7 ms·

Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

55 points by mariuz 15y ago

Maxious 15y ago
"You seem to know a lot of stuff about me. I am not particular fond of people who turn their dislike of software I wrote into personal accusations and judging in a public forum." - Lennart Poettering Sep 21, 2008 http://lwn.net/Articles/299615/ http://lwn.net/Articles/299615/ For what it's worth, 4 years on I still struggle daily with audio and only audio on Linux. I'm not in a position to tell if it's ALSA or PulseAudio that makes nothing come out unless I plug/unplug, mute/unmute in the correct order everytime I come back from suspend/open a different app/want to use headphones. But I didn't have these problems before Fedora 8 when I was using ESD ;) And just recently I've resorted to manually starting couchdb in a console instead of using the init scripts on fedora because after upgrading to 15 they do some bad things to file permissions. Is it the distributors fault or is it systemd? Correlation does not imply causation?
- Tichy 15y ago
  Why does nobody else create a better sound system?
  - toyg 15y ago
    Oh they do, all the time. OSS, ALSA, PulseAudio... http://xkcd.com/927/ http://xkcd.com/927/
  - EdiX 15y ago
    ALSA already is the better sound system as long as you don't need all your applications to have one extra redundant volume control or playing audio on a remote computer over the internet. However de-pulsifying a linux install correctly isn't easy.
    - ColdAsIce 15y ago
      " or playing audio on a remote computer over the internet". I thought thats the point of pulseaudio and really wanted to try it. How can I say... it FAILS at even that! I got it working with ssh and mpd faster than... oh dont make remember.
      - EdiX 15y ago
        > " or playing audio on a remote computer over the internet". > > I thought thats the point of pulseaudio and really wanted to try it. AFAIK (but I wasn't using linux at the time) the point of pulseaudio was that it was very easy for an application to lock your audio exclusively with ALSA or OSS (and still is unless ALSA is properly configured) and there were several competing "sound daemon" trying to solve this problem. Pulse audio was supposed to be the one true sound daemon, emulating everything else under the sun. Then it got sound mixing and networked audio bolted on because Poettering is the master of the kitchen sink.
        rwmj 15y ago
        The right thing to do would have been to fix ALSA so that applications wouldn't lock each other out, or whatever other problems ALSA may have.
        EdiX 15y ago
        They did, eventually, with dmix.
- ibisum 15y ago
  How I fixed Audio on Linux: Removed anything whatsoever to do with Pulseaudio. Got myself a decent sound card (Presonus FP10) Set up JACK as the permanent sound-manager on my system Set up an ALSA Loop for anything that couldn't use JACK but did use ALSA I've had a rock-solid, reliable, stable, easy to use Audio subsystem on my professional-quality Linux-based DAW workstation, running my studio, for years .. Pulseaudio was a total and utter waste of time.
grifaton 15y ago
What's the back story here?
- darklajid 15y ago
  Stupidity, in a word (attacking a single person in this way). If you ask for possible reasons to attack Lennart in the first place: He was the main force behind Pulseaudio (which, for various technical and political reasons was reviled for a long time) and now systemd (a C replacement for the sys-v scripts, think smf/launchd).
  - stephen_g 15y ago
    The only reason people hated PulseAudio was because Ubuntu shipped it as their default sound system a year or two before it was ready. Now it's a pretty mature sound system that works well (at least with all the Linux hardware I have)...
    - toyg 15y ago
      "A year or two before it was ready", people like Lennart were already advocating it as The One True Way for Linux audio, so I don't blame Ubuntu for jumping the gun. Besides, looking at how things go in that area, now that it works well enough it will probably be replaced quite soon.
    - andrewcooke 15y ago
      i don't have an opinion on the larger fight here, but you have to disable pulseaudio if you want a fast startup in opensuse 12.1 (otherwise there's a 30s pause when the desktop starts). disabled, everything seems fine.
      - tene 15y ago
        FWIW, my laptop, running Fedora, boots to the desktop in 15s total, with pulseaudio. I would sooner attribute that to a problem with the suse init system (every time I've dug into the suse init scripts, I've found horribly absurd decisions) than I would pulseaudio.
danieldk 15y ago
Blaming Lennart (not Leonard!) is a bit counterproductive. There's a general tendency in the desktop Linux community to rewrite components every few years, rather than improving what exists. I guess this is mainly caused by the failure of Linux as a commercial desktop. Except for heroic efforts by Red Hat, SUSE, and previously Sun, it's mostly a hobbyist affair. As a hobby, people prefer to do the fun work, not the tedious and boring maintenance, bugfixing, and polishing. The quality of Linux as a desktop operating system is in stark contrast with Linux as a server operating system. Thanks to the enormous amount of money invested in server-related components, Linux as a server is generally very polished and reliable. On a personal note, the effort required to maintain a stable Linux desktop made me switch to OS X in 2007, after using Linux for 13 years.
- rwmj 15y ago
  The "Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenagers" model ... http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
- hasmoo 15y ago
  > Except for heroic efforts by Red Hat, SUSE, and previously Sun, it's mostly a hobbyist affair. Lennart Poettering is a Red Hat employee.
  - adestefan 15y ago
    And some argue that this is the only reason why these things actually make it into the Linux desktop ecosystem. If he wasn't a Red Hat employee would they ever make it into a distribution?
    - ciupicri 15y ago
      systemd didn't replace upstart in Fedora as soon as he wanted, so the fact that he's a Red Hat employee doesn't give him total control.
    - rwmj 15y ago
      PulseAudio is used in Ubuntu, and systemd is in other non-Fedora distros, so I guess the answer is yes.
hasmoo 15y ago
Haha, "Wolfgang Draxinger" signed 28 days ago. Check out this epic battle between Draxinger and Poettering: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0
- darklajid 15y ago
  I've to admit that the presentation as an 'epic battle' made me dismiss this at first. But thanks a lot for that link. It was amusing _and_ interesting.
- albertzeyer 15y ago
  When I read the headline of the article, I had to think exactly about this video. :) There were indeed good reasons for writing things like DBus, systemd, PulseAudio and others.
- toyg 15y ago
  The way Poettering dismisses the "1970s unix mindset" is really sad. Here we have a big Linux contributor who apparently doesn't appreciate his heritage, which explains why he's constantly trying to reinvent it... and poorly, as the saying goes. I'm one of those who really didn't see the need for PulseAudio or any of the *Kit stuff, and even HAL was kind of a train wreck (all those years to make it stable and supported by desktop managers, to then throw it all away). I'm sure he's just the most visible advocate of this approach, not the only one, but he's certainly responsible for a lot of the misery Linux desktop users like me were and are subjected to. After a decade of Linux on my desktop, I've switched back to Windows 7 in early 2011 and, to be honest, I'm quite happy I did.
  - hasmoo 15y ago
    > I've switched back to Windows 7 in early 2011 and, to be honest, I'm quite happy I did. Yes, because Windows 7 and OS X already have all this modern non-70s-stuff that Lennart is trying to bring to Linux.
    - toyg 15y ago
lucian1900 15y ago
I think blaming someone for innovating is possibly the stupidest thing one could do. dbus is awesome. Best bus we have. systemd is really nice and useful, overall a better upstart. The reason it's not a patch for upstart or sysinit is that their designs preclude certain features that systemd provides. I don't know about pulseaudio, and I'm not sold on Journal.
- count 15y ago
  systemd doesn't appear to solve a problem, it seems to just add a layer of indirection and complication, as well as a single point of failure for ALL system startup services, rather than letting each service just handle it's own deal. `init` already exists to kick things off properly - now init just runs systemd which then kicks things off, for no appreciable gain.
  - LeonidasXIV 15y ago
    Seriously, do you even know what you're talking about? init does not start systemd at all. systemd replaces init, in a way that I can even select whether I want to use the traditional init or systemd, on boot time, with a kernel option. And have you seen proper systemd integration? I installed Fedora lately, and man, that boots fast. Fedora solves so many things in a sane way that Ubuntu has been struggling since years. usplash, xsplash, splashy? Fedora has FDO's plymouth. Guess what, it works. SYS V init, the stupid Arch init, ubuntus upstart? Fedora has FDO's systemd, and it's faster than any of those.
    - count 15y ago
      You're right, I misunderstood the integration. It still seems like it's optimizing for the wrong thing for the vast majority of linux users. The # of linux servers, which don't care about boot time (or where software init is a very tiny part of boot time anyway) is way larger than the number of people using it as a desktop. Boot time isn't the thing that's keeping linux off the desktop. Rewriting scripts and rolling them into a C daemon defeats the whole point of scripts in the first place - the administrator of the system can't make quick changes or easily troubleshoot things (or, optionally, selectively enable/disable small sections of initialization). It's also a large amount of new work for folks busy fixing actual broken or buggy parts of their software. Lennart complains that the starting PID on his linux desktop is too high, because init scripts call 'grep', 'awk', etc. - and that developers should rewrite all of that into their own startup daemons. It seems like he's complaining about the 'UNIX way' of small, text-oriented tools each doing one job and piping the results between them for flexibility and power for the the system administrator. Moving all of that into a C-based daemon, hiding it entirely from the administrator (short of a unsupported-by-your-contract recompile and source mod) doesn't seem like a net win for me, especially for a few seconds saved two or three times a year. Most scary is the way he wants to handle socket based services - it's already the source of one remote DOS against a machine running systemd: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=739538 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=739538
lvillani 15y ago
Honestly, I don't understand why move this personal attack against Lennart. From my point of view he just wrote pieces of software he deemed necessary. I would rather put the blame on distributions other than Fedora¹ for trying to integrate his stuff early and poorly (thus starting a chain-reaction which caused even more distributions to rush with integration attempts). I think he's getting a lot of flak for choices made by others. _________ 1: Fedora is known to ship with lots of experimental software/wide-scale changes. Its users expect breakage/major innovations from time to time.
- ColdAsIce 15y ago
  He could have improved esd or jack. But no.
  - fmoralesc 15y ago
    jack? That's a completely different user-case.
  - lvillani 15y ago
    Sure he could, but things like that happen all the time. Countless people start forks and new projects every day, while they could improve the existing ones (the world is full of examples). I have this darwinian vision of the software world where it's extremely positive to experiment with new stuff. Only time will tell which things surpass the test of time. Attacking someone publicly this way just because he doesn't contribute to your¹ favorite project is, in my opinion, a sick thing to do. ______ 1: Not addressing you in particular.
zokier 15y ago
Why shouldn't Poettering be allowed to write whatever programs he wishes, useless or not? I think distributions are responsible for choosing the best selection of software, and nobody should be blamed for providing new alternatives to the table.
rmc 15y ago
I hear a lot of people complaining about these new programmes, like PulseAudio, but as far as I'm concerend, with PulseAudio I can now have proper working sound. No more of this "Oh I have pidgin open, which wants to do sound, so Firefox with flash can't watch youtube" problems that used to happen.
zecg 15y ago
Quoth Dziuba: "A long time ago, the original neckbeards decided that it was a good idea to chain together small programs that each performed a specific task, and that the universal interface between them should be text. If you develop on a Unix platform and you abide by this principle, the operating system will reward you with simplicity and prosperity."

55 points by mariuz 15y ago

"You seem to know a lot of stuff about me. I am not particular fond of people who turn their dislike of software I wrote into personal accusations and judging in a public forum." - Lennart Poettering Sep 21, 2008 http://lwn.net/Articles/299615/ http://lwn.net/Articles/299615/ For what it's worth, 4 years on I still struggle daily with audio and only audio on Linux. I'm not in a position to tell if it's ALSA or PulseAudio that makes nothing come out unless I plug/unplug, mute/unmute in the correct order everytime I come back from suspend/open a different app/want to use headphones. But I didn't have these problems before Fedora 8 when I was using ESD ;) And just recently I've resorted to manually starting couchdb in a console instead of using the init scripts on fedora because after upgrading to 15 they do some bad things to file permissions. Is it the distributors fault or is it systemd? Correlation does not imply causation?

Tichy 15y ago
Why does nobody else create a better sound system?
- toyg 15y ago
  Oh they do, all the time. OSS, ALSA, PulseAudio... http://xkcd.com/927/ http://xkcd.com/927/
- EdiX 15y ago
  ALSA already is the better sound system as long as you don't need all your applications to have one extra redundant volume control or playing audio on a remote computer over the internet. However de-pulsifying a linux install correctly isn't easy.
  - ColdAsIce 15y ago
    " or playing audio on a remote computer over the internet". I thought thats the point of pulseaudio and really wanted to try it. How can I say... it FAILS at even that! I got it working with ssh and mpd faster than... oh dont make remember.
    - EdiX 15y ago
      > " or playing audio on a remote computer over the internet". > > I thought thats the point of pulseaudio and really wanted to try it. AFAIK (but I wasn't using linux at the time) the point of pulseaudio was that it was very easy for an application to lock your audio exclusively with ALSA or OSS (and still is unless ALSA is properly configured) and there were several competing "sound daemon" trying to solve this problem. Pulse audio was supposed to be the one true sound daemon, emulating everything else under the sun. Then it got sound mixing and networked audio bolted on because Poettering is the master of the kitchen sink.
      - rwmj 15y ago
        The right thing to do would have been to fix ALSA so that applications wouldn't lock each other out, or whatever other problems ALSA may have.
        EdiX 15y ago
        They did, eventually, with dmix.
ibisum 15y ago
How I fixed Audio on Linux: Removed anything whatsoever to do with Pulseaudio. Got myself a decent sound card (Presonus FP10) Set up JACK as the permanent sound-manager on my system Set up an ALSA Loop for anything that couldn't use JACK but did use ALSA I've had a rock-solid, reliable, stable, easy to use Audio subsystem on my professional-quality Linux-based DAW workstation, running my studio, for years .. Pulseaudio was a total and utter waste of time.

grifaton 15y ago

What's the back story here?

darklajid 15y ago
Stupidity, in a word (attacking a single person in this way). If you ask for possible reasons to attack Lennart in the first place: He was the main force behind Pulseaudio (which, for various technical and political reasons was reviled for a long time) and now systemd (a C replacement for the sys-v scripts, think smf/launchd).
- stephen_g 15y ago
  The only reason people hated PulseAudio was because Ubuntu shipped it as their default sound system a year or two before it was ready. Now it's a pretty mature sound system that works well (at least with all the Linux hardware I have)...
  - toyg 15y ago
    "A year or two before it was ready", people like Lennart were already advocating it as The One True Way for Linux audio, so I don't blame Ubuntu for jumping the gun. Besides, looking at how things go in that area, now that it works well enough it will probably be replaced quite soon.
  - andrewcooke 15y ago
    i don't have an opinion on the larger fight here, but you have to disable pulseaudio if you want a fast startup in opensuse 12.1 (otherwise there's a 30s pause when the desktop starts). disabled, everything seems fine.
    - tene 15y ago
      FWIW, my laptop, running Fedora, boots to the desktop in 15s total, with pulseaudio. I would sooner attribute that to a problem with the suse init system (every time I've dug into the suse init scripts, I've found horribly absurd decisions) than I would pulseaudio.

danieldk 15y ago

Blaming Lennart (not Leonard!) is a bit counterproductive. There's a general tendency in the desktop Linux community to rewrite components every few years, rather than improving what exists. I guess this is mainly caused by the failure of Linux as a commercial desktop. Except for heroic efforts by Red Hat, SUSE, and previously Sun, it's mostly a hobbyist affair. As a hobby, people prefer to do the fun work, not the tedious and boring maintenance, bugfixing, and polishing. The quality of Linux as a desktop operating system is in stark contrast with Linux as a server operating system. Thanks to the enormous amount of money invested in server-related components, Linux as a server is generally very polished and reliable. On a personal note, the effort required to maintain a stable Linux desktop made me switch to OS X in 2007, after using Linux for 13 years.

rwmj 15y ago
The "Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenagers" model ... http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
hasmoo 15y ago
> Except for heroic efforts by Red Hat, SUSE, and previously Sun, it's mostly a hobbyist affair. Lennart Poettering is a Red Hat employee.
- adestefan 15y ago
  And some argue that this is the only reason why these things actually make it into the Linux desktop ecosystem. If he wasn't a Red Hat employee would they ever make it into a distribution?
  - ciupicri 15y ago
    systemd didn't replace upstart in Fedora as soon as he wanted, so the fact that he's a Red Hat employee doesn't give him total control.
  - rwmj 15y ago
    PulseAudio is used in Ubuntu, and systemd is in other non-Fedora distros, so I guess the answer is yes.

hasmoo 15y ago

Haha, "Wolfgang Draxinger" signed 28 days ago. Check out this epic battle between Draxinger and Poettering: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0

darklajid 15y ago
I've to admit that the presentation as an 'epic battle' made me dismiss this at first. But thanks a lot for that link. It was amusing _and_ interesting.
albertzeyer 15y ago
When I read the headline of the article, I had to think exactly about this video. :) There were indeed good reasons for writing things like DBus, systemd, PulseAudio and others.
toyg 15y ago
The way Poettering dismisses the "1970s unix mindset" is really sad. Here we have a big Linux contributor who apparently doesn't appreciate his heritage, which explains why he's constantly trying to reinvent it... and poorly, as the saying goes. I'm one of those who really didn't see the need for PulseAudio or any of the *Kit stuff, and even HAL was kind of a train wreck (all those years to make it stable and supported by desktop managers, to then throw it all away). I'm sure he's just the most visible advocate of this approach, not the only one, but he's certainly responsible for a lot of the misery Linux desktop users like me were and are subjected to. After a decade of Linux on my desktop, I've switched back to Windows 7 in early 2011 and, to be honest, I'm quite happy I did.
- hasmoo 15y ago
  > I've switched back to Windows 7 in early 2011 and, to be honest, I'm quite happy I did. Yes, because Windows 7 and OS X already have all this modern non-70s-stuff that Lennart is trying to bring to Linux.
  - toyg 15y ago

lucian1900 15y ago

I think blaming someone for innovating is possibly the stupidest thing one could do. dbus is awesome. Best bus we have. systemd is really nice and useful, overall a better upstart. The reason it's not a patch for upstart or sysinit is that their designs preclude certain features that systemd provides. I don't know about pulseaudio, and I'm not sold on Journal.

count 15y ago
systemd doesn't appear to solve a problem, it seems to just add a layer of indirection and complication, as well as a single point of failure for ALL system startup services, rather than letting each service just handle it's own deal. `init` already exists to kick things off properly - now init just runs systemd which then kicks things off, for no appreciable gain.
- LeonidasXIV 15y ago
  Seriously, do you even know what you're talking about? init does not start systemd at all. systemd replaces init, in a way that I can even select whether I want to use the traditional init or systemd, on boot time, with a kernel option. And have you seen proper systemd integration? I installed Fedora lately, and man, that boots fast. Fedora solves so many things in a sane way that Ubuntu has been struggling since years. usplash, xsplash, splashy? Fedora has FDO's plymouth. Guess what, it works. SYS V init, the stupid Arch init, ubuntus upstart? Fedora has FDO's systemd, and it's faster than any of those.
  - count 15y ago
    You're right, I misunderstood the integration. It still seems like it's optimizing for the wrong thing for the vast majority of linux users. The # of linux servers, which don't care about boot time (or where software init is a very tiny part of boot time anyway) is way larger than the number of people using it as a desktop. Boot time isn't the thing that's keeping linux off the desktop. Rewriting scripts and rolling them into a C daemon defeats the whole point of scripts in the first place - the administrator of the system can't make quick changes or easily troubleshoot things (or, optionally, selectively enable/disable small sections of initialization). It's also a large amount of new work for folks busy fixing actual broken or buggy parts of their software. Lennart complains that the starting PID on his linux desktop is too high, because init scripts call 'grep', 'awk', etc. - and that developers should rewrite all of that into their own startup daemons. It seems like he's complaining about the 'UNIX way' of small, text-oriented tools each doing one job and piping the results between them for flexibility and power for the the system administrator. Moving all of that into a C-based daemon, hiding it entirely from the administrator (short of a unsupported-by-your-contract recompile and source mod) doesn't seem like a net win for me, especially for a few seconds saved two or three times a year. Most scary is the way he wants to handle socket based services - it's already the source of one remote DOS against a machine running systemd: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=739538 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=739538

lvillani 15y ago

Honestly, I don't understand why move this personal attack against Lennart. From my point of view he just wrote pieces of software he deemed necessary. I would rather put the blame on distributions other than Fedora¹ for trying to integrate his stuff early and poorly (thus starting a chain-reaction which caused even more distributions to rush with integration attempts). I think he's getting a lot of flak for choices made by others. _________ 1: Fedora is known to ship with lots of experimental software/wide-scale changes. Its users expect breakage/major innovations from time to time.

ColdAsIce 15y ago
He could have improved esd or jack. But no.
- fmoralesc 15y ago
  jack? That's a completely different user-case.
- lvillani 15y ago
  Sure he could, but things like that happen all the time. Countless people start forks and new projects every day, while they could improve the existing ones (the world is full of examples). I have this darwinian vision of the software world where it's extremely positive to experiment with new stuff. Only time will tell which things surpass the test of time. Attacking someone publicly this way just because he doesn't contribute to your¹ favorite project is, in my opinion, a sick thing to do. ______ 1: Not addressing you in particular.

zokier 15y ago

Why shouldn't Poettering be allowed to write whatever programs he wishes, useless or not? I think distributions are responsible for choosing the best selection of software, and nobody should be blamed for providing new alternatives to the table.

rmc 15y ago

I hear a lot of people complaining about these new programmes, like PulseAudio, but as far as I'm concerend, with PulseAudio I can now have proper working sound. No more of this "Oh I have pidgin open, which wants to do sound, so Firefox with flash can't watch youtube" problems that used to happen.

zecg 15y ago

Quoth Dziuba: "A long time ago, the original neckbeards decided that it was a good idea to chain together small programs that each performed a specific task, and that the universal interface between them should be text. If you develop on a Unix platform and you abide by this principle, the operating system will reward you with simplicity and prosperity."