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>It's not that people are opposed to change, it's that there are legit concerns about some of the ways systemd works and is implemented, and the way it's been h
by lsc 8y ago
>It's not that people are opposed to change, it's that there are legit concerns about some of the ways systemd works and is implemented, and the way it's been ham-fisted as a political move in a lot of ways.
I personally think the industry needs a lot more resistance to change when it comes to interfaces and other things humans have to understand.
I mean, I'm not talking about systemd in particular; I'm talking about in general about how interfaces change over time and people don't seem to take into account the cognitive costs of that change. Sure, ss is better than netstat and IP is better than ifconfig... but how much of that 'better' could you have done in a way that didn't toss away the historical knowledge so many people have of those tools?
And really, sysadmin tools are the least of it; I mean, they are operated by professionals, so if you want to pay for retraining (or pay the costs associated with there being fewer of us)
People change customer facing interfaces to no benefit all the time, forcing people who are trying to do other things to put effort into re-learning their interface.
I mean, my point is that interface changes are expensive, and should not be undertaken without a really good argument that they bring more benefit than the cost of retraining.
- pas 8y agoFirst we need sane (secure, semantic, programmatic) interfaces that slowly become standards. netstat? /proc files? ss? parsing text? wtf? I mean, sure why not, but at least don't call them interfaces. they are userland apps people like to script, because they are lazy to use libnetlink (or libwhatever thay uses the right kernel interface, if it exists at all). That said, the recent gmail ui change made me reconsider Thunderbird again. And android looks different every year. sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse. iptables, nftables. http1, http2 (and now 3 over UDP). change is the only constant.
- lsc 8y agoYou need to figure out what is wrong with a machine before you write a program to fix it; this is why it's important to be able to log in to something broken and nose around. Text processing is not harder than figuring out what library to use this month. These things change a lot... but they don't have to, and running things on computers would be easier/cheaper if they didn't.