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Most of your corrections to my story aren't really germane to the point, and mostly involve your constant flogging of a bunch of sysvinit replacements that neve

by cwyers 11y ago

Most of your corrections to my story aren't really germane to the point, and mostly involve your constant flogging of a bunch of sysvinit replacements that never caught on, but there's one where I think you move from mere pedantry to being wrong: > In fact, "some people from Red Hat" already had deeper architectural failings with Upstart (which I agree with, but absolutely not with how they decided to "solve" them) and its event model. The beginnings of systemd (prototyped under the name of Babykit) were lying around for several years on Lennart Poettering's machine. Here's Kay Sievers, one of the originators of systemd[1]: > True statement. And yeah, without the CLA, we would very likely have worked on upstart, instead of starting the systemd project. Four years ago we talked to lawyers and tried pretty hard to convince them to give it up, but there was no way to negotiate. In the comments, from Scott James Remnant, who wrote Upstart for Canonical: > I don't think we ever disagreed enough for me to refuse patches from them - it was very much a case of they had different ideas to me, and couldn't contribute them because of the CLA > If the CLA wasn't there, we'd've just tugged and pulled and fought about patches like normal projects, and Upstart would have turned out much like systemd - I'd've been okay with that :) And another comment from SJR: > you'd be surprised how little of Upstart's code is the "event system". It could have quite easily evolved into what systemd looks like today, with an active community working on it. > Indeed, systemd today doesn't look much like systemd back then either, it's evolved over time - the dependency system has taken a greater forefront than the socket system it was designed around, etc. > systemd had the benefit of an active developer community, because it didn't put barriers up to contribution. People who wrote for systemd and Upstart at the time both claim that if it weren't for the CLA, Upstart would've been contributed to by the people who eventually wrote systemd instead of systemd being its own project. I see no reason to disbelieve them. [1] https://plus.google.com/+KaySievers/posts/C3chC26khpq https://plus.google.com/+KaySievers/posts/C3chC26khpq

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
Kay Sievers was actually a SUSE employee at the time, IIRC. Now, there's a case to be made that the public statements of intent did not necessarily correspond to the actual function, or strategy that made systemd emerge. Quoting from Lennart Poettering's Linux Voice interview [1]: > We, at that time, thought: OK, Upstart is the future! Scott understood how init systems work – it needs to be dynamic, it needs to react to events, and it’s not the static thing that Sysvinit was. So we thought that was the way of the future, but as it progressed, we realised it probably wasn’t the future, because we realised that conceptually, it was the wrong design. Now, furthermore, the goal of systemd became "universal GNU/Linux middleware," a massively increased scope relative to what Upstart was intended to be. Though it may have been the case that Upstart could have evolved into something similar to systemd-the-PID1, it appears to me that systemd's emergence would nevertheless have been determined by the desire for a homogeneous catch-all userland suite. The Upstart architecture, relying on so-called "bridges" at the time to marshall external events to and from the internal format, would likely not have been as desirable. LP's testimony starkly contrasts with Kay and SJR. [1] http://www.linuxvoice.com/interview-lennart-poettering/ http://www.linuxvoice.com/interview-lennart-poettering/
- cwyers 11y ago
  > LP's testimony starkly contrasts with Kay and SJR. No it doesn't. There is no reason that "conceptually, it was the wrong design" has to contradict with "they had different ideas to me, and couldn't contribute them because of the CLA" and "it could have quite easily evolved into what systemd looks like today, with an active community working on it." It is quite easy to read those statements as being in agreement -- Lennart decided that Upstart wasn't conceptually correct, SJR is amenable to discussing merging changes that would bring Upstart in line with Lennart's ideas, but the CLA is a roadblock so Lennart goes off to form his own project. Why not adopt the principle of charity and take everyone at their word?
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    Except for the whole part about Lennart's project already having a prior non-public existence. Discussing historical counterfactuals like this based on limited public testimony is a difficult matter, but my input here is that the ultimate breadth of changes envisioned by the systemd developers would have triggered a split anyway. SJR's comments concern systemd-the-PID1.
    - cwyers 11y ago
      > Except for the whole part about Lennart's project already having a prior non-public existence. Is there any reason, any at all, that you've provided to think that Lennart wouldn't have abandoned that project to contribute to Upstart, if the CLA issue had been able to be overcome? Because the testimony of people who would actually know this indicates that he would have. I mean, I'm happy to drop this argument if you find it a "difficult matter," but it seemed to matter to you enough to bring it up in the first place, and you seem to be focusing on trivialities that you think support your point rather than some pretty unambiguous statements from people who would know (and it seems hard to accuse SJR of some sort of pro-Red Hat bias ehre).
- digi_owl 11y ago
  > Kay Sievers was actually a SUSE employee at the time, IIRC. Something that can make a guy wonder if the root of the issue is Suse, as apparently that distro has always been "weird". Something that may well be a outcome of a corporate culture that former employees are now bringing with them to others. As for LP's story not lining up with others. Not surprised. Best i can find the guy has never told a consistent account of things. The goal posts are forever moving.
digi_owl 11y ago
Link is going 404...

by cwyers 11y ago

vezzy-fnord 11y ago

Kay Sievers was actually a SUSE employee at the time, IIRC. Now, there's a case to be made that the public statements of intent did not necessarily correspond to the actual function, or strategy that made systemd emerge. Quoting from Lennart Poettering's Linux Voice interview [1]: > We, at that time, thought: OK, Upstart is the future! Scott understood how init systems work – it needs to be dynamic, it needs to react to events, and it’s not the static thing that Sysvinit was. So we thought that was the way of the future, but as it progressed, we realised it probably wasn’t the future, because we realised that conceptually, it was the wrong design. Now, furthermore, the goal of systemd became "universal GNU/Linux middleware," a massively increased scope relative to what Upstart was intended to be. Though it may have been the case that Upstart could have evolved into something similar to systemd-the-PID1, it appears to me that systemd's emergence would nevertheless have been determined by the desire for a homogeneous catch-all userland suite. The Upstart architecture, relying on so-called "bridges" at the time to marshall external events to and from the internal format, would likely not have been as desirable. LP's testimony starkly contrasts with Kay and SJR. [1] http://www.linuxvoice.com/interview-lennart-poettering/ http://www.linuxvoice.com/interview-lennart-poettering/

cwyers 11y ago
> LP's testimony starkly contrasts with Kay and SJR. No it doesn't. There is no reason that "conceptually, it was the wrong design" has to contradict with "they had different ideas to me, and couldn't contribute them because of the CLA" and "it could have quite easily evolved into what systemd looks like today, with an active community working on it." It is quite easy to read those statements as being in agreement -- Lennart decided that Upstart wasn't conceptually correct, SJR is amenable to discussing merging changes that would bring Upstart in line with Lennart's ideas, but the CLA is a roadblock so Lennart goes off to form his own project. Why not adopt the principle of charity and take everyone at their word?
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Except for the whole part about Lennart's project already having a prior non-public existence. Discussing historical counterfactuals like this based on limited public testimony is a difficult matter, but my input here is that the ultimate breadth of changes envisioned by the systemd developers would have triggered a split anyway. SJR's comments concern systemd-the-PID1.
  - cwyers 11y ago
    > Except for the whole part about Lennart's project already having a prior non-public existence. Is there any reason, any at all, that you've provided to think that Lennart wouldn't have abandoned that project to contribute to Upstart, if the CLA issue had been able to be overcome? Because the testimony of people who would actually know this indicates that he would have. I mean, I'm happy to drop this argument if you find it a "difficult matter," but it seemed to matter to you enough to bring it up in the first place, and you seem to be focusing on trivialities that you think support your point rather than some pretty unambiguous statements from people who would know (and it seems hard to accuse SJR of some sort of pro-Red Hat bias ehre).
digi_owl 11y ago
> Kay Sievers was actually a SUSE employee at the time, IIRC. Something that can make a guy wonder if the root of the issue is Suse, as apparently that distro has always been "weird". Something that may well be a outcome of a corporate culture that former employees are now bringing with them to others. As for LP's story not lining up with others. Not surprised. Best i can find the guy has never told a consistent account of things. The goal posts are forever moving.

digi_owl 11y ago

Link is going 404...