LPC: Booting and systemd

From what I've seen, Poettering has been highly opinionated but polite and level headed when discussing systemd. Even in the face of angry maniacs blaming him for every problem in the world and calling for his demise on mailing lists, he's remained factual and solution oriented. That is a far cry from the «I will break all your audios» raving lunatic person that I feel he was sometimes channelling in the context of pulse.

Switching a major OS component like init will always be a huge PITA for system admins, but in this case, at least the end result should be something that gives them more control and fewer head aches once the migration is complete. But yeah, holding off the migration for another year or two is prudent, systemd is still in the «rapidly gaining features» phase, which historically implies lots of minor incompatibilities on upgrade.

I would distinguish people like DJB from people like say, JWZ or Lennart by the fact that the latter do actually adjust "their way" in the light of revelations about the workings of the universe (or say, the Linux kernel). The response to calm explanation of why Lennart is wrong is usually either a change to how his software works to accommodate these new facts or at least documentation showing how you can adapt his software to this viewpoint (and if you're right that's what everyone will do, probably including Lennart). With DJB what you can expect is a manifesto calling for all operating systems to be re-written, cultural orders to be overturned, and black to be declared white in the service of making DJB's software work as he intended.

George Bernard Shaw said that all progress depended upon the unreasonable man, but clearly there's a line beyond which no progress will be made because too much effort is expended on tilting at windmills. I think Lennart stays the right side of the line, mostly.

The main issue for an administrator is that systemd is different, which means learning new stuff. If you are (or employ) the kind of sysadmin who spends weeks cursing every minor change in common Unix tools, filesystem layouts and so on, then I have no doubt systemd will be a problem.

I expected systemd to be tremendous PITA at first. However, it's not been a hassle for me at all. At least, not as it's implemented in Fedora 15. I don't have 100s of machines running it, but I have far more than 3.