5 ms·

Important people choosing to use instead of letting the community decide is the definition of political and not merit

by geggam 8y ago

theamk 8y ago
At least for Debian, technical committee (elected by the community) could not choose between systemd and upstart [0], so systemd was the final winner. There was overwhelming desire that sysvinit should go. And when this question was brought to general election, community decided it did not care: [1] So I am not sure who those "important people" were, why do you feel they did not represent you, and what would community choose, in your opinion. I, having worked with upstart, can say it is worse than systemd. [0] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=727708#6729 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=727708#672... [1] https://www.debian.org/vote/2014/vote_003#outcome https://www.debian.org/vote/2014/vote_003#outcome
- codedokode 8y ago
  Interesting, I didn't know that Debian has a constitution.
- kasabali 8y ago
  > technical committee (elected by the community) Technical committee members are not elected by community, they're appointed by the DPL. https://www.debian.org/devel/constitution#item-6 https://www.debian.org/devel/constitution#item-6
tapoxi 8y ago
The community did decide, each distribution chooses for itself what software to use. Debian's open debate process lasted for months.
- geggam 8y ago
  And resulted in Devuan fork. I have used systemd and currently am forced to use it in production. It works great until it doesnt. There have been multiple times I have no idea what was wrong as it was faster to simply recreate the system from scratch and hope the same bug didnt happen again.
diffeomorphism 8y ago
Letting the wider community decide is also the opposite of a meritocratic decision.
veeti 8y ago
Who else has more merit to make this decision than the Debian developers (= the important people) themselves? Random neckbeards whining on online forums?
- geggam 8y ago
  Developers make terrible system managers usually.
- insertcredit 8y ago
  At least as far as Debian is concerned, you will find that the people with skin-in-the-game (administrators) were massively against systemd. The Devuan fork/split happened exactly because of that.
  - jamespo 8y ago
    That's because they only understand bash and not c
    - geggam 8y ago
      because configuring and managing systems in C seems suboptimal ?
  - amyjess 8y ago
    > you will find that the people with skin-in-the-game (administrators) were massively against systemd Let me offer you an anecdote from my company. Now, we're a RHEL shop and not a Debian shop, but we've been around since long before systemd. Most of our hosts now run RHEL 7, but we still have a handful of old boxen still running RHEL 6, and I've been personally involved with quite a few migrations from RHEL 6 to 7 during my time here. Whenever we retire a RHEL 6 host and replace it when a RHEL 7 host, the general consensus from the people who administrate it is "thank god we can now use systemd instead of having to deal with sysvinit". Every time I have to do anything on one of our remaining RHEL 6 hosts, I brace myself for pain, because our RHEL 7 hosts are just that much easier to manage.

Important people choosing to use instead of letting the community decide is the definition of political and not merit

by geggam 8y ago

Important people choosing to use instead of letting the community decide is the definition of political and not merit

At least for Debian, technical committee (elected by the community) could not choose between systemd and upstart [0], so systemd was the final winner. There was overwhelming desire that sysvinit should go. And when this question was brought to general election, community decided it did not care: [1] So I am not sure who those "important people" were, why do you feel they did not represent you, and what would community choose, in your opinion. I, having worked with upstart, can say it is worse than systemd. [0] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=727708#6729 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=727708#672... [1] https://www.debian.org/vote/2014/vote_003#outcome https://www.debian.org/vote/2014/vote_003#outcome

codedokode 8y ago
Interesting, I didn't know that Debian has a constitution.
kasabali 8y ago
> technical committee (elected by the community) Technical committee members are not elected by community, they're appointed by the DPL. https://www.debian.org/devel/constitution#item-6 https://www.debian.org/devel/constitution#item-6

tapoxi 8y ago

The community did decide, each distribution chooses for itself what software to use. Debian's open debate process lasted for months.

geggam 8y ago
And resulted in Devuan fork. I have used systemd and currently am forced to use it in production. It works great until it doesnt. There have been multiple times I have no idea what was wrong as it was faster to simply recreate the system from scratch and hope the same bug didnt happen again.

diffeomorphism 8y ago

Letting the wider community decide is also the opposite of a meritocratic decision.

veeti 8y ago

Who else has more merit to make this decision than the Debian developers (= the important people) themselves? Random neckbeards whining on online forums?

geggam 8y ago
Developers make terrible system managers usually.
insertcredit 8y ago
At least as far as Debian is concerned, you will find that the people with skin-in-the-game (administrators) were massively against systemd. The Devuan fork/split happened exactly because of that.
- jamespo 8y ago
  That's because they only understand bash and not c
  - geggam 8y ago
    because configuring and managing systems in C seems suboptimal ?
- amyjess 8y ago
  > you will find that the people with skin-in-the-game (administrators) were massively against systemd Let me offer you an anecdote from my company. Now, we're a RHEL shop and not a Debian shop, but we've been around since long before systemd. Most of our hosts now run RHEL 7, but we still have a handful of old boxen still running RHEL 6, and I've been personally involved with quite a few migrations from RHEL 6 to 7 during my time here. Whenever we retire a RHEL 6 host and replace it when a RHEL 7 host, the general consensus from the people who administrate it is "thank god we can now use systemd instead of having to deal with sysvinit". Every time I have to do anything on one of our remaining RHEL 6 hosts, I brace myself for pain, because our RHEL 7 hosts are just that much easier to manage.