Single Lennart of Failure? [LWN.net]

Single Lennart of Failure?

Posted Jun 17, 2014 22:08 UTC (Tue) by gvy (guest, #11981)
Parent article: Poettering: Factory Reset, Stateless Systems, Reproducible Systems & Verifiable Systems

I wonder if Lennart (and Kay) will be still around when it comes to actually support what they wrote, and now when RHEL7 is out there they will inevitably get angry (or stupid, like in jbj's case) managers with stimuli.

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Single Lennart of Failure?

Posted Jun 17, 2014 23:18 UTC (Tue) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link] (5 responses)

In a worst case scenario, the source code is still there for others to fix or replace.

Single Lennart of Failure?

Posted Jun 18, 2014 8:56 UTC (Wed) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link] (4 responses)

In a worst case scenario, the source code is still there for others to fix or replace.

That's like putting your food store in a cave with hibernating bears. In a worst case scenario, there will be an animal trainer in the next travelling circus.

Single Lennart of Failure?

Posted Jun 18, 2014 12:10 UTC (Wed) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link] (3 responses)

Suppose the systemd maintainers abandon their work. Recall devfs: https://lwn.net/Articles/139595/

It wouldn't be ideal if key maintainers disappeared, however it wouldn't stop Linux.

Single Lennart of Failure?

Posted Jun 18, 2014 16:52 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

How many systemd contributers are there now? Hundreds?

Might as well speculate what will happen if all the GCC developers decided to drop off the edge of the world.

Single Lennart of Failure?

Posted Mar 27, 2015 11:13 UTC (Fri) by dsommers (subscriber, #55274) [Link] (1 responses)

drag++

This might give you an idea of how many contributes to systemd, as well as the development pace:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.systemd.devel

I'm quite sure someone will be able to pick up the pieces if Lennart or Kay moves on to other projects.

Single Lennart of Failure?

Posted Mar 27, 2015 12:42 UTC (Fri) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

I did some analysis last year, using LWN's who-wrote script. The results are at http://enotty.pipebreaker.pl/2014/12/30/who-wrote-systemd/

Single Lennart of Failure?

Posted Jun 18, 2014 9:35 UTC (Wed) by danpb (subscriber, #4831) [Link] (3 responses)

If you look at the systemd dev mailing list you'll see a large pool of active contributors and maintainers who are capable of sustaining the systemd community long term - systemd is far more than just a 1 or 2 person show these days. Red Hat too has more than adequate resources to be able to support RHEL systemd, and any other RHEL package for matter, even if individuals were to move on to other areas of interest. Such an important piece of RHEL system infrastructure is maintained by a group of people precisely to spread the expertise around and avoid a low bus-factor. IOW there's nothing to fear about long term systemd supportability.

Single Lennart of Failure?

Posted Jun 18, 2014 10:06 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Yes, this starts to remind me of the late-1990s UNIX® vendors saying well, you can't guarantee this Linux thing is going to stay around, and you can't be sure these x86 PC vendors will stay in business. Well gee, I know how they're going to stay in business, they'll use all this cash I'm going to give them instead of you.

And sure enough, seen from 2014 those points look ridiculous. Everybody wants to assure you that you're safe with them, but the reality is that it's the economics, if nobody else is using systemd in five years it'll take a lot of Red Hat effort to keep RHEL 7's systemd on life support. But most likely everybody will be using systemd in five years, and so it'll be no different from supporting X or GCC or dozens of other important complicated moving parts that everybody shares.

Single Lennart of Failure?

Posted Jun 18, 2014 10:07 UTC (Wed) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link] (1 responses)

Rather meant decision making than just expertise.

Single Lennart of Failure?

Posted Jun 18, 2014 10:50 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

It's still unclear. RHEL decision making is largely which patches to cherry pick or backport from upstream. There already are other people involved in that.