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Don't forget to thank him for `avahi' too. Avahi is a fun whack-a-mole game where your computer hides the network connection. You win the game by remembering t

Don't forget to thank him for `avahi' too. Avahi is a fun whack-a-mole game where your computer hides the network connection. You win the game by remembering to kill processes and setting up stuff manually, like most games produced by LP studios. edit: Other popular games include: SystemD: hack your way through a blob of intractability. Try it on Nightmare mode, where you're only given access to a empty bootscreen, for a real challenge. Pulseaudio: Experience the sound of no hands clapping, in a forest where trees are falling with no one there to witness it. Also, the forest is on fire!

scrollaway 7y ago
Lennart Poettering is a dev who has contributed massive amounts of code most people in this thread use every hour of every day. Code which, for most people, does work. It's not like free software has a shortage of talented contributors that people hate for a variety of reasons. At some point you have to actually point out the issues productively, rather than the boring character assassination, or just randomly saying "the software's broken it sucks!" like this is the Best Buy tech support line. I mean, seriously, if you're smart enough to "kill processes and [set] up stuff manually", you're smart enough to disable/remove software you don't like all on your own like a grown adult.
- randolando 7y ago
  The problem is the fundamental shift away from the long accepted design philosophy of software doing one thing and doing it well. This means "grown adults" can't uninstall the software components that they like, because they aren't individual components anymore. Systemd would probably not be hated on as much if it was only a "better" init. But instead it is an opaque and centralized system that is replacing a growing list of tooling ( init, ntp, cron, syslog, network config, to name a few)
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    You mean the myth of the UNIX way, never followed upon commercial UNIXes and somehow became a cargo cult on FOSS community only thank to a book of UNIX idols?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - liability 7y ago
      Right, the only true Unix philosophy which ever described reality was "worse is better." Just look at the GNU coding guidelines, it explicitly mentions that GNU tools are not to use static buffers and silently truncate long lines. Why? Because that's what proprietary Unix implementations were doing at the time! Silent truncation of long input lines! Is that "doing one thing and doing it well" (DOTADIW)? Hell no! DOTADIW is an ahistorical description of Unix. A humble-brag with little basis in reality.
      - tempguy9999 7y ago
        As I'm new to this could you give a reference to those very gnu guidelines so I could see for myself? And also where those guidelines say that silent truncation of long lines should occur? thanks
        liability 7y ago
        Sure, no problem: >"Avoid arbitrary limits on the length or number of any data structure, including file names, lines, files, and symbols, by allocating all data structures dynamically. In most Unix utilities, “long lines are silently truncated”. This is not acceptable in a GNU utility." https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Semantics https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Semantics So perhaps DOTADIW is a GNU philosophy, because it's one of the reasons GNU became so popular. Proprietary unix tools often did one thing and did it poorly, making GNU tools a breath of fresh air.
        teddyh 7y ago
        https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Semantics https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Semantics I think you misinterpreted parent’s statement, though, and/or they mistyped. The GNU Coding Standards says to not use static buffers, nor should GNU programs silently truncate long lines.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- dexen 7y ago
  >Code which, for most people, does work. Working is not the problematic part. There are two interrelated problems: how much complexity is introduced, and how to proceed when something is not working, or is flaky. You, me, and our fellow posters know very well that Lennart's solutions are complex - in fact, more complex than the problem domain. Accordingly, the ability to narrow down, fix, or work around problems suffers. Systemd and PulseAudio aren't UNIX applications [1]; they are entirely new, rather opaque, sub-systems unto themselves. Thus they require separate knowledge, separate intuition, and separate skills. All so I can seamlessly play music on TWO bluetooth speakers while also browsing logs without learning regex. >Lennart Poettering is a dev who has contributed MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF CODE Massive amounts of code is a clear and present problem. Why is the solution more complex than the problem domain? Why is the success being measured by magnitude of effort, rather than by barriers removed, and standards adhered to? -- [1] what makes an UNIX application? small POSIX applications tied together with shell scripts, communicating via pipes, exposing services as files, following the `Worse is better' and `Do one thing, and do it well' principles.
  - derefr 7y ago
    > All so I can seamlessly play music on TWO bluetooth speakers while also browsing logs without learning regex. Are you suggesting that the alternative is to choose to just not support these features at all? (Which isn't implausible as a suggestion; OpenBSD doesn't support Bluetooth at all, for example. But in an ecosystem where everyone is building software to scratch their own itch, and then adopting the software that gains traction...)
    - CameronNemo 7y ago
      I do not know about the person you are responding to, but I particularly take issue with how PA abstracts the hardware and does not allow low latency applications or servers such as Ardour, JACK, or other professional audio recording software to access it in an efficient manner. So you end up with this weird situation where pulseaudio reroutes itself when JACK appears and no longer takes control of the sound card. Why do we need to support two sound servers to take care of all the necessary features? I really hope pipewire fixes this use case and allows pro audio applications to work directly on top of pipewire while still supporting consumer friendly use cases like bluetooth speakers.
- big_chungus 7y ago
  > Code which, for most people, does work. That doesn't mean other stuff couldn't have been better. Here's the problem the systemd argument: it's motte-and-bailey. Systemd is a huge collection of tools, not just an init system: it's got resolved, journald, logind, tmpfiles, bootctl, networkd, and more. However, whenever it's criticized, proponents fall back on "but it's a great init system!" I agree that the unit files are better than rc scripts in many ways. However, there's so much other baggage that comes with systemd. Many people who use systemd in serious production systems have to replace many of these parts: journald -> rsyslogd, tmpfiles -> scripts, bootctl -> grub, networkd -> networkmangaer (or other), systemd-timesyncd -> chrony. Systemd does the "PID 1" stuff fine, but isn't so good at the other stuff. The project has gotten to big for its britches, so to speak: there are ~70 total systemd binaries. They also didn't do a great job of modularity, and don't use dbus like they should (dbus isn't built to be used with an init system; use a socket already). Rather, they have every thing depending on another. Suddenly, everything must re-tool to work with systemd or stop working. It basically unilaterally declared itself the standard. Other stuff: * I hate binary logs * Lennart, Lennart, give me back my cgroups * Stop stealing my cgroups to track processes * Security is not great, nor is code quality. This comes less from being inherently flawed and more from *sheer volume of code*, which is why you don't put that much code in PID 1. More attack surface, more potential bugs. Overall, init ought not to be it's own problem of this scope. Just make a stinkin' init. Oh, and Lennart Poettering is also a jerk. Not an "I'm brash" kind of jerk (like Linus can be), but an "I'm an insecure person; don't critique my code" kind of way. Also, he thinks he's smarter than every one.
  - Avamander 7y ago
    > Oh, and Lennart Poettering is also a jerk. Not an "I'm brash" kind of jerk (like Linus can be), but an "I'm an insecure person; don't critique my code" kind of way. Also, he thinks he's smarter than every one. I think it's largely due to how the community has treated him. It's frankly disgusting.
    - liability 7y ago
      He should take a lead from Drew DeVault. Drew frequently says things people (including myself) disagree with and is working on software a lot of people (including myself) are very skeptical of. Yet if you try to interact with him (as I have), he's a totally reasonable and pleasant dude.
- Volt 7y ago
  Code is code and code is good.
- mwfunk 7y ago
  This aspect of the community is one of the biggest turnoffs to me. There are a lot of people who formulate these really over the top narratives about everything, which lead to (for example) writing long seething angry personal rants about people like Lennart (Miguel de Icaza was another lightning rod back in the day). The sheer emotion expressed invalidates whatever point they're trying to make, but at the end of the day nobody forces anyone to use anyone's software, and nowhere is that more true than in the Linux world. I hate to use the possibly overloaded term 'virtue signaling', but I definitely see a lot of this as a form of virtue signaling within the communities that posters sometime imagine exist, or imagine that they're part of. I've seen so much of it over the years that it almost has a smell to it. A very vocal and bitter personal hatred towards Lennart and Lennart-related projects is sometimes a leading indicator, especially when it's presented not in the context of meaningful discussion of technology, but simply as "init was perfect and never needed to change and people who think otherwise don't understand what makes Linux Linux", stated as a truism. I think a lot of people really like the community aspect of Linux, reading and posting to forums all the time, and latch on to certain mindsets as being the mindsets of who they imagine the insiders to be- you're supposed to love this person unconditionally, you're supposed to hate this person unconditionally, this company is good, that company is evil, this software is good, that software is evil, and if you're a true insider in the community you'll parrot all the same lines as everyone else. But when I see it, no one involved appears to be an insider. It comes across more as teenagers arguing on Reddit about iOS vs. Android, where basically they've decided that whatever phone their mom got them is the best thing ever, and the other thing is terrible, and it's their duty to go online and spew vitriol about it. They think they're arguing stuff that's much much deeper and more technical than what they're actually arguing about, and no one involved has any actual understanding of the technology or industries or communities or histories of the things they're screaming at each other about. It's almost like vitriol for the sake of vitriol, and people just let it seep out as a demonstration of their in-groupness. Which is not to say that there are plenty of valid reasons and places and ways to argue about the merits of Lennart and his software, as one example. I'm really not talking about Lennart in particular though. I'm not talking about people having valid arguments about valid issues. What I'm talking about the FLOSS equivalent of those teenagers and their "the phone my mom got me is better than the phone your mom got me, and that makes me a good person and you a bad person" sorts of arguments. It just all seems very petty and immature sometimes, and that is not a positive aspect of the community.
- dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
  > At some point you have to actually point out the issues productively, rather than the boring character assassination, or just randomly saying "the software's broken it sucks!" But that's not the real problem here! Free Software was always about the freedom of choice. With systemd millions of users worldwide were forced to switch just because the architecture was designed in this way. Among these users were sysadmins who have to deal with many different machines and hardware/software problems. Before the systemd era diagnosing and fixing them was easier. We had survived quite a few revolutions in the past and it's not like we are unable to learn new tools, but this time the change made certain things unnecessarily complicated and gave users no choice.
teddyh 7y ago
You’re confusing Avahi with NetworkManager, which, IIRC, Lennart should not be blamed for. Avahi is simply an implementation of the ZeroConf service discoverability protocol, as also used by macOS’s “Bonjour”.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  Avahi, in all my experience over many years, does nothing noticeable besides going into 100% CPU spin loops at random intervals. Looking it up online, it is reported and declared fixed every couple of years. I would like to know why it still happens, and the right way to get rid of it, or at least to know why I have to have it. I don't have any other system daemons that like to drop into 100% CPU spin loops. Should I be happy it doesn't fork bomb? I guess I am.

scrollaway 7y ago

Lennart Poettering is a dev who has contributed massive amounts of code most people in this thread use every hour of every day. Code which, for most people, does work. It's not like free software has a shortage of talented contributors that people hate for a variety of reasons. At some point you have to actually point out the issues productively, rather than the boring character assassination, or just randomly saying "the software's broken it sucks!" like this is the Best Buy tech support line. I mean, seriously, if you're smart enough to "kill processes and [set] up stuff manually", you're smart enough to disable/remove software you don't like all on your own like a grown adult.

randolando 7y ago
The problem is the fundamental shift away from the long accepted design philosophy of software doing one thing and doing it well. This means "grown adults" can't uninstall the software components that they like, because they aren't individual components anymore. Systemd would probably not be hated on as much if it was only a "better" init. But instead it is an opaque and centralized system that is replacing a growing list of tooling ( init, ntp, cron, syslog, network config, to name a few)
- pjmlp 7y ago
  You mean the myth of the UNIX way, never followed upon commercial UNIXes and somehow became a cargo cult on FOSS community only thank to a book of UNIX idols?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - liability 7y ago
    Right, the only true Unix philosophy which ever described reality was "worse is better." Just look at the GNU coding guidelines, it explicitly mentions that GNU tools are not to use static buffers and silently truncate long lines. Why? Because that's what proprietary Unix implementations were doing at the time! Silent truncation of long input lines! Is that "doing one thing and doing it well" (DOTADIW)? Hell no! DOTADIW is an ahistorical description of Unix. A humble-brag with little basis in reality.
    - tempguy9999 7y ago
      As I'm new to this could you give a reference to those very gnu guidelines so I could see for myself? And also where those guidelines say that silent truncation of long lines should occur? thanks
      - liability 7y ago
        Sure, no problem: >"Avoid arbitrary limits on the length or number of any data structure, including file names, lines, files, and symbols, by allocating all data structures dynamically. In most Unix utilities, “long lines are silently truncated”. This is not acceptable in a GNU utility." https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Semantics https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Semantics So perhaps DOTADIW is a GNU philosophy, because it's one of the reasons GNU became so popular. Proprietary unix tools often did one thing and did it poorly, making GNU tools a breath of fresh air.
      - teddyh 7y ago
        https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Semantics https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Semantics I think you misinterpreted parent’s statement, though, and/or they mistyped. The GNU Coding Standards says to not use static buffers, nor should GNU programs silently truncate long lines.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
dexen 7y ago
>Code which, for most people, does work. Working is not the problematic part. There are two interrelated problems: how much complexity is introduced, and how to proceed when something is not working, or is flaky. You, me, and our fellow posters know very well that Lennart's solutions are complex - in fact, more complex than the problem domain. Accordingly, the ability to narrow down, fix, or work around problems suffers. Systemd and PulseAudio aren't UNIX applications [1]; they are entirely new, rather opaque, sub-systems unto themselves. Thus they require separate knowledge, separate intuition, and separate skills. All so I can seamlessly play music on TWO bluetooth speakers while also browsing logs without learning regex. >Lennart Poettering is a dev who has contributed MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF CODE Massive amounts of code is a clear and present problem. Why is the solution more complex than the problem domain? Why is the success being measured by magnitude of effort, rather than by barriers removed, and standards adhered to? -- [1] what makes an UNIX application? small POSIX applications tied together with shell scripts, communicating via pipes, exposing services as files, following the `Worse is better' and `Do one thing, and do it well' principles.
- derefr 7y ago
  > All so I can seamlessly play music on TWO bluetooth speakers while also browsing logs without learning regex. Are you suggesting that the alternative is to choose to just not support these features at all? (Which isn't implausible as a suggestion; OpenBSD doesn't support Bluetooth at all, for example. But in an ecosystem where everyone is building software to scratch their own itch, and then adopting the software that gains traction...)
  - CameronNemo 7y ago
    I do not know about the person you are responding to, but I particularly take issue with how PA abstracts the hardware and does not allow low latency applications or servers such as Ardour, JACK, or other professional audio recording software to access it in an efficient manner. So you end up with this weird situation where pulseaudio reroutes itself when JACK appears and no longer takes control of the sound card. Why do we need to support two sound servers to take care of all the necessary features? I really hope pipewire fixes this use case and allows pro audio applications to work directly on top of pipewire while still supporting consumer friendly use cases like bluetooth speakers.
big_chungus 7y ago
> Code which, for most people, does work. That doesn't mean other stuff couldn't have been better. Here's the problem the systemd argument: it's motte-and-bailey. Systemd is a huge collection of tools, not just an init system: it's got resolved, journald, logind, tmpfiles, bootctl, networkd, and more. However, whenever it's criticized, proponents fall back on "but it's a great init system!" I agree that the unit files are better than rc scripts in many ways. However, there's so much other baggage that comes with systemd. Many people who use systemd in serious production systems have to replace many of these parts: journald -> rsyslogd, tmpfiles -> scripts, bootctl -> grub, networkd -> networkmangaer (or other), systemd-timesyncd -> chrony. Systemd does the "PID 1" stuff fine, but isn't so good at the other stuff. The project has gotten to big for its britches, so to speak: there are ~70 total systemd binaries. They also didn't do a great job of modularity, and don't use dbus like they should (dbus isn't built to be used with an init system; use a socket already). Rather, they have every thing depending on another. Suddenly, everything must re-tool to work with systemd or stop working. It basically unilaterally declared itself the standard. Other stuff: * I hate binary logs * Lennart, Lennart, give me back my cgroups * Stop stealing my cgroups to track processes * Security is not great, nor is code quality. This comes less from being inherently flawed and more from *sheer volume of code*, which is why you don't put that much code in PID 1. More attack surface, more potential bugs. Overall, init ought not to be it's own problem of this scope. Just make a stinkin' init. Oh, and Lennart Poettering is also a jerk. Not an "I'm brash" kind of jerk (like Linus can be), but an "I'm an insecure person; don't critique my code" kind of way. Also, he thinks he's smarter than every one.
- Avamander 7y ago
  > Oh, and Lennart Poettering is also a jerk. Not an "I'm brash" kind of jerk (like Linus can be), but an "I'm an insecure person; don't critique my code" kind of way. Also, he thinks he's smarter than every one. I think it's largely due to how the community has treated him. It's frankly disgusting.
  - liability 7y ago
    He should take a lead from Drew DeVault. Drew frequently says things people (including myself) disagree with and is working on software a lot of people (including myself) are very skeptical of. Yet if you try to interact with him (as I have), he's a totally reasonable and pleasant dude.
Volt 7y ago
Code is code and code is good.
mwfunk 7y ago
This aspect of the community is one of the biggest turnoffs to me. There are a lot of people who formulate these really over the top narratives about everything, which lead to (for example) writing long seething angry personal rants about people like Lennart (Miguel de Icaza was another lightning rod back in the day). The sheer emotion expressed invalidates whatever point they're trying to make, but at the end of the day nobody forces anyone to use anyone's software, and nowhere is that more true than in the Linux world. I hate to use the possibly overloaded term 'virtue signaling', but I definitely see a lot of this as a form of virtue signaling within the communities that posters sometime imagine exist, or imagine that they're part of. I've seen so much of it over the years that it almost has a smell to it. A very vocal and bitter personal hatred towards Lennart and Lennart-related projects is sometimes a leading indicator, especially when it's presented not in the context of meaningful discussion of technology, but simply as "init was perfect and never needed to change and people who think otherwise don't understand what makes Linux Linux", stated as a truism. I think a lot of people really like the community aspect of Linux, reading and posting to forums all the time, and latch on to certain mindsets as being the mindsets of who they imagine the insiders to be- you're supposed to love this person unconditionally, you're supposed to hate this person unconditionally, this company is good, that company is evil, this software is good, that software is evil, and if you're a true insider in the community you'll parrot all the same lines as everyone else. But when I see it, no one involved appears to be an insider. It comes across more as teenagers arguing on Reddit about iOS vs. Android, where basically they've decided that whatever phone their mom got them is the best thing ever, and the other thing is terrible, and it's their duty to go online and spew vitriol about it. They think they're arguing stuff that's much much deeper and more technical than what they're actually arguing about, and no one involved has any actual understanding of the technology or industries or communities or histories of the things they're screaming at each other about. It's almost like vitriol for the sake of vitriol, and people just let it seep out as a demonstration of their in-groupness. Which is not to say that there are plenty of valid reasons and places and ways to argue about the merits of Lennart and his software, as one example. I'm really not talking about Lennart in particular though. I'm not talking about people having valid arguments about valid issues. What I'm talking about the FLOSS equivalent of those teenagers and their "the phone my mom got me is better than the phone your mom got me, and that makes me a good person and you a bad person" sorts of arguments. It just all seems very petty and immature sometimes, and that is not a positive aspect of the community.
dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
> At some point you have to actually point out the issues productively, rather than the boring character assassination, or just randomly saying "the software's broken it sucks!" But that's not the real problem here! Free Software was always about the freedom of choice. With systemd millions of users worldwide were forced to switch just because the architecture was designed in this way. Among these users were sysadmins who have to deal with many different machines and hardware/software problems. Before the systemd era diagnosing and fixing them was easier. We had survived quite a few revolutions in the past and it's not like we are unable to learn new tools, but this time the change made certain things unnecessarily complicated and gave users no choice.

teddyh 7y ago

You’re confusing Avahi with NetworkManager, which, IIRC, Lennart should not be blamed for. Avahi is simply an implementation of the ZeroConf service discoverability protocol, as also used by macOS’s “Bonjour”.

ncmncm 7y ago
Avahi, in all my experience over many years, does nothing noticeable besides going into 100% CPU spin loops at random intervals. Looking it up online, it is reported and declared fixed every couple of years. I would like to know why it still happens, and the right way to get rid of it, or at least to know why I have to have it. I don't have any other system daemons that like to drop into 100% CPU spin loops. Should I be happy it doesn't fork bomb? I guess I am.