hope not tied to SystemD
hope not tied to SystemD
Posted Aug 15, 2025 22:31 UTC (Fri) by josh (subscriber, #17465)In reply to: hope not tied to SystemD by atai
Parent article: Finding a successor to the FHS
Posted Aug 16, 2025 1:02 UTC (Sat)
by gdt (subscriber, #6284)
[Link] (18 responses)
More generally, writers are moving away from using vendor capitalisation to whatever format assists the reader best, treating the word as a proper noun and capitalising to assist pronunciation. That is, authors are writing for readers, not for corporations. For example, Ikea has a corporate-preferred capitalisation of "IKEA" but is not said as "I. K. E. A.": the corporate style misinforms the reader. Some publications have a house style requiring "System-D" (ie, written as pronounced unless the product is very famous), so this author's choice is within the range of normal.
Posted Aug 16, 2025 2:38 UTC (Sat)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (10 responses)
Posted Aug 16, 2025 7:02 UTC (Sat)
by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152)
[Link] (6 responses)
Care to explain to the ignorant I am, a "useful indicator" of what ? Does the latter convey a particular meaning for some groups ? I've seen it spelled both ways and genuinely thought that the former is the process name while the latter is the project's name, and have seen the latter being used by those trying to carefully represent it. So if this form is associated by some to a certain meaning, it would be nice to know. But I doubt it would be associated with anything negative by the project maintainers themselves, considering that it appears a few times in the repo's history and even still in the code itself: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/main/src/resolve/.... So isn't this just some noise, or maybe those triggering on a particular spelling are themselves an indicator of anything like searching for trouble where there isn't ?
Posted Aug 16, 2025 9:50 UTC (Sat)
by bluca (subscriber, #118303)
[Link] (5 responses)
There's even a brand page defining it if you are in doubt: https://brand.systemd.io
Posted Aug 16, 2025 10:45 UTC (Sat)
by nadir (subscriber, #154506)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Aug 16, 2025 12:00 UTC (Sat)
by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Aug 16, 2025 13:24 UTC (Sat)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link] (1 responses)
So in standard unix nomenclature, systemd is the daemon that manages the system. And like all such daemons, it's lower case.
Cheers,
Posted Aug 16, 2025 21:10 UTC (Sat)
by SLi (subscriber, #53131)
[Link]
While calling it SystemD is obviously just clueless and wrong because that's not its name in any meaning, I don't think this fundamentally collapses the way you propose. For example, we have the thing that is named the Apache HTTP Server, often Apache in brief, which has a binary named httpd. Even if it had decided to call its binary "apached", that wouldn't mean that the software's or project's name is "apached". I think it's useful to think there's a layer of indirection between project names and filenames. Apache is not even the only httpd...
Posted Aug 17, 2025 9:14 UTC (Sun)
by jem (subscriber, #24231)
[Link]
Posted Aug 16, 2025 16:40 UTC (Sat)
by ATLief (subscriber, #166135)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Aug 16, 2025 17:56 UTC (Sat)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link]
To answer your (presumably bad-faith) question earnestly, if there was a project that chose capitalization like 'kEWlfS' to refer to their work, rather than the more conventional 'KewlFS' that would be fine, maybe this project is a FUSE driver for Exchange Web Services (EWS) so they want to emphasize this in their branding, it would be disrespectful to insist that your personal interpretation and preferences are more correct and should override the members of the project who are doing the work, in a matter of style such as this.
Posted Aug 18, 2025 9:16 UTC (Mon)
by tao (subscriber, #17563)
[Link]
Posted Aug 16, 2025 16:00 UTC (Sat)
by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
[Link] (6 responses)
We write iPhone, not Iphone. It is written the way people recognise it, you don't need to know how to pronounce it to know what it means. Written and spoken languages are not the same (though obviously closely related).
Anyone writing System-D is basically doing the same as people writing Micro$oft. A deliberate misspelling for effect.
Posted Aug 17, 2025 11:39 UTC (Sun)
by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152)
[Link] (5 responses)
Why "deliberate" ? I used to think it was spelled like this. There are commits in the systemd repo spelling it this way, and there is even still one instance of it in the code. Why always search for nastiness when it can simply be explained by ignorance ? Why would people know how developers *wanted* to spell it when the *only* contact they have with the name is oral, when spoken about by others ? How many times a day do you see "systemd" written on your screen to represent the project (not the process nor directories), or even do you write it on your keyboard ?
Systematically jumping on people when they ignore something that you happen to know is not doing any service to anyone, let alone to the project you want to defend or represent, it makes it look like being surrounded by people waiting in the corner, ready to attack you if you fail to pronounce it well. This makes no sense. It reminds me of the good old days of LaTeX, where some morons would laugh when someone pronounced "latex", with the most extremes even insisting "don't you see, it's not an X, it's a Chi, but OK you can use the X letter". Better just teach others rather than criticize.
In the case of "Micro$oft" you cited above, it's different, it's using a character that is not a letter but the symbol for a currency to infer a relation between a company name and money. You should instead compare this to spelling "MICROSOFT", or "MicroSoft" instead of "Microsoft", which is easy to be mistaken about as well, particularly since the original logo was uppercase BTW!
Posted Aug 17, 2025 12:08 UTC (Sun)
by bluca (subscriber, #118303)
[Link]
2 in total, both from 2010
> and there is even still one instance of it in the code.
a mistake by a contractor in a code comment that slipped through the cracks, already fixed
> Why always search for nastiness when it can simply be explained by ignorance ?
This time it's just an honest mistake, the issue is that 99% of the times it's not, and instead it's a case of a particular venn diagram being a circle
Posted Aug 17, 2025 18:15 UTC (Sun)
by jem (subscriber, #24231)
[Link] (3 responses)
This text has been on the systemd website since the beginning. Where else would the naysayers have learned to call it SystemD?
Posted Aug 18, 2025 5:21 UTC (Mon)
by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152)
[Link] (2 responses)
Yesterday I made a test and told a friend about this news. He was surprised and told me "Ah? I thought it was written like SystemV". That might actually be one possible source of confusion and a more likely one than deliberately wanting to misrepresent a brand. I find it really bizarre to put criticizers and newcomers in a same box just for their accidental misuse of a name, at the pretext that some untold statistics shows that 99% of the time it's criticizers who spell it like this. Maybe instead they become criticizers after having been insulted for writing it this way. I really find this approach offensive. But anyway, let's end this topic.
Posted Aug 29, 2025 1:10 UTC (Fri)
by cypherpunks2 (guest, #152408)
[Link] (1 responses)
That was my thought as well. I'm quite surprised that people are reading so much into the spelling, to the point of even inferring political opinions.
I don't see any secret cabal of systemd-haters covertly communicating with each other using misspellings to trick those who don't dislike systemd. People who dislike systemd are generally not shy about saying they dislike it. We shouldn't be looking under rocks for people who have different opinions about init systems.
Posted Aug 29, 2025 8:59 UTC (Fri)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link]
It's interesting that people don't seem to wonder why the number in the name should suddenly jump from 5 to 500 …
Also, the legacy init system which systemd replaced wasn't actually called “SystemV”. It didn't have a proper name to begin with (after all it was just the init system, not much to see here, move on) and, in the Linux community, people used to refer to it as “System V init” because it was patterned on what was delivered with Unix System V (in the 1980s), as opposed to, e.g., what BSD was doing. So it isn't entirely obvious why the successor to “System V init” would be called “SystemD” – if Lennart Poettering had intended to continue that pattern he would clearly have gone with “System D init” and not just “SystemD”, but then it'd still be strange to move from “V” to “D” and not “VI” or “W” (remember that the X Window System was the successor of another window system called W, hence the “X”).
Anyway, more than a decade and many blog posts, man pages, distribution releases, conference presentations, etc. later it should be common knowledge that the “d” at the end of “systemd” is, in fact, lowercase. It is reasonable to assume that people who still insist on writing “SystemD” have either been living under a rock or else have an axe to grind.
hope not tied to SystemD
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Wol
hope not tied to SystemD
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That was my thought as well.