On Monday 19 December 2011, Lars Müller wrote:
On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 03:52:02PM -0500, Brian K. White wrote: [ 8< ]
It's not in your own interests to keep rebuffing user complaints.
Right.
At the very very least, you could say "We apologize, we know it sucks right now. We need help making a major transition. We are sorry for making these changes which broke all your stuff. We should not have released this yet." That at least will gain you some percentage of sympathy. And at least some percentage of users will decide to give you their time and effort to submit proper bugzilla entries with better documented observations.
Cristian expressed his point of view. In the past he had himself been very, very critical towards systemd too.
Unfortunately systemd testing while the development of openSUSE 12.1 didn't got the same attention as it got with or after the release.
Thats natural. Usually I'm testing stuff which is interesting to me. Systemd or any other boot stuff is not. All my machines are 24/7 online. If I have to reboot after months uptime (power failure or kernel updates) I expect it to work or at least being able to debug it easily (either thanks to well known transparent shell scripts for example or complete documentation/release notes if something fundamental has been changed lately). Even sysvinit's starpar patches (11.x?) made me horrible surprises so I disabled that everywhere since I've noticed it first time. I would not even write bug reports about it because I don't need it fixed.
The fact that we've had too less systemd testers/bug reporters is pity, but IMO it should have been pity only for the ones who want sytemd into openSUSE. I find it strange that there was no sensiblity to suspend default systemd to 12.2.
As soon as we got aware which amount of trouble it caused we took action and filed http://en.openSUSE.org/openSUSE:Most_annoying_bugs_12.1 section 'Problem: System is switched from sysvinit to systemd during upgrade.'. This at least offers and easy way to switch back to sysvinit.
This bug report (725917) is a good example to see how unsensible things got handled. There was enough time to fix that before releasing 12.1...
Unfortunately after the release there is no real alternative to handle this better. The only alternative which comes to my mind is to publish an update which forces all users back. I'm sure this action would at the end cause additional and even more confusion.
Therefore the main goal at the moment is to get the outstanding updated published.
@Frederic: Am I get it right and the upcoming update is this one? https://build.opensuse.org/project/show?project=openSUSE%3AMaintenanc e%3A126
To let us all focus on the enhancement I'm telling all people bitten by the beast I'm very, very sorry and hope we'll all will make a better job with openSUSE 12.2.
Yup, actually I've skipped 12.1 until now because all my test machines failed on basic things. And don't tell me "Have you filed a bug?" (see above).
Back to the topic of this thread. I don't like most of Christian's proposal but of course the thing can't be as is currently.
IMO first we should drop the F5 button in grub as soon as possible and make systemd and sysvinit conflicting packages. Switching between sysvinit and systemd should be possible only using rpm/zypper. This way the systemd supporters would have it already a lot easier because on installations where systemd resides they have not to care about sysvinit stuff.
Going this way we could drop either sysvinit or systemd easily at any time in future.
If I find time next days I will try to write down more exactly how I would do it and also some pros and cons about that way.
cu, Rudi