Poettering: Why systemd?

Sorry, I seem to be using a form you're not familiar with. The "Shorter:" means I'm summarizing the previous poster's point. In this case, I'm suggesting that the complainers are only in favor of standardization as long as it doesn't force them to change. I agree that this is an unreasonable position. Since I think increased standardization is a good idea, this means people will have to accept some change.

I guess the situation with systemd reminds me of two other situations I've encountered. One was a disagreement between a mechanic and an engineer about cars. The mechanic liked carburetors because he was confident he could fix a carburetor if it ever broke; the engineer preferred fuel injectors because they were much less likely to break in the first place. It seems to me that the supporters of SysV with traditional scripts are like the mechanic; they like that they know how to modify the scripts but ignore that many of their hacks would be unnecessary with a better designed system.

The other is something that the Gnome maintainers commented about their decision to eliminate many configuration options. They said that many requests for new configuration options were really requests to fix bugs, but that the people requesting the "not broken" option didn't realize that the behavior they were describing shouldn't have been happening in the first place. I suspect, though I'm not sure, that many of the configuration tweaks that supporters of the current system are talking about are really bug fixes. They're asking that we maintain their ability to patch other people's breakage rather than move to a system that isn't so broken to start with.