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I'm an open source hacker and I like systemd. Once I took the time to learn its APIs I found it does everything I expect. Your issues with XFCE and libinput do

by awrmc 5y ago

I'm an open source hacker and I like systemd. Once I took the time to learn its APIs I found it does everything I expect. Your issues with XFCE and libinput don't seem to be related to systemd. I can't see how airing grievances against other unrelated projects would be a constructive place to take this discussion. Complaining about open source projects only supporting some use cases is also confusing to me. A lot of these projects are very open about the fact that they exist only to "scratch their own itch".

Blikkentrekker 5y ago
I have no issues with XFCE. I personally would never use i, but it also leaves me alone and it's developers don't exhibit this mentality. I have a problem with Jon McCann's famous quote, who was at the time a lead developed of GTK+, who did not know what XFCE, one of the biggest consumers of the library, even was when he made a change that broke about anything outside of GNOME. — What his language suggested was that he lived in a bubble thinking that only KDE and GNOME existed, and that since KDE wasn't using GTK+ it was fine to do this.
- morelisp 5y ago
  This is a peculiarity of the GTK developers, not anything to do with systemd or fd.o. I maintained a popular GTK-but-explicitly-not-GNOME application long before the days of systemd and they had the same attitude.
  - Blikkentrekker 5y ago
    I believe it is common to pretty much all Red Hat and Freedesktop developers. Poettering has come with very similar claims that betray that he does not understand what people outside of his small circle want and need, the same can be said for Wayland developers, DBus, NetworkManager, PulseAudio and all such other infamous projects.
    - awrmc 5y ago
      It's difficult to understand what your complaint is, that describes every software project I've ever seen. You pick a target set of users and then develop for those users. Is there some other way to develop software?
      - Blikkentrekker 5y ago
        I don't think it is common to find memorable quotes akin to “I have no idea what XFCE is or does, sorry.” outside of this circle. This is a vintage and often quoted Red Hat-ism that betrays their mentality. QT developers will not tell you “I have no idea what LXQt is or does.”; they do not generally break things that compromise 90% of their consumer base and they do not remove theming because they fear it's existence will hurt the “brand identity” of KDE. It's dishonest to say similar problems occur outside of the Red Hat circle and that circle alone is commonly criticized on these policies.
        awrmc 5y ago
        The ticket that quote came from is pretty old and turned out to be a non-issue. I've addressed that in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29865759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29865759 If you're trying to prove a point, you could at least mention something that actually caused a real problem instead of taking this one out of context. I have no idea why anyone would keep mentioning this quote or find it memorable, it seems completely insignificant to me. You also seem to be ignoring all the positive interactions this engineer (or any other Red Hat engineer) might have had. I can personally name a lot of instances where Red Hat engineers have fixed upstream bugs that were affecting me. And just to make it clear I'm not saying this to single them out for praise, a lot of other companies fix upstream bugs too. That's how open source is supposed to work. And you actually could go and search around on old mailing lists to find similarly questionable 11-year-old quotes from Qt developers if you really were interested in digging up more old drama. These things happen everywhere that people go because people don't agree on everything. I suspect you also think that's ultimately futile though, so why keep flogging this particular dead horse? This is still way, way outside the scope of discussion for systemd anyway.
- awrmc 5y ago
  I had to look up the quote but I think you have that pretty wrong. You're getting the GNOME shell and GTK mixed up. https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685 https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685 The ticket is about GNOME 3 removing support for status icons from the GNOME panel. GTK3 still has the status icon API, although they're deprecated and don't work on Wayland. That shouldn't have any effect on XFCE or any other shell with an old panel that supports the old X11 status icons. I think you can also restore the functionality to GNOME with an extension. Also, if you check further down the issue you'll see this clarification: >There should be no change in behavior for non-GNOME platforms.

by awrmc 5y ago

Blikkentrekker 5y ago

I have no issues with XFCE. I personally would never use i, but it also leaves me alone and it's developers don't exhibit this mentality. I have a problem with Jon McCann's famous quote, who was at the time a lead developed of GTK+, who did not know what XFCE, one of the biggest consumers of the library, even was when he made a change that broke about anything outside of GNOME. — What his language suggested was that he lived in a bubble thinking that only KDE and GNOME existed, and that since KDE wasn't using GTK+ it was fine to do this.

morelisp 5y ago
This is a peculiarity of the GTK developers, not anything to do with systemd or fd.o. I maintained a popular GTK-but-explicitly-not-GNOME application long before the days of systemd and they had the same attitude.
- Blikkentrekker 5y ago
  I believe it is common to pretty much all Red Hat and Freedesktop developers. Poettering has come with very similar claims that betray that he does not understand what people outside of his small circle want and need, the same can be said for Wayland developers, DBus, NetworkManager, PulseAudio and all such other infamous projects.
  - awrmc 5y ago
    It's difficult to understand what your complaint is, that describes every software project I've ever seen. You pick a target set of users and then develop for those users. Is there some other way to develop software?
    - Blikkentrekker 5y ago
      I don't think it is common to find memorable quotes akin to “I have no idea what XFCE is or does, sorry.” outside of this circle. This is a vintage and often quoted Red Hat-ism that betrays their mentality. QT developers will not tell you “I have no idea what LXQt is or does.”; they do not generally break things that compromise 90% of their consumer base and they do not remove theming because they fear it's existence will hurt the “brand identity” of KDE. It's dishonest to say similar problems occur outside of the Red Hat circle and that circle alone is commonly criticized on these policies.
      - awrmc 5y ago
        The ticket that quote came from is pretty old and turned out to be a non-issue. I've addressed that in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29865759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29865759 If you're trying to prove a point, you could at least mention something that actually caused a real problem instead of taking this one out of context. I have no idea why anyone would keep mentioning this quote or find it memorable, it seems completely insignificant to me. You also seem to be ignoring all the positive interactions this engineer (or any other Red Hat engineer) might have had. I can personally name a lot of instances where Red Hat engineers have fixed upstream bugs that were affecting me. And just to make it clear I'm not saying this to single them out for praise, a lot of other companies fix upstream bugs too. That's how open source is supposed to work. And you actually could go and search around on old mailing lists to find similarly questionable 11-year-old quotes from Qt developers if you really were interested in digging up more old drama. These things happen everywhere that people go because people don't agree on everything. I suspect you also think that's ultimately futile though, so why keep flogging this particular dead horse? This is still way, way outside the scope of discussion for systemd anyway.
awrmc 5y ago
I had to look up the quote but I think you have that pretty wrong. You're getting the GNOME shell and GTK mixed up. https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685 https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685 The ticket is about GNOME 3 removing support for status icons from the GNOME panel. GTK3 still has the status icon API, although they're deprecated and don't work on Wayland. That shouldn't have any effect on XFCE or any other shell with an old panel that supports the old X11 status icons. I think you can also restore the functionality to GNOME with an extension. Also, if you check further down the issue you'll see this clarification: >There should be no change in behavior for non-GNOME platforms.