And people call Lannart arrogant???

Posted Nov 21, 2011 19:21 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Change... to what? by jmorris42
Parent article: That newfangled Journal thing

Wow. Just... wow. You really, seriously, think that you have the right to drive the heretics from the temple?

This is free world and free software. If you don't want to use Lennart's creations and you don't want to pay for his work - you are free to do so (albeit I doubt you pay RedHat for anything anyway).

But to say that someone should stop doing what they are doing just because they crossed some imaginable line... wow. This is arrogance beyond belief.

If you want to keep UNIX culture and UNIX-like distribution (or distributions) alive - you are equally free to do so. But please stop proclaiming that you somehow have right to send people elsewhere. RedHat will deicide if it wants to continue to support Lennart's work. People will deicide if they want to support RedHat which supports Lennart. But if you want to drive a stake in the ground then you should find a place where people will allow you to do that.

Slackware, Debian, whatever. Find the place where people will be happy to live in the past and will be Ok with supporting "the old ways of doing things". If the froth in this thread is any indication you should be easily able to find supporters and live "happily ever after". But why people who don't share you obsession with "Unix way" should suddenly "move away" id they are Ok with RedHat, Lennart, etc?

Actually I suspect I know why all the froth happens: you understand that in reality "Unix way lovers" is very small (if vocal) group and without people who are doing the real work you'll soon have a system which is only usable on a small subset of hardware and with pretty limited choice of software. Well... this is the price you should pay if you really want to fight for your ideals.

And people call Lannart arrogant???

Posted Nov 22, 2011 1:19 UTC (Tue) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203) [Link] (2 responses)

> Slackware, Debian, whatever.

Yes. That is exactly what I'm asking. At this point though it is very hard to figure out which, if any, of the major distributions plan on remaining recognizable as UNIX descendants. Which makes it kinda hard to pick one. What I'm saying is it is time for distributions to be honest with us poor users and tell us what the hell they are doing. Are they chasing The Year of Linux on the Desktop to the exclusion of the users who have been and currently ARE using their system? Have they even thought about it or are they just caught up in the daily grind of packaging up the same tarballs the other distos are so they show the same version number on distrowatch?

Ubuntu has pretty much told us they are. And we will probably know for sure about RedHat if they actually ship the controversial bits of Fedora as RHEL 7.0. (And if the paying customers eat the dog food, guess it was a good business decision and best 'o luck to em.) But that leaves questions. What of Debian? Do they just pull whatever upline throws them and follow along or what? Does this go unopposed until even Slackware is unrecognizable? It is clear the Windows refugees know exactly what they want and have the numbers to impose their will upon us, so if we don't speak up, and pretty quickly, I suspect there won't be many options other than *BSD, and that their taunt will have come true. That BSD is for people who like UNIX and Linux is for those who don't like Windows.

Maybe we end up having to port BSD to the Linux kernel... Sort of the reverse of Debian/FreeBSD.

And people call Lannart arrogant???

Posted Nov 22, 2011 2:40 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

As far as I know, Slackware has explicitly said "no" to systemd.

And people call Lannart arrogant???

Posted Nov 22, 2011 6:06 UTC (Tue) by jrn (subscriber, #64214) [Link]

> What of Debian? Do they just pull whatever upline throws them and follow along or what?

You can see an approximate preview of the next Debian release by looking at what "unstable" does today (just like you can see a preview of the next Fedora release by running rawhide). If you don't like what you see, you can even participate to improve it by sending clear bug reports and patches.

Suppose you disagree at a fundamental level with an operating system developer --- for example, let's say you love KDE 3 and are upset that the KDE maintainers moved on to KDE 4. Even then, as long as you are doing the work, you can add packages that work the way you want in parallel (for example, you could package Trinity). If your use case requires changing someone else's package in a way that the maintainer does not want, then the technical committee[1] may listen to your arguments, weigh them (which involves, implicitly, weighing the impact on users and the amount of work you have done to bring your proposal about), and come up with a way to make it happen without sacrificing too much.

I imagine most distros work somewhat like this.

[1] http://www.debian.org/devel/tech-ctte

And people call Lannart arrogant???

Posted Nov 23, 2011 23:12 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (6 responses)

> Wow. Just... wow. You really, seriously, think that you have the right to drive the heretics from the temple?

why not? Lennert thinks that he does, the only difference is the definition of 'heretic'

And people call Lannart arrogant???

Posted Nov 24, 2011 8:44 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

The difference is that Lennart's (I think you should take the trouble to spell his name correctly, the guy deserves at least that much respect) approach is backwards-compatible with syslog it is fairly trivial to gate syslog messages into »the Journal« while the Unix traditionalist approach is basically to deny innovation in the syslog space.

It is apparently acceptable to tweak the actual implementation of the syslog daemon, but it would be just as well to acknowledge that the underlying protocol sucks and could use improvement.

And people call Lannart arrogant???

Posted Dec 1, 2011 13:02 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

>the Unix traditionalist approach is basically to deny innovation in the syslog space

That really isn't true. The people I've seen in this thread who are unhappy with journald haven't been saying that everything should stay as it is; they've been saying that evolutionary changes would be better than revolutionary changes, and providing several reasons for that which, on the face of it, seem sane.

Saying "we'd like to improve this carefully rather than starting from scratch" is a far cry from 'denying innovation'.

Well, there are big difference...

Posted Nov 24, 2011 10:32 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (3 responses)

why not? Lennert thinks that he does, the only difference is the definition of 'heretic'

No. The main difference is that Lennart has the mandate to introduce this (and other) changes. Fedora has well-defined procedure where such changes are discussed and accepted and rejected - and so far it was pretty sympathetic to the Lennert's creations. They were considered on their technical merits and accepted or pushed away till they'll be ready. They also have the option to reject proposed changes completely (even it was never implemented so far).

This is normal technical process: we all want to make things better but of course different people differ in the definition of "better". What jmorris42 offers is totally different: we should create some kind of sacred tome which will define out religion and reject everything which does not conform to it. No matter if it's good or bad - if it's sacred tome it's wrong and not allowed.

If you want to worship someone or something - it's your choice, but please do it in your sect, in your temple, don't try to push this on other people.

I understand why jmorris42 does not like to do it this way: world is changing. Just because you refuse to change with it does not mean it'll comply with your wishes and will keep the option to use old code open: *BSD fell in this trap - they are mostly unusable today not because they have some inborn weaknesses but because companies decided they don't care and so it's hard to find hardware to run them on!

It's interesting that Linux itself is in danger of going the same way in some cases: people from Palm complain that when they contact subcontractors and ask about Linux support they are redirected to people who ask which version of Android they plan to use!

But if you fear that this will be the result then you have only two choices actually:
1. Accept changes and "go with the flow".
2. Roll up your sleeves and try to keep your "UNIX-style system" alive (like *BSD people are doing).

Screams "heretics, heretics" are not really a good answer because Linux world has no bishops which can hear you and if someone will try to instill such institution I doubt a lot of people will accept that.

Well, there are big difference...

Posted Nov 24, 2011 11:26 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

you define heretic as anyone unwilling to accept the latest proposal

others define heretic as people eager to change the system in ways that are not incramental changes, but are instead "throw out what's there and write a replacement, the replacement doesn't need to do everything the old system did because the people who used those features aren't important"

changes that are proposed that are really optional (and not just "pick a different distro if you disagree" optional), and can be ignored if the admin wants to get relatively little opposition (they may get some grumbling if it takes work to figure out how to turn off the new features, but nowhere near the opposition that these re-writes from scratch get)

Well, there are big difference...

Posted Nov 24, 2011 11:34 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

by the way, a note on the number of users and the "most machines don't need this feature argument"

If you count by the number of people at a keyboard of a machine you may be right.

but when you start considering server farms where the admin to system ratio is commonly well over 100 servers per admin, you would get very different numbers.

embedded systems are in many ways far more like servers than desktops. They have skilled admins managing the software and all the non-trivial configurations on the devices (either at the factory, or through 'firmware updates'

'winning the desktop' while loosing servers and embedded devices would not be a overall win.

Well, there are big difference...

Posted Nov 24, 2011 14:23 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

but when you start considering server farms where the admin to system ratio is commonly well over 100 servers per admin, you would get very different numbers.

Sure. For example you can get... zero. We have totally different systems on desktop and on servers here (they only share few common packages like glibc and libstdc++ to simplify testing). It does not matter at all what the servers are using because desktops are using totally different Linux. I'm pretty sure we are not alone.

embedded systems are in many ways far more like servers than desktops. They have skilled admins managing the software and all the non-trivial configurations on the devices (either at the factory, or through 'firmware updates'

Again: there are many different types of embedded systems and they use different packages. What they usually don't use are desktop-based distributions.

'winning the desktop' while loosing servers and embedded devices would not be a overall win.

Why not? Apple ceased to produce their rack-mountable servers and they use quite different set of programs on their iPad and Macbook - and still is fine AFAICS.

Sure, we should not forget servers, routers and other Linux-based machinery, but I fail to see why the desktop-oriented distribution should be driven by the needs of server or an embedded system.

I think this one thing which Ubuntu did right (and Fedora followed): distribution's work is selection first and foremost. It must work fine in the default install. If you want to serve a different niche - you can create a spin-off. Journald does not propose to remove support of syslogd for the time being and I'm pretty sure such support will only be considered in the future if Journald will be good enough for most uses, not just for desktop.

As for "who's the most numerous"... it's silly question: RedHat's accounting department knows the numbers, I'm pretty sure needs of the most important customers will be taken into account when the fate of journald will be determined.