The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

What I just heard you say was...
systemd could be more effective taking over the world if it just made some cosmetic changes to placate the people who are afraid of it taking over the world.

So systemd is currently taking over the world, in spite of itself. That's impressive. It's so useful and powerful a technology that even gross mismanagement of the project is unable to stop it from being widely adopted.

Snark aside, the downside to that cosmetic approach.. is that it claiming that level of configuration puts them on the hook for testing all the expanded configuration matrix. And requires larger API stability coverage than they are currently promising. Telling people what they want to hear, by deliberately crafting the message cosmetically...quickly puts them into a situation where they cannot deliver. I would look at cosmetic messaging like that as being far more manipulatively than what they are actually doing, designed to make people feel more comfortable than they should be.

And I think the systemd developers have been much more honest about what they are prepared to maintain and test and are telling people who want to deviate that they'll need to maintain and test that deviation. And moreover they are being very conservative about the API stability they promise. That honesty rankles, and feels like a punch in the mouth for people who want to hear the lipservice.

I still find it weird for example that systemd-shim chose to try to talk the unstable API that links logind to systemd instead of replacing logind itself and talking the stable logind API that apps depend on. That decisions still seems to me like asking for trouble and contrary to the guidance given concerning API stability. -shim is going to be a huge headache for Debian going forward as systemd evolves.