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Longtime Debian Developer Tollef Fog Heen Resigns From Systemd Maintainer Team
An anonymous reader writes Debian developer Tollef Fog Heen submitted his resignation to the Debian Systemd package maintainers team mailing list today (Sun. Nov. 16th, 2014). In his brief post, he praises the team, but claims that he cannot continue to contribute due to the "load of continued attacks...becoming just too much." Presumably, he is referring to the heated and, at times, even vitriolic criticism of Debian's adoption of Systemd as the default init system for its upcoming Jessie release from commenters inside and outside of the Debian community. Currently, it is not known if Tollef will cease contributing to Debian altogether. A message from his twitter feed indicates that he may blog about his departure in the near future.
What do you think is the greatest misconception people not liking systemd have about it?
It's a new system, so some things work differently. Many people seem to fail to see the line between bugs and intentional behaviour. If something doesn't work as before, it might not be because we're evil bastards who are out to steal your logs. It might just be that there's a bug in some package which means your logs aren't correctly forwarded from the journal.
Sometimes it might be that systemd makes other assumptions about what something means and we're just failing to catch that in an upgrade check that should warn you about this. An example here is missing devices/mount points in fstab: sysvinit will happily ignore them, systemd won't consider local-fs.target reached and you'll have to fix your system for it to boot correctly.
Assumptions, as so often before, are the mother of all fuckups. Asking (preferably in a civilized manner) will get you a long way: "Hey, I'm not seeing my logs appear in syslog, is this supposed to be that way, and if not, can you help debug?"
This might not be the greatest misconception, but I think it's the most common one. The greatest is possibly the conspiracy theory that this is all a takeover attempt from RH to kill other Linux distributions and that people pushing systemd are either shills or just unwittingly working against the distro they're pushing systemd into. I'm not sure how adopting a free software component (which sure, happens to be largely maintained by RH engineers, like many other free software components we use to build a distro) will turn us all into corporate-loving robots giving up freedom to be near the source of systemd.
Debian have many good sides. It also suffers from fractions; the problem isn't so much that people disagree about some time petty technical things, but that they abuse the Debian bug tracker and governmental system in order to feud their petty wars on usually innocent package maintainers. By filling "political" bugs together with a lot of whining and twisted representation of facts, and then run and complain to higher ups in the hierarchy, they can force the package maintainer into endless, repeated explanations why things are like they. You can basically force the package maintainers to always be in defensive position. Not fun at all.
In this case it is the "anti-systemd" faction that is abusing the system and the developers, but there have been several other, perhaps smaller cases before this.
The "anti-systemd" faction probably just think they are fighting with their backs against the wall, trying to claw out a place in Debian with any means necessary before it is "too late".
But if they keep on attacking Debian developers like they do now, I think their strategy will backfire. Before the bitter systemd debacles started, most Debian developers where probably quite keen to support non-systemd inits too. But this rather poisonous war just never seems to end, so some Debian developers are starting to think, that the only way forward is an outright banishment of official SysVinit support after Jessie is released.