On Sat, Aug 9, 2014 at 4:09 PM, Raymond Wooninck <tittiatcoke@gmail.com> wrote: [...]
I fully agree with you that this bashing on systemd is counter productive, however I guess we should also see if from a different point. openSUSE is a community driven distribution, but as far as I remember the community itself never took the decision to switch to systemd. This was mainly driven by the maintainers of the core-system, which are part of SUSE.
And the maintainers of the core system are also part of openSUSE. I don't think you are trying to make the case that people who contribute to openSUSE, be it during their work time, and/or outside of it and who happen to be employed by SUSE, are not part of the openSUSE community. So why that inflammatory statement with its underlying implicit claim that it was done by authority and outside of the realm of the community?
And this might be the biggest issue and the cause for the systemd bashing by the community. One of the items mentioned on that website is that more and
"might". Or not. I don't see any of that playing a role in boycottsystemd.org
more programs are starting to have dependencies on systemd and that distro's have to make the switch to the systemd world. Whether they like it or not.
And programs also had to have dependencies on the way SysV init works (exit codes, PID file handling, etc...), whether they liked it or not.
Debian discussed this with its community and based on the feedback it took a decision. As indicated I can't remember to have seen any discussion or questionnaire within the openSUSE community regarding the successor of the sysvinit environment. Of course we can sweep it under the umbrello of "those that do the work decide". But then those have also be prepared for the subsequent discussions that their decision could cause.
That is a fair statement, but a project like this is an evolving thing, and learns from mistakes, hopefully, and adapts. See it as natural selection: if the right decisions and changes are made in such a project for a majority of the people in it, it will thrive. If not, it will die. Mistakes are made all the time, in this project too, almost always with the best of intentions. Arguably though, if you recall the context at that time... 1. would it have helped to have an open questionnaire and go by majority of votes? 1.1. who would get to vote? who would have been seen as having sufficient expertise in the domain to have an informed opinion? 1.2. should a decision like that be taken by majority, or by qualified opinions? 2. the discussion was very much of a hypothetical, as systemd was still quite new, and it was mostly fear of things that might happen, or not happen, in the future 2.1. how many of the claims made then against systemd have proven to be right? and false? 2.2. is it doomsday and has it technically killed the distributions that use it? If you get to the core of it, at least from my personal opinion, it boils down to resistance to change. Some people want to keep it as it has always been, arguing that this automatically means stability and robustness, and predictability. (I don't believe that is true necessarily) Some people want things to change in order to improve, have new features that will allow better functioning. (personally I believe Linux has grown up and taken enough market share to go its own way and stop being held down by the burden of ancient UNIX compliance, stand on its own feet, just look at containers and docker -- but that is merely my personal opinion, given for contrast with the previous ones) I think that the pretty emotional component of the reactions and statements on the topic does reinforce the idea that it is mostly about that psychological aspect. What I mean to say is: I sincerely do not believe a vote would have provided any further guidance. That is not to say that the whole topic could have been approached in a more transparent manner. But transparency also requires responsible community members. Including not making inflammatory claims, play the vocal minority bully card, threatening to leave (*) or harm, or just downright lies and trolling, etc... (*) bye David. seriously. claiming that in a community driven project, the opinion or preference of a single person should trump everything else is ridiculous.
But it is indeed too late to revert back as that we are already depend too much on systemd and it would create a lot of havoc if we would remove it now. However I don't think that this should close the door for alternatives. As David indicated that he has been contributing a lot in the last years, maybe he is willing to work on the integration of a systemd alternative.
Contributing a lot in the last years does not give you the right to threaten to enforce your opinion upon a community. Watch the poisonous people video again for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q52kFL8zVoM Technical arguments may be valid though. But you can't just list issues with systemd and leave out: - that other solutions have issues of their own, especially SysV init - that systemd does open the door to a wealth of new very useful features, that are starting to be adopted more and more, after the transition phase from init - that the doomsday claims that were made when the discussion came up have proven to be wrong - that whatever the init system is, programs will have a dependency on it, at the very least to its requirement and behaviour, as it was the case for init too - that systemd is now clearly the actively developed solution for the majority of developers and projects, and is best option to go forward with - the many issues going with an alternative would bring -- even Canonical was forced to see the light on that point, despite their extreme Not Invented Here syndrome etc... For perspective. cheers, -- Pascal -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org