On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 10:31 UTC (Thu) by timtas (guest, #2815)
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

I fully agree that nobody should get death threats, that just goes too far, period.
Otoh, Lennard does invite all the personal attacks himself, as he is constantly attacking other people personally. People that don't like systemd are called dinosaurs and haters exactly by him, just the two most obvious examples.
His complete lack of acknowledgment that his way of communication is often very personally insulting just goes to show what a liar he is and how strongly he suffers from a serious narcistic personality disorder.

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On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 11:55 UTC (Thu) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (35 responses)

So we're basically back to blaming the victim again?
It's funny how people like to claim that Lennart behaves so badly but when asked about concrete examples, one usually finds mostly technical explanations about why some software has to be the way it is or why a proposed change would not work.

But let's assume that there is objectionable behaviour and Lennart calls people who criticize systemd "haters" or "dinosaurs". Well, most people really are. I lost count of how often some systemd flame was based on some experience with Pulseaudio which has nothing whatsoever to do with systemd. How often I've read about ridiculous Red Hat conspiracy theories or about how Lennart personally forces someone to use his software.

Can one really blame Lennart for not correctly identifying the few who honestly try to criticize systemd in a flood of...well haters? "People that don't like systemd" is a good point. "I don't like it" is not valid criticism that one can reason about. It's just plain emotional refusal. There's nothing constructive about that.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 12:20 UTC (Thu) by timtas (guest, #2815) [Link] (24 responses)

No, we're not blaming the victim, as I see it Lennart just gets a taste of his own medicine, which apparently he seems to distaste as much as his victims too, I'm explicitly exclude death threats from that, no excuse for that.
But regarding personal attacks in general, he's not the victim, he's the one that started the personal attacks and now he's playing cry-baby.

It's typical of the systemd developer community (e.g. Kay and Lennart) to always blame the other side (need a list of downright sneaky and insulting bug report responses?) and never admit to any own failures and shortcomings, and that's why so many people so strongly oppose to them.

It's the we-are-always-right-and-everybody-else-is-an-idiot attitude of Lennart which gets people so angry. There are very valid concerns about how systemd is developed, about its ever-expanding nature, about it's lock-in agenda to which Lennart even admits to, that will never be appreciated by the opensource community. And there is almost universal agreement that his way of responding to criticism is deeply irritating,
Hence my diagnosis of Narcissistic personality disorder.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 12:30 UTC (Thu) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (22 responses)

Funny how you start your postings by claiming that you're not blaming the victim and then go on blaming the victim all the rest of your posts.

By blaming the victim, you are not only defending the perpetrators, you are supporting their cause and their personal attacks. You are giving them credibility and social support.

You become part of the problem. Do you really want that? Do you wish to be part of a conglomerate of sociopathic individuals? If you really do, then please continue. But I'm convinced that most people really don't and just don't realize what they're doing. I hope that's true for you, too.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 12:42 UTC (Thu) by timtas (guest, #2815) [Link] (21 responses)

Please reread my post. I'm all against blaming victims, I just don't buy your and Lennarts view that he is an innocent victim when it comes to personal attacks. But maybe, like Lennart, you don't like to read what other people write and respond to that in a whole, but rather just pick out the easiest sentences, take them out of context and ridicule them.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 12:53 UTC (Thu) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (18 responses)

Please reread your posts, too. I have and still come to the same conclusion. I don't even care about Lennart's innocence or guilt. Because thats _not_ the point!

No digression whatsoever on his part can justify death threats, calls for cutting his arms off, petitions to get him fired or even the loads of verbal abuse he or Kathy or Jonathan Corbet have to withstand. That would be an eye-for-an-eye reaction and surely we are above that by now?

If Lennart crosses lines, than he may be criticised and I will be the first to join in. But there's a big difference between criticism and abuse and the latter can never ever be regarded as the first. Because using one person's perceived misconduct to justify abuse will always be just that: blaming the victim.

So unless you stop bringing Lennart's behavior into a discussion about the abusive behavior of his haters, I will always call what you do by its name: blaming the victim.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 13:07 UTC (Thu) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (17 responses)

You're falsely simplifying the concept of blaming the victim.

Blaming the victim means that you claim that the bad things that happened to the victim are specifically the fault of the victim.

If someone gets beat up at a bar after work, and I said "Why was he such an idiot to go drinking at that bar, it's his fault!" then I'm blaming the victim.

If someone gets beat up at a bar after work and I say "He always was an asshole." Then I'm not blaming the victim, I'm just insulting him at a gauche time.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 13:11 UTC (Thu) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (16 responses)

So timtas is either blaming the victim of abuse or joining the abuse by adding his own personal attacks. The result is pretty much the same from where I stand.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 13:40 UTC (Thu) by timtas (guest, #2815) [Link] (14 responses)

I'm joining the abuse by adding my own personal attacks, that was at least my idea. Sorry if it came out as if I wanted to blame an innocent victim. Again, I'm stating for the third time, that death-threats are totally unacceptable, but you somehow still seem to be totally missing that. Maybe I have to put it on a separate line in capital letters:

I THINK THAT DEATH-THREATS AND SUCH ARE TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!!!!!

Got it?

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 13:45 UTC (Thu) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (13 responses)

What about the rest? Do you think calls for hacking his hands off are acceptable? Do you think petitions for him to loose his job are acceptable? Do you think verbal abuse is acceptable?

Just because you mentioned the one tiny bit, doesn't make the rest go away.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 13:55 UTC (Thu) by timtas (guest, #2815) [Link] (9 responses)

No, I was referring to that by stating

DEATH-THREATS AND _SUCH_

Any forms of threateanig physical violence are totally unacceptable because Lennart is only a major, insulting arsehole, but never threatened physical violence on anyone, as far as I know. So I agree with you, totally unacceptable.

Petitions for him to lose his job are also stupid, I'd never sign anything like that. Let him keep his job.

Regarding verbal abuse, that's a difficult subject, it depends how far these verbal abuses go. In my opinion, a lot of what he writes qualifies as personal, verbal abuse as well, so I think he deserves some of that. Just because he packs his insults in decent language doesn't mean it's not deeply insulting.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 14:02 UTC (Thu) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (8 responses)

You added the "and such" only in your third try.

Am I reading you correctly? Threats of violence against Lennart are unacceptable _because_ he did not threaten anyone himself? But verbal abuse may be ok, because of insults?

So what if Lennart did threaten someone? Would it then be ok to threaten him? Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth? Is this the kind of community you are propagating?

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 14:07 UTC (Thu) by timtas (guest, #2815) [Link] (3 responses)

Some call it "Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth", others call it "what goes around, comes around" or "the grapes of wrath". Let's leave it that. Back to work!

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 2:13 UTC (Fri) by misc (subscriber, #73730) [Link] (2 responses)

I do not see why it matter, since so far, no one showed where there is repeated abuse from Lennart, just people saying this occured without evidence, repeating it ad nausuem without pointing to anything.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 8:00 UTC (Fri) by edeloget (subscriber, #88392) [Link] (1 responses)

To be fair, it's quite easy to find some Lennart bashing threads on the net. They are literally everywhere. You might even find some on LWN - and if you really want to read stupid user comments, you can give a look to Phoronix (apologies ; I don't mean that Phoronix is bad, just that some users are repeatedly crossing the line ; but hey, any mention of Lennart in a news is generating 100+ stupid comments).

To be even fairer, a large part of Lennart defense - either by him or by some (why do they even exist) fanboy is a simple argument: "you do not criticize <INSERT PRODUCT NAME> because it's technically bad, you criticize it because you dislike Lennart". Which is as abusive as criticizing Lennart in the first place (this is and the too classical "you don't understand <INSERT PRODUCT NAME>, so shut up" or the "You're just a user, you don't have any word to say. Only coders do" which is also kind of wicked (software tend to be used by... well, users I think)).

Some people in the community need to learn how to communicate with other people in a constructive way. Some people need to learn how to listen other people. That's how we're supposed to build both a community and the software this community uses.

Regarding Lennart, and while I don't want to play the victim blaming game, I believe he needs to both learn how to communicate and how to listen others. Part of the bashing he receives (and I agree that it goes far beyond what is acceptable) has roots in his own attitude ; he made himself a very polarizing person - so a good way to help correcting this is also to work on his own behavior if it's not too late.

(I really hope I wrote this correctly ; it's a fine line I'm walking, and I have to say that I don't want to be neither inflamatory nor disrecpectful.)

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 14:42 UTC (Fri) by misc (subscriber, #73730) [Link]

Did he made himself polarizing, or do people made him polarizing ?

Because I see him listen to people as much as he can ( unless we suppose that the TODO list of systemd filled itself ), he went to speak and listen to several free software events, and he say in g+ that he did read lots of thread everywhere.

So the whole idea of "he doesn't listen to people" is more a variation of "he didn't do what I suggested at some random place or he disagreed with my vision".

We have bugs rotting in all bug trackers, and no one get called for that, no one say "I am being ignored" despites the fact this happen to everybody on every projects. Or PR, for that matter. yet, when a bug take 8 months to be fixed, people use it as a evidence to confirm their existing bias, applying double standards.

Anyone who think about free software realize that the ratio of people who code on a project vs people who use the project is most of the time very low. So of course, you cannot answer to everybody in a satisfying way for everybody. Yet, people seems to expect that for some reason for systemd.

Since that cannot happen until we start to recruit lots of people doing bug triaging and "customer" services handling, they then just use this fallacy to justify complains about Lennart as if this was different from any others projects. And people who do not want to take side start to think "yeah, maybe there is a middle ground", and just give more force to accusations.

Maybe that's a more general symptom of users/developers communication deficiency in free software, maybe that's just people jumping on the band wagon and not spending time to think about how free software is produced.

But in all case, just saying "he should listen more to users" while there is evidence he does is just propagating vicious memes leading to victim blaming. Sure, you do not want to do that, but that's the beauty of it, it is not sufficient to say "I do not want to do that" for it to not happen, ideas evolves outside of your control once your propagate it.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 16:59 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (3 responses)

You're clearly *not* reading him correctly; you're going to great lengths to misread, nitpick and twist someone else's words in order to extract some sort of confession. That's simply another form of abuse.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 9:05 UTC (Fri) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (2 responses)

Err...if I'm not reading him correctly, why did he not say so himself? He answered to my comment, so he obviously read it. Instead of contradicting me, he even confirmed what I said by repeating his preference of a revenge based society.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 11:38 UTC (Fri) by timtas (guest, #2815) [Link] (1 responses)

Can we now stop this?
"Revenge-based society", come on.
I just detest people hitting out at other people and when they're hit back, start crying like little babies: he hit me, he hit me!
I know that you're now going to bring back that I'm in favour of death threats and will ask again for a list of references where Lennart has been personally insulting, but it's useless: You Lennart fanboys are like Apple fanboys or fundamentalistic teligious believers: you've found the right way and no mountain of evidence to the contrary will bring you off your path to the golden future. Walk on!

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 12:30 UTC (Fri) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

… and no mountain of evidence to the contrary will bring you off your path to the golden future.

“Mountain of evidence”? Come on. “Mountain of unsubstantiated claims” would be more to the point.

As far as the “golden future” is concerned: Systemd is doing fine so far and very likely to be part of all major Linux distributions in due course. There will probably be some problems (there always are) and they will probably be resolved one way or another. There is no need for insults and threats on either side of the debate. Three years from now nobody will remember what all the flap was about.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 18:18 UTC (Thu) by Funcan (guest, #44209) [Link] (2 responses)

I think verbal abuse of somebody who is verbally abusive is understandable if not a good thing.

Looking at a guy with a broken jaw and saying 'he only got punched because he punched the bouncer' is *not* victim blaming to my mind.

Death threats are rarely acceptable.

Petitions for somebody to loose their job are very context sensitive morally (e.g. I've personally called for and actively campaigned for certain politicians to loose their job, and feel I was absolutely morally right to do so), and I'm not aware enough of the context of the calls for Lennart's sacking, so I'll assume they were probably unreasonable until I learn otherwise.

Calls to hack off somebody's hands? That, depending on context is an obvious joke or entirely unreasonable.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 13, 2014 10:57 UTC (Mon) by OdyX (guest, #58768) [Link] (1 responses)

A politician's mandate is not a job. The electing body should be allowed to ask for withdrawal from the elected mandate when things go wrong.

Petitioning to a corporation (which most petitioners are not even clients of) to get someone fired is a totally different thing, to which the only answer I'd expect from said corporation is /dev/null.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Nov 1, 2014 18:32 UTC (Sat) by blujay (guest, #39961) [Link]

> Petitioning to a corporation (which most petitioners are not even clients of) to get someone fired is a totally different thing, to which the only answer I'd expect from said corporation is /dev/null.

$ find . -mtime -365 -iname "*eich*"
./Brendan Eich "steps down" from Mozilla.html

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 13:55 UTC (Thu) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

Sigh.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 1:21 UTC (Fri) by misc (subscriber, #73730) [Link] (1 responses)

Are you implying that there is a difference between "innocent victim" and "non innocent victim", and that this warrant a difference of treatment, or that Lennart is not a victim ?

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 4:29 UTC (Fri) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

I can't tell if this was in response to my comment because the nesting has gone apoplectic.

However the answer to the question, if it was to me, is no.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 2:11 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link]

And unless you're actually a qualified psychologist who's been observing him at clinically close range, you have no grounds to diagnose any damn thing. Moreover, for those of us who have been wrongly diagnosed with personality disorders in the past and had serious issues ignored as a result, that's actually a profoundly offensive thing to do.

If you want to call him a narcissist, call him a narcissist and expose yourself to the charge of name-calling. Don't dress it up in cod psychology to make yourself look more authoritative.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 13:10 UTC (Thu) by ksandstr (guest, #60862) [Link] (9 responses)

This entire "hey, stop blaming the victim!" trope is poison to a rational discussion. It permits anyone to pre-emptively don the cloak of victimhood and then be excused from anything and everything. Analysis is rendered taboo in its cradle and cynical rules-gamesmanship rules the day in the name of "decency" and "politeness".

We don't call victim-blaming when someone jumps in front of a speeding car and is then said to have been in a position to prevent himself from being run over, and therefore partially responsible. Even if that someone jumped onto a zebra crossing, and was therefore formally in the right. Cars don't stop on a dime just as there's no way to anger broad swathes of the Linux community without getting flamed to a crisp again and again.

It's the same thing with systemd as it was with Pulseaudio. Lennart uses every shenanigan in the book to push his software through dependency creep, disregarding any technical critique (e.g. the brittleness of the binary logging mechanism, the monolithic IPC architecture and its tendency for becoming wedged, etc.) and especially not giving two fucks that said creep breaks everything it touches outside of the Brave New systemd World. There are good arguments being made that systemd is Red Hat's hostile takeover of the Linux user-space and they are going systematically unreported.

Those who read Lennart's G+ post will have noticed certain other tropes, such as complaining about the "boycott systemd" campaign as though he were entitled to a total absence of criticism. Further there's the populist reference to "white men in their 30s and 40s" in the pejorative sense -- racism and sexism if I ever saw it -- and a pre-emptive refusal of further discussion in the very same article, like a seagull making its mark on a beach. Needless to say, this is not a recipe for a healthy bipartisan discussion; and from the content of this LWN article, Mr. Corbet isn't interested in having one either.

This kind of unquestioning pro-Lennart publicity will only fan the flames further. Mark my words: the Linux community does not take well to having technology dictated to it.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 16:01 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (8 responses)

Cars don't stop on a dime just as there's no way to anger broad swathes of the Linux community without getting flamed to a crisp again and again.

s/broad swathes of/a tiny but vocal minority within/

There. Fixed it for you.

There are good arguments being made that systemd is Red Hat's hostile takeover of the Linux user-space and they are going systematically unreported.

Consider Debian. Debian is not particularly known for adopting sub-standard solutions and, in the absence of any form of leverage, is certainly not susceptible to a “hostile takeover” from Red Hat. Yet still the distribution has decided to go with systemd as their default low-level plumbing on Linux. The technical discussion that led to that decision is publically available for anyone to look at, and while there are still flame wars on some Debian mailing lists, so far there don't seem to be enough Debian developers who are sufficiently unhappy with the pro-systemd decision to start a GR to try and overturn it.

It is worth reiterating that by now the systemd development community includes people from a variety of distributions beside Red Hat, and there is no evidence that systemd and its future directions are especially dominated by Red Hat. If you make claims to the contrary then feel free to produce the allegedly “systematically unreported“ support for them.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 16:25 UTC (Thu) by ksandstr (guest, #60862) [Link] (7 responses)

First, I don't see where you derive your argument that the anti-systemd side is a ``vocal minority'' from, nor do I see the relevance. Free Software is neither a popularity contest nor a shouting match: if it were, systemd would've won by sheer number of fanboys alone, and it hasn't as evidenced by holdouts such as Gentoo and Debian.

Secondly, there's no need for leverage over Debian when leverage exists with regard to the upstream packages which Debian distributes and on which all Linux distributions depend. These are components such as udev, udisks, upower, dbus, xorg, policykit, consolekit, the list goes on. As Theodore Y. Ts'o said, ``we have commit privs and you don't''. You'll note that versions of each that bring with them dependencies on Lennartware have been uploaded into unstable, and a reduction of support for systems that don't run either systemd proper in its most recent version, or systemd-shim (which is perpetually behind the curve).

For example the testing package of xfce4-power-manager has been unable to suspend or hibernate systems since June 2014; and cryptsetup's boot script has had significant trouble with boot-time password entry due to systemd influence in console input handling. These things worked before systemd came along, and now they do not. How much more damning could it get?

Moreover, systemd got into Debian during a time when it was marketed as ``just an init system''. You'll agree that it has expanded into taking over the roles of syslog, dhcpcd, pm-utils, network-manager, and that many other functions are still in the pipeline. This is not what Debian voted for in their GR.

Furthermore, the parties whose views are going systematically unreported are of course those that're outside systemd development. (sheesh.) Why would an opponent lend credence to a project s/he opposes, thus furthering its goals of having systemd in every Linux installation and VM instance everywhere? (As evidenced by Lennart's juvenile decrying of Gentoo as ``haters''.)

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 16:45 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> For example the testing package of xfce4-power-manager has been unable to suspend or hibernate systems since June 2014; and cryptsetup's boot script has had significant trouble with boot-time password entry due to systemd influence in console input handling. These things worked before systemd came along, and now they do not. How much more damning could it get?

If that's the best you have, that's hardly "damning".

So you've identified two bugs/regressions in the *testing* packages; assuming they have been reported, I'd presume that would get fixed as part of Debian's standard release freeze cycle. Debian has blocked releases for much less.

Meanwhile, if you're unhappy with the quality or quantity of other people's work, you're free to contribute.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 17:14 UTC (Thu) by ksandstr (guest, #60862) [Link]

Well pooh-pooh to you as well, sir, and good day.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 17:41 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (2 responses)

If there are really so many people who don't like systemd (to avoid more loaded terms), then how is it that all the major Linux distributions have managed to adopt systemd without there being either a massive exodus to distributions like Slackware or else an obvious and popular initiative to produce systemd-free forks of Fedora, openSUSE, or Debian? All of these distributions are freely available, and the “we have commit privs and you don't“ argument doesn't count when everyone is free to make a forked repository where they have commit privileges.

This suggests that people are quick to bitch and moan but not so quick when the time comes to act. If not having systemd on one's system is not important enough to one to actually do the legwork (which is really straightforward compared to many other free-software projects since the required bits and pieces already exist; it's not as if one would have to write sysvinit and a zillion init scripts from scratch) that puts into perspective their complaints of how they're getting screwed over by those people who are in fact prepared to spend their time working on stuff.

There are issues with systemd but there are also people within the systemd community and the various distributions who are committed to getting these issues fixed. In the long run, systemd can only get better at delivering what most Linux users will find useful. It is up to you whether you want to avail yourself of this or whether you prefer to pursue another approach, but please stop complaining that it is all a huge plot to prevent you from having other people work on your behalf, for free, in order to produce the Linux that you want.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 21:46 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

> If there are really so many people who don't like systemd (to avoid more loaded terms), then how is it that all the major Linux distributions have managed to adopt systemd without there being either a massive exodus to distributions like Slackware or else an obvious and popular initiative to produce systemd-free forks of Fedora, openSUSE, or Debian?

Where's your facts and figures to support that assertion? I see new recruits on the Gentoo forums every week who straight up cite systemd as their reason for switching. comp.sysutils.supervision.general is quite alive as of late too.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 23:05 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Well, there are no visible projects aiming for systemd-free versions of the mainstream distributions. For example, for all the heated debate going on around systemd in Debian, no Debian developers have so far resigned in disgust after the decision for systemd. Similarly, it seems to be business as usual with all the other mainstream distributions.

Maybe some people are looking at Gentoo more closely now. If so, more power to them. However the idea that “large swathes” of the Linux community are really opposed to systemd to a point where they seriously consider switching distributions just to avoid it is probably wishful thinking on the part of those who don't like systemd.

FWIW, I teach Linux system administration for a living and thus get to meet rather a lot of Linux sysadmins of various backgrounds in my professional life. I have yet to run into one who didn't think systemd was a good idea and a considerable improvement on the status quo. For many people it comes as a bit of a shock at first but then it grows on them, and the more they find out about it the more they like it.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 20:18 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

> cryptsetup's boot script has had significant trouble with boot-time password entry due to systemd influence in console input handling

Works flawlessly for me in Fedora, so it's not impossible. Maybe there's a bug with Debian or the script?

> Moreover, systemd got into Debian during a time when it was marketed as ``just an init system''. You'll agree that it has expanded into taking over the roles of syslog, dhcpcd, pm-utils, network-manager, and that many other functions are still in the pipeline.

Of those you list, only dhcp (just the client side though IIRC, not dhcp*d*) and networking weren't in systemd already and they had (AFAIR) been announced by that time. My understanding is that for *simple* network solutions, systemd will suffice. If you need bridging, VPN, or anything complicated, use NetworkManager (or the old ifcfg scripts…which still work because I still use them).

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 20, 2014 16:40 UTC (Mon) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

>Works flawlessly for me in Fedora, so it's not impossible. Maybe there's a bug with Debian or the script?

Debian's version has some extra functionality (keyscripts) that's not supported. It could be reasonably argued that the way it's currently implemented is pretty ugly, although the flipside is that it could be considered simple and not over-engineered.

Last I checked (several weeks ago), it looked like it was going to be hard to find consensus on how to handle it, with discussions on it having petered out. Possibly it's just a case of the discussion having become less visible though.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 20:43 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (17 responses)

>Otoh, Lennard does invite all the personal attacks himself, as he is constantly attacking other people personally.
[citation needed]

From what I've seen, Lennart does not attack other _people_.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 22:27 UTC (Thu) by dag- (guest, #30207) [Link] (16 responses)

No, Lennart didn't attack them.

Even worse, Lennart developed Open Source software that Linux distributions started to use. With the result that these people were *forced* into using his pieces of software ! Next to death-wishes some even threatened to switch back to Windows !

Oh, the horror...

PS I support Lennart Poetering, not just because of the surrealism above, but also because he generally is a nice guy. Although I don't agree with the characterization of Linus (also generally a nice guy BTW ;-))

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 23:59 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (15 responses)

Lennart Poettering is one of those rare people who aren't afraid to tackle difficult problems that most folks are way too scared to touch. It is safe to say that the traditional setup (System-V init and friends), after 30 years or so, is no longer adequate – a situation that is usually addressed with the equivalent of band aid and baling wire, and that has been waiting for a long time for somebody to do a radical rethink (incidentally something that most other Unix versions, to various degrees, have done ages ago).

The problem with paradigm shifts of this sort is that there are usually lots of people who are heavily invested in the status quo and hence unwilling to consider alternatives even if they are technically superior. The problems start when (a) most major distributions notice that something like systemd is a good idea and start incorporating it in their setups, and (b) the inventors of the new paradigm are convinced they're doing the Right Thing and don't want to bother with people who disagree, especially when they disagree without proposing compromise solutions (preferably with code). (a) means that people will feel “forced” into using the new software simply by virtue of the fact that their favourite distribution made a (hopefully well-considered) decision to adopt it. They could move over to a different distribution but that would mean work. (b) means that, together with people who bitch and moan as a matter of principle, people with legitimate concerns who did take the trouble to see what the new software would do (or not do) for them can be left out in the cold.

It is generally reasonable advice for people in charge of a free-software project to have meaningful discussions with users who do have legitimate concerns. (There can be little meaningful discussion with people whose main contribution is “This software sucks because I don't like it – even though I never looked at it in detail –, and its developers should go jump in a lake”.) This does not mean that one must bend over backwards to accommodate everybody and their pet problem, but that people on both sides of such a discourse should come away from it with an awareness of each other's point of view and the reasons for it, and a reasonable picture of how to proceed (or a rationale why not to proceed, as the case may be). We have lots of open-source software projects where that sort of approach seems to generally work, and in the long run this will accomplish a lot more than people calling one another “assholes” or collecting money to have somebody killed.

Personally I'm convinced that something like systemd is a wonderful idea in principle. It has great potential to standardise various aspects of Linux that have long been neglected and today are notoriously disparate between distributions. With a software project of systemd's scope, there are bound to be dark corners and places where the initial solutions aren't quite right, and that can prompt people to reject the idea as a whole, which is shortsighted because such issues can be identified and fixed. It would be best if all the name-calling could stop and we could all work together to make systemd into something that the Linux community can stand behind for the next 30 years or so.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 17:44 UTC (Fri) by Jandar (subscriber, #85683) [Link] (1 responses)

> With a software project of systemd's scope, there are bound to be dark corners and places where the initial solutions aren't quite right, and that can prompt people to reject the idea as a whole, which is shortsighted because such issues can be identified and fixed.

Systems's scope is the main problem for many people criticizing it. If systemd's developer would constrain it to an excellent init and service {starter,monitor} most complaints would go away. Why does it have to have a so large scope that in this bundle of solutions (to problems many don't have) there are dark corners and places where the initial solutions aren't quite right?

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 12, 2014 6:10 UTC (Sun) by agrover (guest, #55381) [Link]

Sometimes when you're writing code and you do something new, and a whole set of assumptions that were baked into the old code no longer make sense. I think this has happened repeatedly: one, because init and startup is so central to how the overall system works, and two, because there is a huge amount of baggage that has built up over Unix's lifetime, actually not baggage but just no-longer-correct assumptions about amount of needed flexibility or about the resources on a system. The initial systemd fixed one, but there were a LOT more (and still are).

So many things we hold as foundational about Linux/Unix are actually accidents, or bugs-that-became-features. (see /usr -> /home transition, and dotfiles not showing up in ls). The reason that distros keep adopting it is even as new and possibly-buggy-in-corners, it does more, in less code and complexity overall than what it replaces, and if a problem is found it's going to be fixed.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 14, 2014 4:29 UTC (Tue) by ThinkRob (guest, #64513) [Link] (12 responses)

Personally I have very few problems with systemd as a piece of software. It seems quite well thought out, and while there are certainly plenty of areas where it drives me nuts, the ratio of awesome:annoying is a) within the bounds of my tolerance b) about the same as plenty of other stuff that I consider good.

Where I do have a problem is with systemd as a project, particularly with some of the leaders' behavior. The "debug" flag drama was an example of the sort of behavior that I find rather stupid, but more bothersome was the fact that many people from the systemd community (cabal? ;) I'm not sure what the right word is here... camp, maybe?) seemed to see absolutely nothing wrong, and were seemingly confused why Linus would react the way he did. That worries me, as it's indicative of either a rather pervasive arrogance or a rather poor display of leadership from people who should be in a position to ensure that the project "plays nice with others". Neither one seems particularly healthy from a project that the community is supposed to base, well, basically everything on.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 14, 2014 7:55 UTC (Tue) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (11 responses)

The "debug" flag drama as you like to call it was fault of the kernel community using an generic term for their debug output called "debug" not kdebug or kernel.debug basically some other term that clearly identifies it not being a generic thus being kernel only and theirs alone since others are *also* using the kernel commandline.

Not a single time did Kay ever step out of bounds in response ( nor anyone other from the systemd community including Lennart ) in that bug report but the same cannot be said about the kernel developers Borislav Petkov and Steven Rostedt followed by him posting that to lkml with Linus responding way out of line followed by a media storm and his fans shitting all over that bug report as an result of that.
( Kay wanted to move this to the mailinglists for further discussion as he clearly stated in that report)

And to this day I have yet to see the kernel community have an architectural discussion about those *generic* namespace kernel parameters which are open to misinterpretation which is the underlying problem that caused this to begin with and change the name of *their* parameters and fix *their* workflow accordingly since misinterpretation like this was bound to happen eventually and bound to happen again. ( If it had not been systemd it would have been something else)

Apparently it's much easier for the kernel community to play territorial pissing matches, break stuff by hiding it, shit over people in bug reports and mailinglists then there is to have civil discussion and simple add "kernel." in front of those *generic* namespace kernel parameters and adjust their workflow accordingly, thus eliminate the underlying problem *for good* and the shortcomings in their own design and at the same time follow what they preach about fixing problems where they belong.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 14, 2014 8:07 UTC (Tue) by johill (subscriber, #25196) [Link] (5 responses)

The kernel command line constitutes ABI in a sense, so gratuitously changing it (by either side - renaming on the one hand or actually using it for something it wasn't used before!) cannot be done.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 14, 2014 8:52 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (4 responses)

It can. It just takes preparation and time. ”debug” on the command line isn't one of the most widely used-by-other-software parts of the kernel UI (not ABI as there's nothing “binary” about it) to begin with. It's probably more feasible to change the behaviour of “debug” than it is to change the behaviour of open(2).

Having said that, the original issue was a misunderstanding about what “debug” on the kernel command line actually means. Some people insist that it applies to the kernel only while others claim it applies to other basic system components like plymouth or systemd, too. Since it had never been documented properly it is difficult to figure out who is right and who is wrong here; it does make some sense to be able to tell early-boot software to log debug messages, and possibly to do so using one convenient command line parameter rather than half a dozen. The actual problem at hand started because systemd contained a faulty assertion that caused it to write loads of stuff to the “dmesg” buffer. That assertion was promptly fixed.

Anyway, one interesting observation is that in the bug report we find

Kay, Please go die in a fire along with Lennart. Your type is the cancer that is killing any semblence of usability Linux once had.

and

Kay and Lennart: please just go away, disappear from the FOSS community, we don't need you and your crap.

and

Hopefully the FOSS community will wake up and eject these fucktards.

with nothing remotely similar being said by systemd developers, who remain commendably calm and try to get the discussion back on a technical track. If that is supposed to be an example of how systemd developers are rude and pushy while kernel developers are polite, sensitive and deferential, then there seems to be a bit of cognitive dissonance going on here.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 14, 2014 9:33 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (2 responses)

The kernel command line is absolutely an ABI; it is used not only by humans, but by other programs (bootloaders write it, and userspace programs running on top of the kernel read it). That one of the defined properties of the kernel command line is that it looks like text does not make it cease to be an ABI, any more than the defined inputs or outputs for various nodes in /proc being formatted text makes those not an ABI.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 14, 2014 10:22 UTC (Tue) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (1 responses)

Last time I checked there was no stability promises with regards to the kernel commandline ( not sure it ever can be ) so relying on it in any shape or form cannot be trusted thus you are on your own if something breaks and as far as I know things get added and deprecated all the time.

Cleaning this up ( yes it's mess not just the generic part ) takes preparation, time and adoption period ( an time where both the new and the old parameters syntax are valid )

Once the kernel community has established clear and well defined kernel command line naming policy and clean things up accordingly it could well decide to declared it as an "ABI" but now it is an complete utter mess.

As things currently stand you cannot see a difference between an kernel command line parameter that is bios related,kernel related, pci related etc. Things are being separate by an underscore, an dot. an minus. o_O

The old ( none existing ) naming scheme might have worked back in the day when there were just 5 kernel parameters and everybody kept a local copy of the kernel man pages in their back pocket for what these meant and what they where supposed to do and where they belong but this is the 21 century and things have considerably grown since then so an clear policy like bios.<foo>, kernel.<foo> pci.<foo> etc is much needed to clearly define which parameter belongs where and to avoid anykind of misinterpretation of those parameters.

If the kernel community does not want to clean this up it should not insult and complain when stuff breaks as an result of that.

This whole "debug drama" would not have taken place if these things had been thoroughly thought through from the beginning but I guess people had better things to do at that time and now it's being indicated that they cannot fix it as an result of that. <sigh>

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 14, 2014 11:18 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Last time I checked there was no stability promises with regards to the kernel commandline

I don't think there are formal stability promises for anything in the kernel. It's just that the kernel people have a good track record of not changing things without cause, and they're trying to keep things that way.

The kernel command line is an example of what happens if people get to add stuff in an ad-hoc manner and with little regard to present consistency or compatibility down the road. No wonder nobody knows exactly what the “debug” option is supposed to mean when it was probably added at 2am in the morning someday in 1993 to solve some immediate issue and never actually thought through. As far as kernel commandline parameters go, we're now basically stuck with them in the same way that we're stuck with “cut -d“, “awk -F”, and “sort -t”.

Could the “debug drama” have been handled better by everyone concerned? Sure. But piling all the blame on Kay Sievers doesn't do it for me.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 16, 2014 20:32 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Can you explain the purpose behind the three quotes you've chosen to post in this context, and whether any of those people have any connection whatsoever to either systemd or kernel development?

Without that context, I interpret the second half of that post as a textbook example of strawman fallacy.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 14, 2014 15:48 UTC (Tue) by ThinkRob (guest, #64513) [Link] (4 responses)

My issue wasn't with Kay's wording or anything like that. I didn't see him be anything but civil. It was more the sentiment behind the action that worried me. Let me try to explain:

> And to this day I have yet to see the kernel community have an architectural discussion about those *generic* namespace kernel parameters which are open to misinterpretation which is the underlying problem that caused this to begin with and change the name of *their* parameters and fix *their* workflow accordingly since misinterpretation like this was bound to happen eventually and bound to happen again. ( If it had not been systemd it would have been something else)

Ok, so you want better naming. Fair enough. (Which, BTW, is what ended up happening, with systemd using a more specific name...)

But like with any API that's been there for a while, there is now an established base of code that depends on certain parameters working in a certain way.

This is where the split in ideology happens.

One side says "we should just start doing things 'the right way' and screw whatever breaks, 'cause it was broken anyways". It seems to me that you're clearly of this mindset, as are many in the systemd community. I understand the appeal, and I too used to be of this mindset.

The other side takes the approach of "here is how people expect it to work, and even if it's not ideal we shouldn't just wholesale break all of their expectations just because we had a better idea". This is where Linus seems to fall. I tend to agree with this more nowadays, having been on the receiving end of one too many "your stuff is now broken 'cause you were doing it 'wrong'" changes, particularly ones where "wrong" meant "not the way I want to do it."

The problem with the first is that very few people can agree on what "the right way" is, so that too ends up in a pissing match. Usually the best politician or the strongest ego wins, and continual battling coupled with CADT means that it becomes very hard to have a system that remains "stable" (in the development/administration sense, not the uptime sense) for more than a couple years.

The problem with the second is that if left unchecked, you wind up with Win32.

Both sides need to be aware of the dangers of their default stance. I've seen awareness of that in the Linux kernel dev. community throughout the years (as evidenced by the many long discussions surrounding various large-scale changes, many of which have been covered here on LWN), but as of yet I've seen precious little awareness of the dangers of the first approach in the systemd community. And *that* is what concerns me.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 14, 2014 17:26 UTC (Tue) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (3 responses)

"One side says "we should just start doing things 'the right way' and screw whatever breaks, 'cause it was broken anyways". It seems to me that you're clearly of this mindset, as are many in the systemd community. I understand the appeal, and I too used to be of this mindset."

Yes I am of the opinion that things that are broken are supposed to be fixed where they are broken not workaround so if that happens to be systemd then it should be fixed in systemd or if it happens to be the kernel it should be fixed in the kernel.

"The problem with the first is that very few people can agree on what "the right way" is, so that too ends up in a pissing match. Usually the best politician or the strongest ego wins, and continual battling coupled with CADT means that it becomes very hard to have a system that remains "stable" (in the development/administration sense, not the uptime sense) for more than a couple years."

I would argue there are only few areas of stability that actually existing in open source software since the governing mentality is "throw it over the wall and see what sticks" Look at Gnome for example I would argue that it has been in beta state since it got introduced in RHL.

With regards to what concerns you I did not manage to follow what you where referring to as first approach and second half hence I could not put into context so you kinda need to spell it out what actually concerns you.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 14, 2014 20:36 UTC (Tue) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link] (2 responses)

Bloody wonderful. Do you suggest we do the same with the kernel-to-userland interfaces? You know, on the theory that interface stability is so rare that nobody would care. Because there's a whole lot of ill-designed crap I would love to be rid of - all the *notify stuff, for starters. And cgroup would be much improved by being ripped out and replaced with something saner. And ioctl-based part of socket API is a disgraceful mess - we wouldn't *need* netdev namespaces if it had only been done right back in early 80s. So's sysv IPC interface. Let's kill them, should we? What, tons of userland code would break? Tough, but serves them right for using bad interfaces. Oh, and sysfs? A walking design mistake, with really unpleasant consequences wrt e.g. containers. Let's take it out as well, while we are at it...

Do you really want that? BTW, I'm absolutely sure that glibc people also can provide a not so little list of misfeatures that won't be missed (and screw those who would miss them)...

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 14, 2014 21:07 UTC (Tue) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]

I would not say bloody but quite wonderful yes.

If it's broken in the kernel you fix it in the kernel or where else would you have the kernel-to-userland interfaces fixed and the rest you listed there and or wanted to get rid of?

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 15, 2014 6:14 UTC (Wed) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link]

It certainly *would* be wonderful if that would be at all feasible. Of course it isn't. But trying to clean up a bit in the swamp of boot-time command-line options (which is a mish-mash of options to the kernel, kernel modules, the boot loader and init) is (in my opinion) quite far from stuff like ioctl, cgroups, *notify, etc.

That said, it's Linus's kernel, and if he decides not to namespace the debug option, then I think that's his prerogative.

PS: It would be kind of nice to have a consistent set of "non-legacy" kernel interfaces (such as you allude to) and an option to disable all the legacy stuff. I wonder how much cleaner & safer software written against such an interface would be.

PPS: Yes, glibc would certainly benefit from removing quite a bit of brainfuck and in cases like gets(3) -- which is not deprecated by LSB, obsoleted by POSIX and removed from C11 -- everyone who do use them should indeed be screwed. But again, wholesale crapectomy would of course be infeasible, unless aiming for a "non-legacy" OS.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 0:56 UTC (Fri) by misc (subscriber, #73730) [Link] (3 responses)

"Lennart dinosaur" on google do not seems to give any result, so I think your affirmation that is constantly attacking others people is hyperbolic, and likely wrong.

In the light of this post ( http://seriouspony.com/trouble-at-the-koolaid-point ), it could be seen as just someone trying to rewrite history, like what Andrew Auernheimer did.

Of course, that's maybe not your goal, maybe Lennart did said that and I am just unable to find it, maybe you are just repeating something that you believed to be genuinely true because it came from a credible source or whatever. It is hard to judge on 1 single post.

But yet, saying he suffer from a personality disorder kinda make me think that you are more likely on the trolling and harassment side that a regular person would be.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 0:59 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

hint "Lennart" isn't always in his username (such as when he posts here on LWN)

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 10, 2014 3:55 UTC (Fri) by misc (subscriber, #73730) [Link] (1 responses)

I focused mostly on the mailling lists, where he sign by his name.

But taking your hint in account, I tried "mezcalero dinosaur -site:lwn.net" and it didn't yield lots of result ( ie, 2 ), and the 2 of them being false positives.

So maybe I did really miss something, but maybe this the same exact problem of having Lennart Poettering being a symbol, like the video of Phil Fish linked around this page ? IE, people made Lennart "internet famous", and some people love to hate him up to the point of repeating facts that cannot be verified ?

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 11, 2014 12:26 UTC (Sat) by ms_43 (subscriber, #99293) [Link]

That's probably a large part of the problem; claims that "LP is an asshole" are essentially unsubstantiated rumours that go around in circles among people who don't like systemd, or still haven't gotten over the problems PulseAudio caused them 5 years ago; people unfamiliar with systemd may first learn about it on forums where everybody accepts "LP is an asshole" as a basic premise, and so the meme spreads...

There are of course also pro-systemd trolls posting inflammatory comments and calling people "dinosaurs", but the systemd developers themselves aren't doing that or encouraging it.