The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Sir, your generation wouldn't recognize a troll if one told you to slaughter Irish orphans for lunchmeat and then bit you in the arse to drive the point home further.

In the systemd discussion we've consistently seen the pro-systemd side undertake extraordinary contortions to categorically not engage the systemd-critical crowd. From an outside perspective it's as though systemd was couched in iron-clad dogma and that all arguments requiring analysis outside that dogma cause a significant emotional response in systemd apologists, giving rise to calls of troll and predictions of administrative exclusion from discourse. As you yourself do right here with your talk about "burning a paid account", as though LWN were some ban-happy crypto-authoritarian Internet septic tank.

It is my experience that when one side completely fails to engage in even the most civilized forms of debate then that side is knowingly in the wrong, but figures that by digging in and holding on they'll prevail by inertia. In the systemd civil war this side has always been the pro-systemd one from the top down; for a simple and clear example one need only look at Mr. Pöttering's "systemd myths" posting where he can only answer his own strawmen by side-stepping his own caricaturelike reformulations of their arguments! Further along the same pattern we have Pöttering's G+ post in the "I'm a victim of white middle-class heterosexual men" theme, aiming to stop critique in its cradle with the "victim-blaming" canard if not by design then certainly by effect.

This argument, and many others, could be comprehensively done with and gone by next week if the anti-systemd concerns were addressed lucidly and in good faith. It's been this way for years now. It follows that either the rising volume and virulence of the anti-systemd crowd isn't leaving as many jimmies rustled as the toys-from-pram episodes of various Debian luminaries would suggest (given how technical arguments are quicker to write for one in the know than e.g. Russ Alberry's recent "fraught" tirade), or that varyingly theatrical public complaints about it are seen as the way to go instead. The former casts those Debian developers as engaging in synchronized dishonesty, or acting on outside orders (a mild conspiracy theory right there); but the latter is merely consistent with the continuing theme of the systemd developers' willful failure to engage their critics.

In conclusion, the systemd project doesn't address the critique leveled at it because it is unable to do so. Their reasoning is only consistent with unstated (and therefore unexplored) dogma, which in its obscurity cannot be justifiable by anything besides tribality, faith, and other forms of irrationality. Combined with the numerous displays of authoritarian aggression (outlined in my second paragraph) in this thread and many others, seemingly exclusively from the pro-systemd side, the evidence strongly suggests that an orchestrated take-over of the GNU/Linux userspace is afoot.