4 ms·

This is the back-end plague which is everywhere in free software. The idea is that whatever "it" is, adding support for "it" is "just another back-end" . Take c

This is the back-end plague which is everywhere in free software. The idea is that whatever "it" is, adding support for "it" is "just another back-end" . Take cairo for example, it has or had back-ends for gdk, win32, png, svg, html canvas, pdf, postscript, opengl, xlib, quartz, etc. Only a few of them are actually usable and support has been removed for several others over the years. The number of sound back-ends on Linux is uncountable: ALSA, OSS, OpenAl, PulseAudio, Jack, Esound, PipeWire... It's never "just another back-end" because every back-end needs continuous testing and maintenance. Poettering when designing systemd wisely, WISELY decided to not go the back-end route. Other free software hackers learn the hard way that multiple back-ends are expensive and rarely worth the cost.

imtringued 1y ago
The problem is that everyone is doing their own thing instead of coming up with a common standard. That's kinda why Wayland is so hated. What people seem to be misunderstanding about systemd is that it is not encroaching and forcing itself upon distros. It's the opposite. It's solving problems faster than anyone else and thereby wins by default. If there was a competing project that did the same things systemd did (the problem is that you need a whole collection of projects that are poorly integrated with each other), then you could start talking about standardizing things, but as of right now, systemd is spiritually the new Xorg of Linux.
- sph 1y ago
  > The problem is that everyone is doing their own thing instead of coming up with a common standard I mean, there is a reason XKCD 927 is the most quoted to the point of attracting downvotes. It's pure cliché, so I wonder why you believe a common standard to rule them all is possible. There is only one sane approach in software: opinionated configuration. Yet the free-software world somehow still clings to the utopia of multiple, freely interchangeable choices, and all you get is half a dozen unmaintained backends and just one that actually works for a number of years when someone forgets 927 and decides to reinvent the wheel, badly.

imtringued 1y ago

The problem is that everyone is doing their own thing instead of coming up with a common standard. That's kinda why Wayland is so hated. What people seem to be misunderstanding about systemd is that it is not encroaching and forcing itself upon distros. It's the opposite. It's solving problems faster than anyone else and thereby wins by default. If there was a competing project that did the same things systemd did (the problem is that you need a whole collection of projects that are poorly integrated with each other), then you could start talking about standardizing things, but as of right now, systemd is spiritually the new Xorg of Linux.

sph 1y ago
> The problem is that everyone is doing their own thing instead of coming up with a common standard I mean, there is a reason XKCD 927 is the most quoted to the point of attracting downvotes. It's pure cliché, so I wonder why you believe a common standard to rule them all is possible. There is only one sane approach in software: opinionated configuration. Yet the free-software world somehow still clings to the utopia of multiple, freely interchangeable choices, and all you get is half a dozen unmaintained backends and just one that actually works for a number of years when someone forgets 927 and decides to reinvent the wheel, badly.