Systemd and PulseAudio are getting pushed down everybody's throat, unasked for. They are both horrible to work with and suck quite a bit, both introduced way prematurely and buggy.
Why did he not roll his own distro fully based on systemd to convince people it is so cool? instead of rolling out his own distro, people responsible for distro package/rolling were convinced it should be added to the default; as it was so much cooler then Sys V Init. Nobody would have wanted to hire a hit-man for him making choices for his own distro. But no the choice was made to infect nearly all distributions with systemd.
And worst, it is not even optional, which is BAD. The package maintainers, the nerds that like to have meetings on what should happen with a certain distribution got convinced, or simply wanted to be the person to implement something new, without giving it some proper thought. It's a task, work where their name is showing. Which makes them think they are cool, special or any other term you think applies! That's what is wrong with people, we are all a bunch of hypocrite bastards, from the most recent baby that got born crying for a mothers tit from mother Theresa that wanted her place in heaven by choosing the life of suffering. It's in our nature.
Sys V Init was simple and transparent, and it worked fine for anybody i knew working with linux, nobody had the need for a systemd like .. lets call it a product as i don't want to use another insulting term, as the author apparently might get his feelings hurt. (one does not write such a blog post as he did, if you DO NOT care).
If his blog post was mine, and i would have re-read it before posting it, i would strongly wonder if i have not done something wrong, striking so many people the wrong way; SO MUCH SO, people want to hire a hit-man. If you need address so much bitching about your 'stuff' and still feel like stuffing it down everybody's throats, you miss some critical wiring in the brain. There were a lot of different paths that could have been chosen, but the path that effects nearly all linux users was chosen… WHY?
Yes i would like it very much if systemd, pulse audio and lennart pottering would disappear from the linux community. That is my personal opinion, shared and or opposed by many, deal with it.
>They are both horrible to work with and suck quite a bit, both introduced way prematurely and buggy.
The community invites you to produce something superior. PulseAudio and systemd may have their own problems, but they're in place for a reason. I don't think they were selected due to some irrational hero worship for Poettering; they were selected because they were the most concise way to solve a real problem.
As much as one may dislike Pulse, it provides a unified, modern audio system that just works. I don't know if you remember the bad old days when it was a fight to get applications to play audio correctly, but that has gone away with the introduction of Pulse. For all of its potential problems and inefficiencies, it provides the basics in a reasonably accessible and universal manner.
>And worst, it is not even optional, which is BAD.
It is optional. Open-source means you can run your own distro completely free of Poeterring's touch. You may have to deal with the legacy left by his projects, but that's nothing special; he had to deal with the legacy of ALSA et al and wrote compatibility layers that were major factors in the successful proliferation of PulseAudio.
>The package maintainers, the nerds that like to have meetings on what should happen with a certain distribution got convinced, or simply wanted to be the person to implement something new, without giving it some proper thought.
I'm sure the nerds that are entrusted with the security and sanity of millions of systems across the world would disagree about whether "proper thought" was involved.
I don't really see a point in addressing the rest of your reply. Disagreement is fine, but please be civil. Poeterring and others in the community are obviously capable and they deserve acknowledgement and respect, which is a different thing than deference or worship. If you disagree, please disagree, but do so with civility. This shouldn't have to be complicated.
Please read the reply below to snowwrestler, check the PDF. As i think it also applies here.
Also please don't put to much faith in the people that roll the packages. It's a kind of dangerous assumption, see history for examples.
Also i fail to see where i have not been civil, I've tried so very hard. Not a single F-word in there ;-)
I agree it wouldn't have to be complicated at all, if simply a new distro was created fully based and compliant with the ideas of systemd, until its mature enough for others to adopt. Instead of overwriting the existing with something that certainly is not proven to be better or best for the job. And many are entering a road where they are not even sure systemd is going to end taking over things, unifying things, making all distros the same.
> Why did he not roll his own distro fully based on systemd to convince people it is so cool?
Why don't you roll your own distro and keep init in that?
I'm honestly not trying to troll. Isn't the point of open source that each individual can do what they want with the code? Why is it someone else's responsibility to maintain code options that you want, but they don't?
I know, nor did or do i mean to troll and it will be the only way nowadays to keep using linux as somebody started to learn it, started to like it, and for many now need it, etc. And also will require much more time from them to maintain their new os, while they has a base os to work on for years which suddenly changes drastically, and for many for no proper reason. The time they could have spend on their code, product, service etc. There will be no choice anymore, all will be in the 'CoreOS style' laid out by LP and friends.
The above; This is not linux to me anymore, its something else, something new, and i think, my opinion, is that it should have been setup as something new, not adopted into existing linux distros. Calling it CoreOS, why not release a new distro called CoreOS, and then when the ground/framework is done, have ubuntu, red hat and every package manager/maintainer of each distro roll their CoreOS flavour distro. As this migration is horrible (i can't find a better word).
But i think many simply like 'to ride the wave of 'software' change', be the author having its name above a package for a particular distro, having their names mentioned in the wiki as the author that brought 'the change'. Thinking something new must be better, of course plenty that don't think that and honestly fool themselves there is a need for systemd.
How you can not see that the introduction and adoption of his tools lead to the anger of users that get this forced down their throats? If there was no such thing as pulse audio or systemd, nobody would be upset with him in the linux community. And where i say attacks are justified at all? I hate violence in any form.
I wrote that i would prefer not to see any of his stuff, nor him in the linux community (for of product nr 3 i don't need). The whole discussion is waste of time and space, just like pulseaudio and systemd. And i wrote that one has to realise when others get SO pissed off they want to hire a hit-man, SOMETHING is up, perhaps requires a second thought. Consider making it optional? It's not a crazy idea.
I have big misgivings about Poettering, and this post has done nothing to improve my opinion of him. But a lot of the systemd criticism is poorly argued.
> Sys V Init was simple and transparent, and it worked fine for anybody i knew working with linux
Sys V init only works "fine" for you if your needs are simplistic. If you have not dealt with dozens of badly written init scripts that turns restarting a typical server process into a matter of trying "restart" followed by a "killall", possibly rm'ing pid files, and a "start", then you have not dealt with Sys V init much.
If you have not dealt with essential system processes dying and not getting restarted, and having to implement monitoring and restart logic to deal with problems that would not have occurred in the first place without a process monitor, you have not been exposed to a lot of Sys V init problems.
If you have not dealt with process managers outside of pid 1 being killed.
If you have not dealt with problems retaining log output from early boot.
And so on.
Systemd solves a lot of real problems that maintainers of bigger systems are likely to have run into. I will agree that it solves a lot of real problems in contentious ways, including things I don't agree with (I, for example, can not agree with the arguments for binary logs - I love the filtering functionality that journald brings, but they would all be possible while retaining a text based format for the main log files)
> If his blog post was mine, and i would have re-read it before posting it, i would strongly wonder if i have not done something wrong, striking so many people the wrong way; SO MUCH SO, people want to hire a hit-man.
I agree with you about this, to a point. If you get some criticism, it's fair to assume that it may be their problem. If you become one of the most hated OSS developers in history, on the other hand, it should cause a lot of introspection.
To me it seems that there are a few separate problems:
- Poettering appears to have a very abrasive working style that wins him a lot of opponents. He may very well be a nice guy in person, but a lot of the time that appears not to come through online.
- There are some real assholes that go way to far in the way they criticise him, and he seems to use the illegitimate criticism as a way of ignoring the real issues and concerns people have with him. This is not that strange - if the outpourings of hatred towards you is not something you can easily reconcile with your own views about what you are like as a person, then it becomes easier to dismiss them all than to filter and accept some of them and dismiss others.
- Some of the technical decisions he makes are questionable and controversial, which is not uncommon, but rather than get resolved, due to the caustic environment created around him, very often it becomes impossible to deal with the actual technical issues and fronts harden.
With all respects, all the issues you address, should not be addressed with a new process manager which glues and tapes things together as some hot fix.
The processes need to be debugged and fixed. I'm strongly of the opinion that daemons for example, need to start once and not crash at all. I don't want a process manager to decide to restart it, and if that was acceptable, a safe script will do fine. (and hehe don't get me started about process states within systemd, its that process manager that often think processes are still running, while the old init would check for the process, detect its not running, cleanup the pid and start)
I also strongly believe in separation of duties, so 'big systems with many processes' do not exist in my opinion. They all have a specialised function, and only that function.
Also please have a look at the pdf i replied below to snow wrestler about systemd and its future.
>Why did he not roll his own distro fully based on systemd to convince people it is so cool?
He does, it is called fedora. The problem is that red hat has so much influence that people will follow their lead. In this case, they pretty much have to as some software simply won't work if they don't follow.
hehe :) i guess indeed fedora is his playground, and probably why i stopped using it. (which was before i even knew the name of the pulseaudio author)
But still think its should have been something new, Fedora-CoreOS until its matured and then decide to overwrite all existing distros with systemd if the need and demand is there, instead of forcing it through the whole community while there is a large part that doesn't want it and it's not even finished or really brings something new to the table.
And yes its the people that follow the 'leading parties' blindly, and they think its cool to roll out something new, in my opinion mainly because it is new and exciting.
Why did he not roll his own distro fully based on systemd to convince people it is so cool? instead of rolling out his own distro, people responsible for distro package/rolling were convinced it should be added to the default; as it was so much cooler then Sys V Init. Nobody would have wanted to hire a hit-man for him making choices for his own distro. But no the choice was made to infect nearly all distributions with systemd.
And worst, it is not even optional, which is BAD. The package maintainers, the nerds that like to have meetings on what should happen with a certain distribution got convinced, or simply wanted to be the person to implement something new, without giving it some proper thought. It's a task, work where their name is showing. Which makes them think they are cool, special or any other term you think applies! That's what is wrong with people, we are all a bunch of hypocrite bastards, from the most recent baby that got born crying for a mothers tit from mother Theresa that wanted her place in heaven by choosing the life of suffering. It's in our nature.
Sys V Init was simple and transparent, and it worked fine for anybody i knew working with linux, nobody had the need for a systemd like .. lets call it a product as i don't want to use another insulting term, as the author apparently might get his feelings hurt. (one does not write such a blog post as he did, if you DO NOT care).
If his blog post was mine, and i would have re-read it before posting it, i would strongly wonder if i have not done something wrong, striking so many people the wrong way; SO MUCH SO, people want to hire a hit-man. If you need address so much bitching about your 'stuff' and still feel like stuffing it down everybody's throats, you miss some critical wiring in the brain. There were a lot of different paths that could have been chosen, but the path that effects nearly all linux users was chosen… WHY?
Yes i would like it very much if systemd, pulse audio and lennart pottering would disappear from the linux community. That is my personal opinion, shared and or opposed by many, deal with it.