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> It's being forced on long time users of distros without any of the users having a say. It's being adopted by distributions in accordance with the stated and

> It's being forced on long time users of distros without any of the users having a say. It's being adopted by distributions in accordance with the stated and implied wishes of the developers, maintainers, and users of the distributions. The reason that (e.g.) Arch dropped support for legacy init so quickly was because they literally failed to find anyone who wanted to go through all the work of maintaining the old init system. If none of the users want to do the work, then nothing's being "forced" - that's the way community-organized FOSS projects work![0] Same goes for Debian, who made the switch in accordiance with their normal development process (including a general resolution in support of systemd!). Debian has promised to maintain systemd-shim (supporting other init systems) through at least Jessie, and possibly longer, depending on whether there is enough demand for alternative init systems, and support from developers for maintaining it in future releases. Ironically, the biggest threat to systemd-shim in Jessie's successor are people who claim they want to fork Debian - if all the people who hate systemd leave Debian, then nobody who wants to actually do the work to maintain the alternative init systems will remain with the Debian project[1]. [0] Even then, you can still find an AUR package for it (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/initscripts-fork/ https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/initscripts-fork/), though as with everything in the AUR, it's subject to much less testing. Note that the package has only 27 votes - this means that only 27 people actually said that they care about moving this package back into the main distro. [1] This may be a bad or a good thing, depending on who you ask.

cthalupa 12y ago
>The reason that (e.g.) Arch dropped support for legacy init so quickly was because they literally failed to find anyone who wanted to go through all the work of maintaining the old init system. If none of the users want to do the work, then nothing's being "forced" - that's the way community-organized FOSS projects work![0] Users != developers I am not a developer. I'm an administrator. I know enough C to be able to poke around source code and understand what is happening when I get an error, but not enough of it or anything else to maintain an init system. A lot of admins don't know this much. A lot of desktop users don't know this much. I'm not disagreeing with your overall sentiment here - but it's not so simple as "If the users of the product liked it, they'd maintain it" - sometimes they don't have the skills required to. Not everyone who drives is a mechanic, etc.
- jethro_tell 12y ago
  > Not everyone who drives is a mechanic, etc. If you car requires more knowledge to maintain than you have, you can get a different car, pay someone to maintain it or get a bike. Those are the only options I see. I don't see how init is any different than a car. You have those same options. I'm sure someone somewhere is paying RH or canonical or in house devs/admins to maintain init scripts for their application stacks.
  - cthalupa 12y ago
    I hesitated to make the analogy because I expected a response like this, stretching the analogy too far. It isn't a matter of managing init scripts - that's easy. Continually updating a distro to use your init system of choice is a wholly different matter. I can change the oil in my car. I can't replace the transmission.
- EmanueleAina 12y ago
  > I'm not disagreeing with your overall sentiment here - but it's not so simple as "If the users of the product liked it, they'd maintain it" - sometimes they don't have the skills required to. Not everyone who drives is a mechanic, etc. What I find quite unfair is that many people say that they don't have the technical skills to effectively contribute to the project, let alone develop or maintain any alternative, yet accuse the systemd team (or the GNOME team, or the NetworkManager team, or the XFCE team, or whatever) of producing sub-standard software. Given the self-asserted lack of skills, on which basis such a severe judgement is done? Can we please go back to trusting each other, praising who actually do some useful work or at least avoiding open attacks to them? Technical disagreement is welcome, but it has to be backed by some skills to be useful.

cthalupa 12y ago

>The reason that (e.g.) Arch dropped support for legacy init so quickly was because they literally failed to find anyone who wanted to go through all the work of maintaining the old init system. If none of the users want to do the work, then nothing's being "forced" - that's the way community-organized FOSS projects work![0] Users != developers I am not a developer. I'm an administrator. I know enough C to be able to poke around source code and understand what is happening when I get an error, but not enough of it or anything else to maintain an init system. A lot of admins don't know this much. A lot of desktop users don't know this much. I'm not disagreeing with your overall sentiment here - but it's not so simple as "If the users of the product liked it, they'd maintain it" - sometimes they don't have the skills required to. Not everyone who drives is a mechanic, etc.

jethro_tell 12y ago
> Not everyone who drives is a mechanic, etc. If you car requires more knowledge to maintain than you have, you can get a different car, pay someone to maintain it or get a bike. Those are the only options I see. I don't see how init is any different than a car. You have those same options. I'm sure someone somewhere is paying RH or canonical or in house devs/admins to maintain init scripts for their application stacks.
- cthalupa 12y ago
  I hesitated to make the analogy because I expected a response like this, stretching the analogy too far. It isn't a matter of managing init scripts - that's easy. Continually updating a distro to use your init system of choice is a wholly different matter. I can change the oil in my car. I can't replace the transmission.
EmanueleAina 12y ago
> I'm not disagreeing with your overall sentiment here - but it's not so simple as "If the users of the product liked it, they'd maintain it" - sometimes they don't have the skills required to. Not everyone who drives is a mechanic, etc. What I find quite unfair is that many people say that they don't have the technical skills to effectively contribute to the project, let alone develop or maintain any alternative, yet accuse the systemd team (or the GNOME team, or the NetworkManager team, or the XFCE team, or whatever) of producing sub-standard software. Given the self-asserted lack of skills, on which basis such a severe judgement is done? Can we please go back to trusting each other, praising who actually do some useful work or at least avoiding open attacks to them? Technical disagreement is welcome, but it has to be backed by some skills to be useful.