Single Lennart of Failure? [LWN.net]

Single Lennart of Failure?

Posted Jun 18, 2014 9:35 UTC (Wed) by danpb (subscriber, #4831)
In reply to: Single Lennart of Failure? by gvy
Parent article: Poettering: Factory Reset, Stateless Systems, Reproducible Systems & Verifiable Systems

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.

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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.