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If adopting systemd actually broke everything, then of course they'd be doing something else instead. The anti-systemd crowd looks at this issue the way you mig
by deong 12y ago
If adopting systemd actually broke everything, then of course they'd be doing something else instead. The anti-systemd crowd looks at this issue the way you might look at someone who took a working piece of software, and then did a completely correct transformation of all loops and conditionals to use bare gotos.
It's not incorrect to do that. Nothing crashes. It might actually even be faster or use less memory if you were sufficiently clever about it. However, the argument is that you just bought yourself a future full of pain and misery for not a big enough present gain.
Look at poor technical decisions from the past. The earliest browsers were encouraged to be liberal in what they accepted (an adaptation of Postel's law to HTML parsing). I think a lot of people today regard that as a decision that probably held the internet back by a decade -- think of the time we wasted writing compatibility layers and artificially restricting what our web pages could do. But it wasn't immediately obvious that that was the case. It took 10 or 15 years for the implications of that decision to really hit home.
What happens next is not a collapse of the world. It's a slow accrual of follow-up decisions that are needed to keep the lights on, until one day you look at the Eldritch horror you've had to build over 10 years and go, "Jesus, that was a bone-headed idea." Maybe they're completely wrong in opposing it, but systemd isn't anywhere near old enough to have decided that just yet.
- walterbell 12y agoSomeone needs to dedicate an academic thesis to documenting how systemd advocates pulled off their coup, and what improvements are needed to OSS governance structures to prevent a repeat. By the time the pain becomes visible, no one will remember how the actual decision got made.
- digi_owl 12y agoA bunch of devs scratching itches, Just so happened that their scratching sticks where tired together and covered in super glue.
- the_why_of_y 12y agoYes definitely, and the thesis should discuss in detail the role of the Illuminati in getting systemd adopted, and provide a by-the-minute protocol of what went down at Area 51.
- walterbell 12y agoAdd astro-turfing to the list of thesis topics, e.g. use the HN API to perform clique analysis of the many systemd threads on HN.
- anonbanker 12y agoThe sole voice of truth in the entire thread, down voted for telling an uncomfortable bit of it.
- anonbanker 12y agoLook how they buried me for even mentioning it.
- deong 12y agoI don't think there's any vast conspiracy to understand or try to prevent. sysvinit has actual problems, and systemd solves many of them. I'm one of the ones who finds it ugly/inelegant/gross aesthetically, but it did address issues people wanted addressed. And there wasn't a faultless alternative either. It's not like upstart or sysvinit was so good that you need to invent anything to explain why systemd won out. It won out because people either don't share my mild aversion to its design or because they chose functionality on Linux over elegance/portability/fill-in-your-own-thing. And hey, that's a Pareto-optimal choice as well.