitman are in the right.

All Lennart does is write free/libre open source software, and you people hate him for it. No one is forcing you to use anything, go and use what you want, and let people scratch their own itches in peace, we don't need your stupid hate.

Re:Hmmm

[Nemyst]

People treated slaves like objects and women like subhumans not that long ago - should the slaves just have done some self-reflection and realized that they were, in fact, objects and subhumans?

This kind of shit is never okay, regardless of who's involved. Don't get blinded by personal bias.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[gargleblast]

Everybody knows Hans Reiser. I'm impressed by the Dan Quayle connection: "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy."

Many problems

[lowlands]

There are many problems with Poettering and Sievers:

1) they don't seem to care care about the Community
2) they don't seem to want to interact with the Community
3) they don't seem to want to have a discussion about the many problems and concerns the Community has voiced about systemd
4) it takes no other than Linus himself to force Kay Sievers to get his act together and fix his crap (the "systemd kernel debug" story) and there's another one where Linus orders Sievers again to fix more crap (the "let's *not* read 1 byte at a time" story)
5) they make bad design decisions and consequently write bad software: let's do binary log files and too bad if your journal goes corrupt. We'll just delete it and move on. Given their employer, how is that anywhere near "Enterprise"?!
6) they ignore the Unix/Linux mantra: do one thing and do it well. Now go take a look at the systemd design and how massive that PID 1 kitchensink is. That's a SystemdOMGNucleairZombiesShock waiting to happen.

Why did Red Hat Engineering let it get to this? It's not like this story is beneficial to Red Hat in more than one way. Death threats are of course insane and have no place in our Community. However, the underlying frustration and anger because of their abrasive my-way-or-the-highway attitude and blatant disregard for the Community is hardly surprising. It would not be a bad idea for Red Hat Engineering to reassign Poettering, Sievers et al to work on projects that have no Community interaction nor impact or at least replace their current PHB with someone vastly more capable to reign in those ego's and put an end to this epic amount of Stupid.

Re:in the spirit of open source

[grcumb]

Please RTFA, he is saying people even make life threats.

Yeah, that sucks. It's really juvenile and stupidly cruel.

It's not a thing of "I want to be married by church but they don't accept gay marriage", it's "The KKK burned down my house because I kissed my significant other in the park".

No, it's a case of, 'I piss on my neighbours lawn every day. Yeah, there's a little dead patch on the grass where I do it, but now he's trying to shoot me.'

The first step in remedying this situation is, 'Call the cops.' The second step in this process is 'Stop pissing on your neighbour's lawn.'

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[Anonymous Coward]

This!

Or my favorite version:

If you meet an a**hole in the morning. You met an a**hole.
If you meet a**holes all day, you're the a**hole.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[drnb]

Everybody knows Hans Reiser. I'm impressed by the Dan Quayle connection: "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy."

No they don't, for the typical slashdot reader Hans is more of a Dan Quayle than a Jack Kennedy in terms of recognition.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[multimediavt]

Or, in car analogy terms:

If one guy tailgates you and then passes you on the right, he's an asshole.

If 50 people tailgate you and then pass you on the right, take a goddamn hint.

That's the first car analogy that I've seen actually not be fallacious posted to /. Congrats!

Welcome to the world.

[antdude]

Everywhere is "Quite a Sick Place To Be In". :(

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[Barsteward]

people who tailgate are complete dangerous wankers so thats a stupid analogy.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[Narcocide]

Believe it or not you can get a ticket for driving too slow, even if that speed is the posted limit.

Bitcoin Hitman Story, SERIOUSLY?

[xiando]

1) Post your BTC addresses and say you will kill everyone even remotely famous various places
2) Hope that some BTC dust settles in some of your addresses
3) Watch complete idiots take this seriously and report it as news

Even thinking such threats is anything but lame attempts at making a small profit is utterly ridiculous - it is just as stupid as thinking that an init system should handle everything from systemlog to dhcp.

Anonymous trolls on the Internet ..

[lippydude]

You shouldn't have conflated certain developers with anonymous trolls. These people specifically hang about Open Source forums to disrupt them. There's one sick fuck whose been doing it for the best part of a decade. I assume it's an individual, but how to explain someone posting on average one msg every five minutes over a twenty four hour period, mustn't sleep, eat or work ? And it isn't just Open Source forums. Some time back the Richard Dawkins forum had to be suspended as it had been infested and taken over by some particularly pathological people with their own agenda. Lastly, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols had this to say on the matter:

"But what I find particularly appalling is the fact that he regularly defends this, and advertises this as an efficient way to run a community. (But it is not just Linus, it's a certain group of people around him who use the exact same style, some of which semi-publicly even phantasize [sic] about the best ways to, ... well, kill me)." Lennart Poetterings

'At this point, I think Poettering has gone off the rails.

I know most of Linux's top developers. None of them are fantasizing about killing anyone or encouraging such hateful attitudes" Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I happen to know a bit - if not a fair amount - about the advantages and drawbacks of plain-text vs binary formats for I/O, and the brittleness of dependencies that are expressed through binary formats vs. parsing text.

The beauty and glory and travesty that are *NIX are living testimony to this. The trail of RSTS/E, MVS, VMS, DOS, MacOS, Windows.last and Android.next all demonstrate why POSIX-style systems, built on the "do one thing well" philosophy, with mostly human-readable text-based IO have longevity and are the leveragable core technology under most, more transient, graphical user shells.

SystemD is an abortion. It appeals to RedHat - who stacked the deck and manipulated the governing process to have it adopted by Debian. If they want an OS built like that? They can license the VMS sources and make their OWN copy of NT.

Hooks that fuckup a system, tying init to specific libraries and specific builds of individual device initialization and volume mapping schemes are a step back into darkness - and a cult of experts with necessary commercial funding. This is the breakdown of Open Source vs Free Software from a movement/philosophical POV.

The result of a Linux kernel tied to SystemD and PulseAudio approaches is similar to that of Android - where meaningful work is done by arcane parts of a system that relegates kernel function to the most undifferentiated commodity tasks, and source availability is almost irrelevant - because changes and fixes occur through closed processes, against a code base that is inaccessibly dense and full of binary dependency.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

How has "open source" stagnated? What are your criteria for being dynamic and viable?
Explain in 25 words.

Re:Jeremiah Cornelius & violence

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Your satire-parser needs adjustment.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

He's no Copernicus, blazing a new vision previously un-charted and thus incomprehensible to his peers.

LP is just pivoting to the kind of architectural model for platform software and device/process communication that defined VMS and IBMs SNA. That way? Ah. DLL hell....

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

That was a personal matter.

In which country?

[DrYak]

I'm interested, in which jurisdiction can you get fined for NOT violating rules ?!

That certainly not the case anywhere here in europe.

Re:In which country?

[NormalVisual]

I'm interested, in which jurisdiction can you get fined for NOT violating rules ?!

Most states in the U.S. have laws regarding driving too slowly, and being in the passing lane when you're not in fact passing anyone. Where I live, the relevant laws are F.S. 316.183 (5) and F.S. 316.081. Note that 316.081 is missing the "or in compliance with law" language present in 316.183 (5), so even if you're going the speed limit, you can still be ticketed for hanging in the left lane when you're not supposed to be there. It's rarely enforced though, and it's quite common where I live to see a bunch of idiots cruising in the left lane with the right lane vacant for a mile or more.

Re:In which country?

[rnturn]

That's the law in Illinois, too.

``it's quite common where I live to see a bunch of idiots cruising in the left lane with the right lane vacant for a mile or more.''

I see that, too, and I think in many cases it's drivers trying to stay out of the right lane that's been beat up by overweight trucks.

Re:In which country?

[skids]

We do better than that in MA. Our left lane law was actually apparently written before multilane highways and never adapted. It's technically even illegal to take a left exit here (never enforced) and to use the middle lane unless passing.

There's a common code that many states to defer that gets it about right, unlike the "passing only" states: you have to be going the average speed of traffic to use the left lane, should pull over if safe to let people pass, and generally shouldn't use the left lane unless there's too much congestion for everyone to drive in the right lane. with exceptions for left exits and preemptive passing positions when going by entrance ramps.

In Europe they put on their blinker towards the median side rather than obnoxiously flashing their high beams to remind people in front to vacate the fast lane. Very civilized. This also lets the driver behind you know you'd pass the guy if you could.

Re:In which country?

[NormalVisual]

That's not the case here though - we have a lot of older drivers that either just don't know better or aren't paying attention. Having had the opportunity to drive in a few countries in Europe, it's interesting to see how much easier it is there because people actually know the laws and follow them. Even driving on the Peripherique around Paris is a walk in the park compared to dealing with a lot of highways here in the U.S.

Re:In which country?

[NormalVisual]

In Europe they put on their blinker towards the median side rather than obnoxiously flashing their high beams to remind people in front to vacate the fast lane. Very civilized.

Yes, I've seen that many times myself. Of course, that presupposes that most drivers are actually checking their rear-view mirrors, which sadly and often is not the case here.

Re:In which country?

[KozmoStevnNaut]

In Europe they put on their blinker towards the median side rather than obnoxiously flashing their high beams to remind people in front to vacate the fast lane. Very civilized. This also lets the driver behind you know you'd pass the guy if you could.

Haha no. People flash their high beams like mad if they think you're not moving fast enough. They also put on the blinker, but the high beams come first.

Re: In which country?

[skids]

What I meant is that some people do it in Europe. Here in the U.S. I've seen someone other than me do it about a grand total of once.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I don't mean to pick on these few, but they're indicative of a larger trend toward users who appear to believe that reading manuals and learning OS internals is bad, and we should plaster over all of that mumbo-jumbo with a nice, sleek -- and completely opaque -- management layer. For example: systemd.

I believe this thinking is pretty much in line with Microsoft's train of thought back in the early 1990s. This is an end-user mindset -- this has nothing to do with servers, and certainly not enterprise-level servers. This "learning is hard" mentality is very damaging for Linux as a service platform.

 

Go ahead, kids, spackle over all of that unsightly runlevel stuff. Paint over init and cron, pam and login. Put all of that into PID1 along with dbus. Make it all pretty and whisper sweet nothings about how it's all taken care of and you won't have to read a manual or learn any silly command-line stuff. Tune your distribution for desktop workloads. Go reinvent Windows.

"You Have Your Windows in My Linux"

Re:Jeremiah Cornelius & violence

[DamnOregonian]

That's quite possibly the most awesome slashdot quote I have *ever* seen.

Re:This can't be true.

[Anonymous Coward]

We're told that only women are the victims of this sort of stuff on the internet and that the threats are always real and that it is only because they have boobies, because men are evil misogynists rutting in this rape-culture of ours.

You've never been told that, even once, by anyone ever. And you know it.

Get a clue...

[DrYak]

Unfortunately, yes they do. Unless you want to switch to BSD, or roll your own distribution

If so many distributions, including several major ones (openSUSE, Fedora, Debian, etc.) are ALL switching to systemd (and before that to network manager and pulseaudio), and some of them since quite some time (openSUSE has been using it for 4 iterations) without switching back, and some are even eager to jump in as start using future project from the same source (Google has expressed interests in KDBUS), there might be 2 explanations:

- either Lennart is an Evil-Über-Wizard-Super-Mutant who is mastering the art of mass mind-control, and it forcing every distro to switch using hypnosis.

- or maybe, perhaps systemd is actually USEFUL, solves real-world problems (to the point that most distribution have decided to use it), and isn't as problematic as the detractor want you to believe (don't base your opinion on what the first beta was years ago). Some of purported evils of systemd have no base in reality (detractors tend to forget that systemd is not only PID1, but a whole constellation of helper softwares and daemons).
Systemd might have enough objective qualities, so that even if a very vocal minority doesn't agree with it, a silent majority has considered interesting enough to give it a try.

Also, online I hear a lot of people complaining about systemd and calling for boycott, but I see very few actual useful work:
- Gentoo *DID* write their own init system (OpenRC).
- Uselessd is an attempt at an alternative using as few components as possible.
- SystemBSD is an attempt to offer the same API but rewritten from scratch for BSD (so Gnome and other software which relies on systemd can run there).

But outside of there 3 exceptions, it's basically only people complaining and whining, and not much effort to actually avoid systemd and propose another alternative.

Re:Get a clue...

[drinkypoo]

either Lennart is an Evil-Ãoeber-Wizard-Super-Mutant
- or maybe, perhaps systemd is actually USEFUL,

False dichotomy. One additional possibility is that the GNOME devs are lazy assholes, which we know already based on how many features they've removed and how insensitive they've been to the community's response, but that GNOME is sufficiently important to drive systemd uptake.

Re:Get a clue...

[AlterEager]

Also, online I hear a lot of people complaining about systemd and calling for boycott, but I see very few actual useful work

Don't forget upstart, which was so fantastic even it's authors abandoned it for systemd when systemd became available.

Re:Get a clue...

[stoborrobots]

Plus Ubuntu's upstart... And DJB's Daemontools... And runit... And EpochInit... and busybox's init...

Re:Get a clue...

[maestroX]

But outside of there 3 exceptions, it's basically only people complaining and whining, and not much effort to actually avoid systemd and propose another alternative.

Systemd *has* been bullied into distributions, systemd *is* a bully to other parts of the system.
What response to bullies do you propose?

Re:Hmmm

[AK Marc]

The right to life is unalienable.

So someone that puts down a dog should be tried for murder?

Someone who attempts suicide should be executed for attempted murder?

The right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

If I want to enter your private property with my gun strapped on my side, then you should be banned by law from barring me entry, as it's my right to bear arms, and nobody, not even private citizens on their own property, can infringe upon that.

If you don't agree with my absurd stretches of your statements, then you are a liberal commie.

Re:Pathetic

[drinkypoo]

What a pathetic rage quit post

Sigh, if only it were a rage quit. It's just a rage troll. He's been running around talking mad shit and now people talk shit and then he cries.

Re:Which is it?

[arth1]

You got to wonder what's most likely. That all these people who criticize systemd/pulseaudio or work on the Linux kernel are assholes who gang up on an outstanding individual, or that Lennart Poettering is an asshole who can't handle criticism?

His attacks on Linus Torvalds and likening the Linux Kernel core development team to "a fish [that] rots from the head down" tells me he has gone off the rails. He doesn't need derision, he needs help.

Pulse made one abandon hope

[Bent Spoke]

I've used Linux continuously as my only desktop top every year since 1994, except for 2011 when I switched all our machines to Windows 7 for a year. It was an awful experience, but what made me do that was pulse-audio pooching every distribution. Not sure how it came about, and I'm not casting blame, but what made it so frustrating was I don't even use sound on the PC.

Narrative

[simm_s]

Sadly there is a lot about the open source narrative that we are finding that is not true. Inclusivity and security seem to be the first of a set of pillars that are falling for opensource. Companies gobble up opensource projects they want and lock them behind ecosystems that are not interoperable. It is kind of sad.

Re:Know what's funnier? This... apk

[BarbaraHudson]

Time to poke my personal troll a wee bit :-)

her TomHudson & Barbara, not Barbie accounts banned

Nope. Full explanation of how I was unable to see well enough to use a computer for more than 2 years, and thought I would never be able to, so don't have my old passwords (though they may be written down somewhere) can be found here.

The real issue with APK, (google "APK Hosts File Troll"): Victims of technological change - Why haters gotta hate - which is somewhat on topic to this story.

Oh, and 3 stories on the front page (1 Thursday, two Sunday) Diners Tend To Eat More If Their Companions Are Overweight, First Birth From Human Womb Transplant, and NASA Asks Boeing, SpaceX To Stop Work On Next-Gen Space Taxi.

What have YOU been doing to contribute to the site - except for attacking me based on my gender identity and pimping your hosts file?

Anyway, time to ignore him for another week.

Waste of time

[Anonymous Coward]

In a public forum there will always be two assholes for every reachable person. If you engage indiscriminately, you have to be ready to be disappointed. Favor interaction methods where you work and build relationships directly with people worth your time; and permit you to identify them early on.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[amiga3D]

Yes, keep driving the speed limit.....in the right lane you fucking dipshit. Get the fuck out of the left lane like the damn driver's manual you never read clearly states. If you aren't going fast enough to pass anyone you've got no business over there you sanctimonious Bastard.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[amiga3D]

Damn....I forgot to give you this link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Re: Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[Charlotte]

Hey, I resent that!

Re:Which is it?

[gweihir]

And in addition he needs to stop pushing his vision on everybody. But if he really has gone of the rails, good. Maybe some people will wake up now.

systemd-kernel will come next

[citizenr]

Poettering thinks he is being singled out, but can you name another dev hated by a community? I can - Miguel de Icaza. Icaza advocated for broken closed OOXML, used Gnome to force MONO dependency (rings any bells?) and trolled whole community endorsing OSX over Linux desktop.
Poettering is the next Miguel de Icaza. He not only learned from Icaza how to fuck with people, he took it to the next level. Why settle with gnome dependency when you can take over vital subsystems and use your political power to make them the new default.

Mark my words - systemd-kernel is comming. Poettering dreams at night of being the next Linus, he is jealous and cant stand the fact people love Linus.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[weilawei]

It's pretty simple. There's supposed to be a 2 second gap in good conditions. It's written into the handbook here in MA for driver's ed, although I believe it's been raised to 3-6-12 instead of 2-4-10.

Re:Not different from any other workplace

[NormalVisual]

I've encountered it a few times - it's usually someone that's young, inexperienced and has a higher opinion of his abilities than is warranted. I've had a couple of them that have tried to stab me in the back during meetings and such, which is usually followed by a private conversation indicating that if they want to play office politics, I'm more than willing to do so, but I have a lot more experience doing it and a complete lack of concern for the consequences for them if that's really the route they want to take.

I think a lot of it boils down to John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. People that actually have to interact with you in person tend not to be as dickish because of the potential consequences.

Re:I don't care

[NormalVisual]

Because there's always BSD to fall back on. Just keep Poettering away from that.

Theo would eat him alive without a second thought.

He has a point, but is oe of them himself

[Foske]

If you look carefully, mr. Poettering is the guy behind many problems in the current Linux world. He is the guy behind Pulseaudio, the audio system that destroyed everything that was good about ALSA, and didn't properly fix anything that was bad about it. He is the guy behind systemd, the swiss army knife that is good at everything except what it is supposed to do, reinventing all the wheels that used to be the base of a Linux system. He is complaining that Linux is still too fragmented, and fixes that by adding more fragmentation on the one hand (Pulseaudio, yet another audio implementation) and reducing fragmentation to the level that it's insane on the other (systemd).

And, mr. Poettering. Sometimes listening to others is not a bad idea. There is no excuse for binary log formats. The fact that you still refuse to listen to this message (and others), brought to you by many, makes you nothing better than all the people you are barking at.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[drnb]

and here I thought you'd go for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... (which might be unfamiliar to non-americans)

The Quale joke doesn't work so well when you substitute someone quite well know, Kennedy, with someone who few (even among geeks) have heard of. Many readers recognized the joke but were thinking "who the f*** is Hans Reiser?"

As for those who knew who Hans Reiser was, they were thinking that the reformulated joke didn't make sense. The original joke was a put down, saying that Quail is no war hero, scholar and statesman. The reformulated joke is saying that Lennart is not someone who abuses and murders his wife. The reformulated joke was ill thought out.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[torsmo]

Come back with your rant when Poettering's crap is not being forced down the throats of users of most major distros, and when the company he works for ceases to wield great influence over what eventually becomes accepted standard in the community. Nobody is forcing me to use Windows either, but I use Linux over it for the freedom Linux offers. Yet it's starting to become more of a "You're only free to do these things if you want to use our more popular distro. Piss off if you don't like it". I know I could always try and gather some like minded people and start yet another distro, but when software vendors will only support the major distros and their offerings won't work on your incompatible OS, you have no choice but to fall at the feet of the those you disagree with. Significant alterations to basic software is not synonymous with "scratching an itch".

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[Zontar The Mindless]

Maybe we're old enough by now to realise that "new + shiny" does not always equal "good".

 

Gentoo Users

[PincushionMan]

Yes, I'm sure he's very upset at the rejection by all 10 people who use Gentoo.

Hey, there's no need to count in binary. Oh, and thanks for your decision not to switch the both of us to systemd for now.

Re:Car Analogy

[penguinoid]

What would be the car analogy here?

Your car starts faster but now the brakes and steering are dependent on the ignition?

MLK might have said it like

[bingoUV]

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice

Don't like it, don't use it.

[mo0n_sniper]

People that are against Lennart or systemD act exactly like little spoiled brats. If you don't like systemD then don't use it. No one is forcing you to. You are using something for free, no one has to make you happy in particular.

An anonymous coward writes

[AlterEager]

He says in part: "I don't usually talk about this too much, and hence I figure that people are really not aware of this, but yes, the Open Source community is full of a#@&oles, and I probably more than most others am one of their most favourite targets.

No he didn't you cowardly twit, he wrote:

I don't usually talk about this too much, and hence I figure that people are really not aware of this, but yes, the Open Source community is full of assholes, and I probably more than most others am one of their most favourite targets.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[AlterEager]

This!

Or my favorite version:

If you meet an a**hole in the morning. You met an a**hole.
If you meet a**holes all day, you're the a**hole.

I don't get it. Sometimes your "s" key works, sometimes it produces a "*". Maybe you'd better get your keyboard fixed.

forward looking don't need no logs from the past

[bingoUV]

Exactly. You hit the nail on its head.

Looking for system logs of PAST events, and expecting them to be not corrupted? Can someone be less forward looking than that? Talk about obsession with the past. Forward looking guys need no logs of the past. Next feature in systemd is a log file from future.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[dr_blurb]

mod parent up to some score higher than 5 :-)

Re:Jeremiah Cornelius & violence

[goarilla]

True. All Hail Jeremiah !

systemd is abortion

[bingoUV]

Of good sense. So how can anti-abortion people be not anti-systemd?

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[serviscope_minor]

Yes, keep driving the speed limit.....in the right lane you fucking dipshit. Get the fuck out of the left lane like the damn driver's manual you never read clearly states. If you aren't going fast enough to pass anyone you've got no business over there you sanctimonious Bastard.

Firstly, no driver ever anywhere has the slightest obligation to lift a finger to help you break the law. Second, the slow lane is often full, and sometimes so is the middle and fast lane and they all go at the same speed. There's often no room to move in. So, stop expecting people to live their life around aiding you as much as possible in breaking the law. It makes you seem like a very silly person.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[Rich0]

It's pretty simple. There's supposed to be a 2 second gap in good conditions. It's written into the handbook here in MA for driver's ed, although I believe it's been raised to 3-6-12 instead of 2-4-10.

I think the goal of the tailgater is to influence the driver ahead of them to change their behavior, by genuinely putting their life at risk (if they have to stop quickly, they'll be rammed and then they get to deal with that in addition to whatever they were trying to avoid ahead of them). Leaving a 2 second gap defeats that purpose, thus ensuring that the two guys driving 30 in a 50 zone side-by-side continue to do so.

I'm not saying that it is legal or ought to be legal. That is the rationale, however.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[Rich0]

SystemD is an abortion. It appeals to RedHat - who stacked the deck and manipulated the governing process to have it adopted by Debian. If they want an OS built like that?

Uh, you do realize that virtually every distro around is in the process of switching over to systemd, right? About the only one with no real movement towards doing so that I can see is Slackware. Did RedHat stack the deck and manipulate the governing process on all of them? Or, maybe do they just all want an OS built like that?

Still choice

[DrYak]

but that GNOME is sufficiently important to drive systemd uptake

You still get the choice between:

- keeping GNOME and SystemD.
- throwing away GNOME + SystemD, and switching to KDE, or LXDE, or XFCE, or Unity, or Enlightment, or MATE (or even a mix of Cinamon that relies on gnomelibs that are systemd-free).

(Though probably given that - no matter how much you refuse to believe - systemd *IS* actually useful and *DOES* help solving real-world needs, probably KDE is going to start using it some time in the future, too.
On the other hand, KDE being KDE and being much about choice, KDE will probably go the "phonon" route: they'll probably make a new module in kdelibs called "libkde-systemk" which is a very simple API and high level abstraction of the few features they need, and which can use systemd as a back-end, but could also use systembsd, other backend or even whatever could produce the same functionality under Mac OS X [Launchd] and Windows [huh...?] )

GNOME is *NOT* a absolute requirement for Linux.
And several distros *DID* switch away from it (but not on the grounds of systemd. Mostly because they didn't like the direction Gnome 3 was heading):
- Gnome2 got forked into MATE and had quite some success.
- Ubuntu created their own Unity.
- Mint started their Cinnamon fork of Gnom3
- Some distro switched to XFCE to have a "Gnomish look" but less resource requirement than Gnome 2/3
etc.

Now in fact if you look at it closely:
- Yes, Fedora *IS* a GNOME-based distribution, and they also use SystemD, but...

- openSUSE has been systemd-powered for the past 4 releases (~3 years ago, ~1.5 year after the systemd launch) . Yet, opensuse *IS NOT* a GNOME-based distro. KDE has always been the default, although suse has always made the effort to support both KDE and Gnome as first-class DE making effort to customise and integrate them both.
- ubuntu did switch from Gnome to Unity... but they are switching from Upstart to systemd. ...etc...

Apparently, systemd might be useful enough that even distros that DO NOT depend on Gnome3, STILL decide to pick it up.
The only remaining practical questions are:
- how much until it becomes stable and mature enough (opensuse is showing signs that this is soon)
- how long will it stay before "let's change everything" madness strikes again.

Re:Still choice

[drinkypoo]

You still get the choice between:

- keeping GNOME and SystemD.
- throwing away GNOME + SystemD

You still get the choice between engaging your brain or leaving it idle. This is about distributions adopting systemd, not about me adopting systemd.

GNOME is *NOT* a absolute requirement for Linux.
And several distros *DID* switch away from it

At least some of the distributions you mention still support normal GNOME.

openSUSE has been systemd-powered for the past 4 releases (~3 years ago, ~1.5 year after the systemd launch) . Yet, opensuse *IS NOT* a GNOME-based distro

GNOME-based? "As one of the two default desktop environments of openSUSE, GNOME can be easily installed via various methods." Guess what? Distributions aren't based on GUIs.

Apparently, systemd might be useful enough

systemd is not the only way to provide any of its features. In many cases, other daemons already had some of the functionality. In other cases, the functionality is actually fairly irrelevant. In some cases, the functionality is abhorrent, such as what has been done to logging.

So far, nobody has given a good reason why init needs to have so much more responsibility, or why all these daemons we've been using need to be replaced with one daemon that fails a lot because it's brand new code with no maturity written by a developer with no maturity.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[gbjbaanb]

I prefer:

When you look back at all your failed relationships, you will find a single common factor in all of them .... you.

It's enforced

[DrYak]

Having had the opportunity to drive in a few countries in Europe, it's interesting to see how much easier it is there because people actually know the laws and follow them.

Maybe because it's enforced here in Europe ?
To get a driver's license, one need not only to pass practical driving exams, but also to pass a theoretical exams about the laws. You are required to register to a few theory courses for it. (All paying, that's why some people consider that driver's licenses are trying to scam as much money out of people as possible).
While it's not as difficult as a real school's exam, that still involves at least grasping the basics of the law.
There *are* people failing it. In some countries: fail 3 times in a row, and the local department of transport will politely offer you to put you in contact with professional psychologists if you like (repeated failure might be stress-management related. But might be also an opportunity to catch learning disabilities in a few people, instead of having them repeat the exam 20x until they eventually pass it by random chance and then allow such people on the street).

In comparison, when I was visiting the states, I was baffled at how stupidly trivial it is to get a drivers license.
Which of course makes sense in a country that is so much over reliant on cars. When even "go get groceries at the block's corner's store" means a 15 minutes drive, because the "block" consist of a several mile long succession of 2-store houses, then NOT having a drivers license is basically being completely unable to function in society. Add to the fact that driver's licenses function as photo ID and thus basically anyone is required to have one, so you can't easily fail people. (Unlike here in European countries which all have proper ID Cards. Due to a VERY HIGH level of standardisation, a driver's license is acceptable and can be used as a substitute for ID Card when in a rush. But still, european countries have a photo ID card that is issued to everybody, without needing to pass an exam or to pass a bank's credit card financial history check).

But yeah, basically:
- in europe, to be allowed to drive, you need to positively prove that you aren't going to pose a significant danger to the other drivers.
- in US, to be allowed to drive, you need to approximately qualify as 'human being' (more or less). (Corporal Nobby Nobbs would probably qualify too).

Even driving on the Peripherique around Paris is a walk in the park compared to dealing with a lot of highways here in the U.S.

yet, north European (Germans) find that the French drive badly.
(and the opposite is true in the Balkan, probably US-ians will find driving there too much dangerous for them).

Re:It's enforced

[BeardsmoreA]

Just a quick factual correction - European countries do NOT all have ID cards. The UK for one is quite happy without them (strong resistance to them from most quarters as they are seen - rightly or wrongly - as a sign of an overly interfering state).

Re:It's enforced

[cwsumner]

People in the US have an allergy to government-issued ID cards...

Depends on country

[DrYak]

People flash their high beams like mad if they think you're not moving fast enough. They also put on the blinker, but the high beams come first.

Depends on the country. In Germany, being aggressive *IS* fine-able.
In Switzerland it could be considered impolite.
In southern France, that's the normal behaviour.

Re:Hmmm

[Rich0]

That and polarized topics are such that someone can paint even a moderate view as extremist. I'm anti-abortion and pro-choice. They are orthogonal. Some people think that abortion is a valid contraception method, to be used casually (see the abortion rates and stats from the Soviet Union). Others would wish that nobody needed one, but so long as they are needed, they should be legal. They are pro-choice and anti-abortion. The "pro-life" group is anti-choice. Anti-abortion could fit a description of people from both sides.

I'll agree that pro-abortion and pro-choice are somewhat orthogonal, but the reason that people treat them as not being so is that their real assertion is that abortion is murder, and they just assume that you can't be pro-choice about murder. That is completely untrue, of course, pro-murder and pro-choice are also orthogonal in the same sense.

Let me rewrite your paragraph here and illustrate the challenge:
That and polarized topics are such that someone can paint even a moderate view as extremist. I'm anti-murder and pro-choice. They are orthogonal. Some people think that murder is a valid dispute resolution method, to be used casually (see the murder rates and stats from the USA). Others would wish that nobody needed to kill anybody, but so long as it is necessary, it should be legal. They are pro-choice and anti-murder. The "pro-life" group is anti-choice. Anti-murder could fit a description of people from both sides.

Now, the reality is that almost nobody would self-identify with that statement, but it is a completely self-consistent position to have. I could very well think that murder is something to be avoided, but that it should be legal and up to every individual to decide whether to kill somebody over a disagreement.

I fully appreciate that almost everybody who is pro-choice does not consider abortion to be morally equivalent to murder, and so they will object to the analogy. However, I suspect that most who are pro-life DO consider abortion to be morally equivalent to murder, and so you shouldn't be shocked when they take objection to this simply being a matter of preference.

In my mind the more interesting moral question is whether abortion is murder. Once you make a decision on that one way or another, whether it should be a matter of choice would probably be fairly straightforward in most minds (but then again, considering that gay marriage is still illegal in 20 states and marijuana use in almost all of them, perhaps not).

Hitman? No

[LubosD]

Before you say that someone is hiring a hitman to kill him, you should know that Lennart is referring to this IRC comment:

Feb 14 18:21:51 <kerio> how expensive is a hitman?
Feb 14 18:22:03 <kerio> we can pool some bitcoins

The whole thing is greatly exaggerated.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

You do not acknowledge the abuse of the Debian Community process? Or the fact that Debian is Upstream of 5 or 7 principal distros?

Why not stuff yourself into PID 1 and execute yourself?

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Linux isn't tied to systemd, and you don't even know how to spell systemd (hint: it's not SystemD). Still, you're modded up by the muppets who know less.

Now, before you become a pedant, you must learn to polish your shoes and knot a tie.

Linux is not tied to the init. Correct. Read that as "Linux Distributions".

The "SystemD" is erroneous capitalization - not spelling error. It is deliberate, for editorial satire.

"Muppets" are amusing and bring joy to millions. Try watching some of these "muppets", then come back here and contribute a post with actual content, erroneous or otherwise.

Because only few know 4chan and the bear ..

[burni2]

Saw also some smaller decals on cars.
And thought to myself, perhaps someone wants to state that he or she is pedophile and warn others ?!

Oh... wait... I'm guilty of that.

[HeckRuler]

Yeah, I have to fess up to being one of the people he's talking about. One of those articles about systemd had some comment about how the makers were, you know, bad people.

So I looked it up, and yeah, this guy is at the top of the stack. I'm reading about him and as soon as the term PulseAudio popped up I transformed into a seething ball of rage that wanted bad things to happen to this person. Now, all thing considered with the human condition, that's perfectly fine and all. But then I posted to Slashdot verifying the OP was spot on about the... I dunno... satanic heritage or somethingorother about this guy. What can I say, he broke my sound.

So yeah, he is tied to a thing that caused me grief. I'd never actually want to hurt the guy, but I do wish he had never done anything with PulseAudio.

I can understand if he's caught some flak online.

Re:Oh... wait... I'm guilty of that.

[AntiSol]

heh, that's exactly what happened to me:

"systemd? New init system? Whatever. I trust debian, I'm sure it'll be fine."

"Oh that systemd thing again huh? Wow, seems to be controversial. But as long as I can easily configure my startup I don't care."

"Wait, what? THE PULSEAUDIO GUY WANTS TO GET INTO MY INIT SYSTEM??? FUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOU!"

Violence/threats/etc are never acceptable, but I think it's very fair to be concerned that people who want to be in charge of the most critical process on your system couldn't even get a sound server right. Especially considering that said sound server was unnecessary in the first place and was also shoved down our throats.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[rochrist]

Well of course that justifies death threats! What was I thinking?

Re:Hmmm

[AK Marc]

However, I suspect that most who are pro-life DO consider abortion to be morally equivalent to murder, and so you shouldn't be shocked when they take objection to this simply being a matter of preference.

Since you have abandoned the idea of either side painting the middle as extremists (you didn't stick to the point that "additionally anyone who wishes for abortion to remain legal for incest-rape is pro-murder - you should be bound, by law, to carry your child/nephew to term", or other statements that show either side can force any moderate opinion to an extreme one), but instead you are arguing points about abortion, I'd note that the anti-abortion group is decidedly pro-murder. What's more pre-meditated killing of a human than the death penalty? And it seems that the anti-abortion crowd isn't anti-murder, but pro-size limits. Like fishing, you have to throw them back small and kill them later.

But then, that's another way that the moderate get painted as radicals. If you aren't absolute on every statement, then they paint you as being non-committal to anything/everything. So they'll assume some "moderate" stance on some unrelated topic and attack that. "Oh yeah, I bet you want to kill all the Jews in Israel and hand it back to the Sand Niggers." And if you dignify that challenge with anything other than "fuck off" they'll have something from you on the unrelated topic to vilify you.

The Internet is mostly mental masturbation and rhetorical games for trollers to stroke their egos over forcing people to agree (when the people don't agree, but say they do to be able to discuss other things), or verifying their world view.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[Hans Adler]

So you are now admitting that what you claimed is wrong. *Of course* you can get a ticket for driving in the left lane for no reason at all. It's the same everywhere here in Europe, but people here actually stick to this rule, most of the time. As my ex-wife told me after half a year in Oregon, this is not at all the case there. I guess this is somehow related to everyone with a pulse being able to get a driver's licence. In Germany, like in most European countries, there is always a very real chance of not passing. At the time when most of my classmates turned 18 and took driving lessons, several of them failed on their first attempt. Typical problems were failing the theory exam, not properly starting the car on a rising slope, taking "turn right at the next chance" more seriously than a one-way sign, and following a lorry at a traffic light that turned red - or might have done so - while obscured by the lorry.

In other news: Believe it or not, you can get a life sentence for walking on the side-walk. (If you shoot someone dead while doing so.)

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[rezme]

And the ones about Tesla tend to even be fellatious...

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[amiga3D]

It makes you seem like a dipshit to fail to understand that you aren't supposed to be in the far left lane unless you are passing the car in the left. That's the law. I don't know how many times I've been on I-75 behind a dipshit like you running a snail race against the car in the right. The car in the right lane speeds up, you speed up. The car in the right lane slows down, you slow down. Now you know why everyone flips your stupid ass off as they finally pass you on the right side you smug, self righteous bastard.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[torsmo]

What was I thinking?

Well, you weren't. In my comment, while I certainly didn't mention the threats of violence to his person, an absence of condemnation does not amount to me justifying something as unacceptable as that.

Re:Spell "Penetration" for us JC

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Penetration? It's spelled "Y-O-_-M-O-M-M-A".

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

You have a terrible misread on the situation.

I'd like specifics, next time. Not impressions about "smart phones" and watches - which nearly ALL embed an open kernel and rely on open/free toolchains.

Linux, BSD and Mach are in every Samsung and or Apple product with a CPU.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[Rich0]

You do not acknowledge the abuse of the Debian Community process? Or the fact that Debian is Upstream of 5 or 7 principal distros?

The fact is that virtually every distro has chosen to adopt systemd. The only one not adopting it that I'm aware of is Slackware. Gentoo isn't going to make it a default, but seems likely to drop their existing default. Of course, the #1 Gentoo derivative runs Upstart, so it will be interesting to see where it goes (hint, more systems run Upstart on a Gentoo derivative than on Ubuntu).

Sure, Debian's choice led to many derivative distros going along with it, but there have been many independent decisions to adopt it.

As far as the Debian community process goes - I only followed that tangentially, not being a part of the Debian community. I think I might have one VM somewhere running it that I fire up once a year. You'll have to ask a Debian lawyer whether their process was followed - there seemed to have been a lot of those types on that thread.

Why not stuff yourself into PID 1 and execute yourself?

At least we're getting back to the main topic - the FOSS community is full of assholes.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[Rich0]

1. Gentoo is not switching to systemd, either.

At this point systemd is about as well-supported on Gentoo as the default openrc, and there is open discussion on the lists about removing the default entirely so that there is no default, just as there is no default bootloader or kernel. The whole point of Gentoo is that you get to run what you want to run, more or less. Of course, not all configuration permutations are equally supportable.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[RockDoctor]

Many readers recognized the joke but were thinking "who the f*** is Hans Reiser?"

I'm still trying to work out who the fuck thins Lemming Potsherd guy is, and why I should care about his opinions. Something to remember when WritingTFS, before people refuse to RTFS or even RTFA.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

At least we're getting back to the main topic - the FOSS community is full of assholes.

This was a comment on the basic design flaw of sytemd. I couldn't pass on the joke. Relax a little.

I'm sorry if it seemed personal.

Cheers.

Who the fuck?

[RockDoctor]

So, he's someone who has written some sound shit (totally uninteresting) and is screaming about shit that goes on below the level at which I want to care about the system.

[Shrug] Maybe I'll remember his name for long enough to ignore the next stuff that he writes about.

Re:Hmmm

[Rich0]

Since you have abandoned the idea of either side painting the middle as extremists (you didn't stick to the point that "additionally anyone who wishes for abortion to remain legal for incest-rape is pro-murder - you should be bound, by law, to carry your child/nephew to term", or other statements that show either side can force any moderate opinion to an extreme one)

You're going to have to re-state that, as I am not sure what you're trying to say. You seem to be putting words in my mouth.

I really didn't intend to comment at all on whether either side paints the middle as extremists at all.

I didn't say "additionally anyone who wishes for abortion to remain legal for incest-rape is pro-murder - you should be bound, by law, to carry your child/nephew to term" so I'm not quite sure why it is in quotes.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you. I'm just honestly not quite sure what you're trying to express.

I'd note that the anti-abortion group is decidedly pro-murder

Uh, what does being against abortion have to do with being for murder? I'm not sure how this follows.

What's more pre-meditated killing of a human than the death penalty?

So, there are a few problems here:

1. First, you can be anti-abortion and also be anti-death-penalty. Many aren't, but they are really different issues.
2. You've basically defined "murder" as "the premeditated killing of a human." I doubt most will accept that definition. If we were to accept that definition, then murder isn't a crime, abortion is murder, many consider murder morally acceptable, etc. I'm not usually big on arguing over definitions, but this was not what I meant when I used the term.

But then, that's another way that the moderate get painted as radicals. If you aren't absolute on every statement, then they paint you as being non-committal to anything/everything.

No argument there, and that was certainly not my intent.

My point was simply that the reason the "anti-abortion" crowd tends to also be "anti-choice" is that they consider abortion to be murder, and as a result people can't be offered a choice. Most people would not say that a person has a right to choose to kill their adult neighbor without their consent. Many would actually say that a person doesn't even have the right to kill themselves, though this is far more controversial.

Whether abortion is murder is certainly something that can be debated. There is no question that abortion is pre-meditated killing. Looking at an ant and stepping on it is pre-meditated killing. Whether it is the killing of a human is just a matter of your definition of a human. However, murder usually involves more than just the pre-meditated killing of a human. For example, we generally do not use the term murder to describe the actions of a firing squad, a police officer firing on a hostage taker, or a military operation, but all of those can involve the pre-meditated killing of a human.

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[Rich0]

Np. It was a nice pun, and much of this debate goes to whether this sort of thing is acceptable discourse.

Between two friends as a joke it goes over a lot better than between two strangers on a mailing list. :)

I'd suggest

[NewYork]

He do MBA.

Great for laptops, shit for servers

[Phil Urich]

Indeed, like much of what the Red Hat / GNOME camp have created (NetworkManager being a perfect example), it's great technology for personal laptops and absolutely shit technology for servers.

Re:Great for laptops, shit for servers

[The Technomancer]

Exactly. Hey, if Red Hat thinks that Fedora/RHEL for desktop is going to pay their bills instead of people in my shoes, good for them. I'll go to a vendor that wants my dollars.

Because unlike the people touting systemd and wanting it for the desktop, laptop, or mobile, I'm actually paying for this shit.

Kindof suspicious timing

[Phil Urich]

I'm sure it's a coincidence, but I still can't shake the timing of Lennart's rant. Right when Linus goes incommunicado for traveling, eh? Hmm.

GNOME OS

[Phil Urich]

He's long talked of "GNOME OS", and the kernel as a mere "implementation detail". So honestly, you might not be far off.

Re:GNOME OS

[Tetra]

I>He's long talked of "GNOME OS",
that would be fantastic - I wish he would go do that. Then maybe shit can get back to a normal working state...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Systemd AND PULSE AUDIO

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Reply weeks late? Stop living in the past!

Die Hard - Nothing Lasts Forever

[mrfatmann]

>> If you troll and do things that people don't like, you are bound to get a lot of negative feedback. Your own remarks a a fine example of this.
> It's fascinating how in the digital age people have lost sight of this.

This seems so confused to me. No one has lost sight of this. You can't post into any forum, join any community distro, with the intention of receiving or giving help without coming in "with your hat in your hand", so to speak (more for the former than the latter, actually). What happens afterwards depends greatly on moderation and the culture. In an anarchic culture you're lucky if you can give as good as you get.

And that's exactly the confused and mighty culture which was needed to make competitive products with juggernauts the ilk of Microsoft.
Who would 'av thunk it possible 20 years ago?
Technologies are maturing.
People grow up.
They don't want to fight tooth and nail--all the time.

Ni!

[Hognoxious]

There you go, bringing class into it again.

Hugh Grant

[Hognoxious]

The key word there is just. Look it up.

(Hint: it's not used in the "fair/equitable" sense in this context)

Re:Hugh Grant

[qpqp]

it's not used in the "fair/equitable" sense in this context

No, it definitely is not ; )

Re:Hitman

[Hognoxious]

First rule of hitmen: never talk about hitmen.