I'm not so sure...

Posted Nov 25, 2011 8:59 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: That newfangled Journal thing by cas
Parent article: That newfangled Journal thing

no, it's because it comes from LP and he quite clearly hates Unix and loves Mac & Windows. Not the kind of person we want designing core unix infrastructure.

Actually I think it's time to bring people who care about things being done more and less about sacred "UNIX way". It does not mean I'll accept journald unconditionally, but I will not reject it before try like most people here are doing.

Every time I hear of yet another one of Poettering's fads, I can't help but remember the Henry Spencer quote "Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.". Poettering is a near-perfect exemplar of that.

You know, I think people repeat this mantra so often they start to believe it. Even if it's not true at all.

Exhibit 1: command-line utilities. Solaris included real hardcore UNIX command-line utilities. But to make it even somewhat usable you needed to bring GNU packages and use that. "true UNIX lovers" said the same thing about "overbloated and heavy" GNU tools they say today about systemd and journald yet today these "good old GNU tools" are perceived as "UNIX tradition" because otherwise you must admit that UNIX has mostly dead.

Exhibit 2: remote access. 20 years ago remote access in Windows didn't exist while UNIX boasted "network-native X protocol". 10 years ago Windows got RDP and remote access become easy for Windows people. Yes, I know, Microsoft did that by twisting Citrix arms, but the end result is still the same: easy to use system where you don't need to configure anything in advance - you can just turn knob "on" when you are late and need to go home, then connect from home and continue your work. It happened 10 years ago so we should have similar capabilities on Linux today? Nope: today it's still huge problem with a Linux world: there are bazillion tools for that, but they don't employ "network-native X protocol" (because it lacks the knobs: you can not switch clients from one X server to another "on the fly") and in general it's hard to use and slow. The one big achievement in this regard was introduction of PulseAudio: at least now we can reliably forward not just GUI, but the accompanying sound as well.

Rather than the far more sane and productive method of gradual, incremental improvements - and actually *fixing* bugs rather than just abandoning the code and starting from scratch because maintenance is boring while complete rewrites are exciting.

It does not work, sorry: search for some of his arguments in regard to syslog are technically wrong, but can be considered true if one looks at current practice.

People are vocal social creatures, true - and this calls for "gradual, incremental improvements". But that's lie. People are also lazy creatures and that works for Lennart's "let's redo everything" approach and against "more sane and productive method". Think about it: how much foam was on the web WRT KDE 4. You'd think that outraged people dropped everything and rushed to support KDE 3? Well... four of them did...

Opt-in vs opt-out makes huge difference. Opt-ins are usually ignored while opt-outs lead to large flamefests but then quite fast adoption. And you will have flamefest anyway then why not redo everything to cleanup all the cruft?

If the result will be usable - it'll be adopted anyway, if it'll not be usable - it'll be thrown away no matter what. And as you've correctly noted it's often simpler to rewrite something from scratch rather then to try to fix bugs in existing solution.