Yet another systemd fiasco

Posted Nov 17, 2014 18:12 UTC (Mon) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510)
In reply to: Yet another systemd fiasco by tomegun
Parent article: Russ Allbery leaves the Debian technical committee

If we were to split the development of systemd over several projects it would entail a huge amount of extra work for us (the developers), at no apparent gain.

I'm viewing this one statement in the context of my work on Debian, and I see it as the major difference we have.

Ian Murdock did all of the base system work himself. I took over from Ian and broke it up, handing pieces to individual developers. Eventually I was not left with even one piece. It did not impose a lot of extra work on anyone. It did enforce both independece and relationships. We had to communicate. We had to put more thought into how things worked together, and to explain it to each other, because the other parties didn't have to listen to each other. Everything did work together amazingly well. I think better than it would have otherwise.

Yet another systemd fiasco

Posted Nov 17, 2014 18:44 UTC (Mon) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link] (5 responses)

Then I guess you'll be happy to hear that the systemd community counts well over 500 developers who communicate, explain and work together and work on their individual pieces. Just like Debian really. Just without the flames and bickering and negativity.

Yet another systemd fiasco

Posted Nov 17, 2014 19:55 UTC (Mon) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (4 responses)

Just without the flames and bickering and negativity.

Well, you may have internal unity, but you seem to be absolutely surrounded by flames and bickering and negativity. Including on the LKML, not just in Debian. None of it is your fault, huh?

You marketed it wrong. I don't think you can fix that now.

Yet another systemd fiasco

Posted Nov 17, 2014 20:16 UTC (Mon) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]

"Well, you may have internal unity, but you seem to be absolutely surrounded by flames and bickering and negativity. Including on the LKML, not just in Debian. None of it is your fault, huh?"

None of this is my fault, no. Can't be, since I'm involved neither in Debian, nor in systemd in any way. I am just an observer. And I observe many flames by people who have not even tried to understand systemd or the many technical arguments the systemd developers have brought over and over. Instead, people seem to repeat the same myths and preconceptions over and over. Until maintainers can't stand it anymore and quit working on free software.

I wonder, why someone who has been a part in creating the free software movement suddenly works to destroy it. Seems quite illogical, but I guess that's just human.

Yet another systemd fiasco

Posted Nov 17, 2014 20:57 UTC (Mon) by tomegun (guest, #56697) [Link] (1 responses)

It is not clear to me what we could have done differently (modulo the occasional minor human error or short temper), except at the expense of our technical aims (e.g., avoid stepping on people's toes by not doing work that we believe needs to be done).

At this point, all we can really do is to try to listen and learn what we can from our critics. That said, this far into the game most basic things have been said already many times, and for those of us who have been involved since the beginning it does get exasperating having to answer the same, long-debunked "criticism" from people who have only a very superficial knowledge of what we do, the problems we try to solve, and the previous discussions on the same topic.

Yet another systemd fiasco

Posted Nov 18, 2014 11:29 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

I think Lennart's blog posts and the other stuff done was pretty good. Having read the many comments about systemd in various places, I think systemd folks did a great job of reaching out distros and people involved in FLOSS development but distros haven't done as good of a job at convincing users about systemd, which I think is a symptom of the larger problem of the FLOSS development community (especially Debian) being fairly disconnected from people who use our output.

I'd also like to point out this recent post from Planet Debian entitled "Enabling Change".

http://blog.brlink.eu/index.html#i69

Yet another systemd fiasco

Posted Nov 17, 2014 23:46 UTC (Mon) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

> Well, you may have internal unity, but you seem to be absolutely surrounded by flames and bickering and negativity.
Yeah, except for the communities who actually *use* the stuff you're constantly bitching about, i. e. OpenSuse, Fedora, Arch, Mageia etc.

> You marketed it wrong. I don't think you can fix that now.
If that's your only complaint about systemd then it must be one fine piece of software.

Yet another systemd fiasco

Posted Nov 17, 2014 19:57 UTC (Mon) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

You forget that we have git now, so "have one repo vs. 20" and "have one maintainer vs. 200" are completely orthogonal problem spaces.

There is no technical OR social reason why splitting up the systemd repo into N subparts should change anything at all, except create more work for everybody involved.

Yet another systemd fiasco

Posted Nov 17, 2014 21:12 UTC (Mon) by tomegun (guest, #56697) [Link]

Bruce,

You did not answer any of my questions, so at this point I really can't tell what you are proposing that we do (in concrete terms). It appears to me that you have not really studied the project you are proposing fundamental changes to (but I'd be delighted to be proven wrong).

As to your comparison to your earlier Debian development, I fear the similarities are only superficial (both because the base OS is very different then from now, because Linux itself is, and because systemd is much more modular than you appear to believe), and without further detailed analysis I see absolutely no reason why what worked well for you should be blindly followed by a very different project.

Cheers,

Tom

Yet another systemd fiasco

Posted Nov 17, 2014 21:34 UTC (Mon) by jwarnica (subscriber, #27492) [Link]

Was it not at least an implicit requirement, at the time, to "do what UNIX did, maybe a little better"? That isn't a hard goal to articulate (or not articulate), nor is it a hard goal to implicitly test against.

I'm not quite prepared to grant that the SysV design, itself organically developed, was ever ideal, and it is beyond question today in deep need of reworking. Reimplementing a 1990 design by '97 (or whatever the dates) is an accomplishment, but that doesn't make it an accomplished design.