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Some changes needed...Some changes needed...Posted Nov 28, 2012 11:01 UTC (Wed) by Wol (guest, #4433)In reply to: Some changes needed... by HelloWorld Parent article: Langasek: Upstart in Debian
And the programmer in question has a reputation for blaming other systems when it is their fault.
A lot of programs follow the unix philosophy of "be strict in what you send, and liberal in what you accept". Lennart doesn't do that. He does "be strict in everything you do". Which is why so many of his previous programs have been such a pain - he refused to work around bugs etc in other programs, and just complained and complained until they were fixed.
Unfortunately, in the meantime, things like Pulseaudio didn't work properly :-(
Hence the decision that systemd would assume the things it needed were there, I suppose. And then Lennart made sure that, in linux at least, they were. If other people want to port systemd, they need to make sure the things it needs are there.
Cheers,
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Some changes needed... Posted Nov 28, 2012 11:28 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]
Aside: Isn't that more often referred to as the "Postel Principle", rather than the unix philosophy?
Some changes needed... Posted Dec 3, 2012 13:50 UTC (Mon) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link] Yes, it is, and it applies to the internet (originally the TCP/IP protocol), not unix. (It is also often misunderstood...)
Some changes needed... Posted Nov 28, 2012 14:06 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
Personally, I also try to get bugs fixed rather than work around them. Either everybody will need to do that workaround or those that really need it fixed can just bump the minimum version. Yes, things can suck until they are fixed, but I can't remember any sound issues since Fedora 10 or 11 (and I've had a Rawhide machine since 14 or so)[1]. Maybe its selective memory, but they've not been major enough to mention in passing (Fedora 9 Beta however...). And, FWIW, this is what GNOME tries to do. As long as those refusing to do workarounds help in some way with the bugs (fixing, testing, documenting it, etc.), I see no issue with the approach.
[1]Well, okay, flat volumes suck, but that's been added to my dotfiles.
Some changes needed... Posted Nov 28, 2012 16:24 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]
I'm not sure how demanding quality and working on building a robust infrastructure is supposed to be a bad trait ... I think if more developers were less tolerant of misbehaving infrastructure that the Linux software stack would be even better than it is now.
Some changes needed... Posted Nov 28, 2012 16:57 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>I'm not sure how demanding quality and working on building a robust infrastructure is supposed to be a bad trait ... I think if more developers were less tolerant of misbehaving infrastructure that the Linux software stack would be even better than it is now.
We tried that. It was called HURD. As you know, it's been a roaring success and now powers 87% of desktops around the world.
Some changes needed... Posted Nov 28, 2012 17:07 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
I've actually tried HURD when it became available in Debian (I think it was about 5 years ago). It was a crappy PITA - nothing worked, daemons crashed, system was locking up all the time.
Some changes needed... Posted Nov 28, 2012 17:50 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
And that's what actually happens in reality when you focus on theoretical elegance like being intolerant of misbehaving infrastructure, rather than focussing on making things that work in this world.
It's why 32-bit applications can't play sound out of the box on Debian wheezy (at least as of a couple of weeks ago), because both PulseAudio and Debian's multiarch implementation care more about 'technical excellence' than working software.
(I know, I should have filed a bug for my specific problem, or at least found out if there was one already, but I'd just spent ages trying to figure out why 32-bit applications can't use OpenGL on NVidia hardware only to discover that the bug was filed, the reason understood, a fix posted, and the maintainer intentionally didn't apply it because "if there's two things in the world I don't care about it's wine and the nvidia driver". I had no desire to head right back down that particular rabbit hole.)
Some changes needed... Posted Nov 28, 2012 17:58 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
> "if there's two things in the world I don't care about it's wine and the nvidia driver"
Was this a package maintainer or upstream?
Some changes needed... Posted Nov 28, 2012 19:06 UTC (Wed) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
That seems like something FESCo would handle in Fedora (conflict between packager of A and packager of B which depends on A). There's no way to elevate it in Debian?
Some changes needed... Posted Dec 1, 2012 15:05 UTC (Sat) by viiru (subscriber, #53129) [Link]
> That seems like something FESCo would handle in Fedora (conflict between
> packager of A and packager of B which depends on A). There's no way to > elevate it in Debian?
Yes there is, the Technical Committee (see http://www.debian.org/devel/tech-ctte ).
Some changes needed... Posted Nov 28, 2012 22:24 UTC (Wed) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
It's interesting to see that other people had the same kind of issues with Debian maintainers that I did. It's one of the reasons why I switched away from Debian some time ago.
Some changes needed... Posted Nov 28, 2012 17:41 UTC (Wed) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]
> We tried that. It was called HURD.
Lennart doesn't call for some crazy new design that nobody is able to implement, he merely advocates fixing bugs instead of working around them. And he does succeed with that, most distros ship with PulseAudio, Avahi and systemd today.
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