8 ms·

For good or ill, Lennart Poettering is not well regarded in these circles.

by Lazare 11y ago

scrollaway 11y ago
Lennart is a skilled dev with some excellent ideas and some controversial ideas. The stuff he designs eventually ends up being picked by distributions and defaulted. And for creating software that simplifies the lives of distros and gets picked up, he is "not well regarded" as you say. But don't mince your words, people fucking hate him for it. They don't even know him yet they despise every fiber of his being. Have you seen some of the hate that goes on even here? And everything he does or writes is getting analyzed like a teenager analyzes every character in his girlfriend's texts because "oh god I'm so in love". Look at this issue. He mis-presses send on a github comment and immediately you have 10 comments without even waiting for an explanation, calling the guy "absurd and stupid". He's not the only one getting treated like that by the community. One day, one of those devs will kill themself, and people will rush him to talk further about them like they know them. Exactly like what happened to Aaron. Yeah I sure would love to get treated like that for working full time on improving foss. /s Edit: It's fucking appalling how I get immediately downvoted, without any reply, just for defending the guy as a human being. Really proves my point.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  As someone who disagrees with but nonetheless respects LP, you seem to misrepresent his character. He isn't as sensitive or shallow as you portray him, he's a provocateur and he embraces it to his leverage. He's really skilled at using technical details while mixing them in with lies by omission, subtle distortions and personal opinion to create some formidably sly arguments that an inexperienced observer takes for granted. Skilled programmer and speaker. That he makes distribution maintainers' lives easier is mostly true. This isn't really an argument in favor of systemd, though. The things that distro maintainers did with sysvinit for so long has been anathema to any good design principles, so just about anything is an improvement in comparison. Yet even still practical systemd integrations are quite flaky and unoptimized (https://wiki.freedesktop.org/www/Software/systemd/Optimizations/ https://wiki.freedesktop.org/www/Software/systemd/Optimizati...), as there are no magic bullets and systemd being an informal spec is breeding ground for lots of cargo cult wisdom.
  - belorn 11y ago
    I would like to see the face of a non-technical police officer that get to handle the reports of death threats. A person who develops and gives away software that makes people lives easier for free is so provocative that harassment, death threats and general hatred is directed at him. The actions of those people is then defended by a community because the developed software do not follow good design principles or is considered flaky and unoptimized.
    - pessimizer 11y ago
      That is a desperate non-sequitur. It might be easier to choose the worst person you can think of to reply to, but it's silly to pretend like this comment is a response to the comment above.
- beedogs 11y ago
  "Lennart is a skilled dev with some excellent ideas and some controversial ideas. The stuff he designs eventually ends up being picked by distributions and defaulted." He works for RedHat. That's why his generally-not-so-great software ends up in distributions. That he has characterized the entire Open Source community as "full of assholes" really doesn't endear him to folks here and elsewhere, especially in light of his own behavior.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    > He works for RedHat. That's why his generally-not-so-great software ends up in distributions. As an archlinux TU, an LXDE/LXQt developer and someone close to a lot of distro maintainers, I can assure you, it's not. Systemd got popular because it's good, and it fixes and standardizes a lot of pain points. Red Hat being behind the development just means the product gets actively developed. Not all software has the chance to flourish like that.
    - AdieuToLogic 11y ago
      As a multi-platform Unix developer and someone often responsible for system administration, I can assure you that systemd does in fact "standardizes [sic] a lot of pain points." It being good is where we certainly disagree. Red Hat funding the product means more than it being actively developed. It also implies control over the offering's compatibility, functionality, and direction. It means control over everything an OS using it can do as all processes will have systemd as its parent.
  - bkor 11y ago
    > He works for RedHat. That's why his generally-not-so-great software ends up in distributions. Systemd was chosen by various distributions because it works and was way better than what was there before. Works for Red Hat is not a consideration in this. Note: I actually follow Mageia, openSUSE, Debian, Fedora. In each of these distributions, the decision was not never "works for Red Hat". Even for e.g. Ubuntu, the decision was more or less: "Debian chose it". > That he has characterized the entire Open Source community as "full of assholes" Can you provide evidence of that? He's pretty easy to deal with, that is one of the reasons. You get a clear answer each time. Might totally disagree with it, but that's different matter.
- carlisle_ 11y ago
  A couple of issues with your position: > Look at this issue. He mis-presses send on a github comment and immediately you have 10 comments without even waiting for an explanation, calling the guy "absurd and stupid". Why should people have to assume that he "mispressed" send? Isn't it more likely people would take his comment at face value and respond accordingly? If there is a problem with something he's said, that's on him for not being more concise and clear about his point. > He's not the only one getting treated like that by the community. One day, one of those devs will kill themself, and people will rush him to talk further about them like they know them. Exactly like what happened to Aaron. This is so overly dramatic and completely unrepresentative of what happened with Aaron Swartz. The fact you threw his name in is borderline offensive, seeing how with Aaron Swartz he was a victim of perverted justice, not abusive comments on Github. You're just trying to garner sympathy based on his name alone, shame on you. I'm all for being reasonable and giving people the benefit of the doubt but your comment comes off as so fanboyish no wonder you're getting downvoted.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    I disagree with Lennart and am disgusted at the community for how they're treating other people. Human beings. That is some serious leap to fanboyism... And I didn't imply anything regarding why Aaron killed himself but how the community reacted after he did. You should re-read the comment. > Why should people have to assume that he "mispressed" send? I dunno, maybe because it was clearly incomplete and ended in the middle of a word?
    - carlisle_ 11y ago
      >And I didn't imply anything regarding why Aaron killed himself but how the community reacted after he did. You should re-read the comment. YOU should reread your comment because the way you're phrasing it sounds /exactly/ like you're implying devs are going to start killing themselves because of abusive comments. And honestly, even if we read your comment as how you're saying you intended it to sound, what's your point? People die and others might exaggerate their relation to the deceased? That happens with everyone, not just Aaron Swartz, or even celebrities as a whole. Your use of his name is without any relevance. Your comment isn't "defending a human being". You're just pandering.
- viraptor 11y ago
  To be honest, I've never seen anyone attacking Lennart as a person on HN. At least not in the not dead comments. Did I miss it? There's a lot of attacks on what his doing, people despising him as a project leader, and criticizing him for the way he interacts with other projects. And what's wrong with that? I see what he's doing with his projects as replicating MS's EEE strategy. Do we need to defend as a human being everyone who we think is doing something you can't stand? Do we need to write for example that Elsevier management hurt the world of research, but I'm sure they're sensitive and good as humans?
  - DanBC 11y ago
    It's possible to vigorously and robustly attack software without resorting to insulting the people behind that software.
    - viraptor 11y ago
      But this actually does not have anything to do with software. Parts of systemd are pretty good. For many people it's Lennart decisions and leadership that are the problem. This doesn't change even if systemd becomes a bugfree software masterpiece.
      - scrollaway 11y ago
        Systemd enjoys a steady stream of regular and new developers and pretty much all of them seem happy with Lennart. The criticism comes from internet forums and other places, like this one here, which are completely disconnected from the people actually doing the work. Armchair problematism.
        viraptor 11y ago
        Same description applies to MS's EEE. (they retained and hired developers) Yet, we probably agree the results were terrible. BTW, I'm somewhere in systemd changelog with a security bugfix to an issue in systemd resolver. So I became a "new developer" and I fixed it, because practically I have no choice of init in my system, not because I'm happy with Lennart. I still disagree that systemd should have its own resolver. (and the bug wouldn't even exist if they didn't decide to write their own resolver)
- vacri 11y ago
  You're doing a good job of putting words in peoples' mouths, and then denouncing them for it. People "despise every fiber of his being"?
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    Do you disagree? Look at the comment right below you, calling him appalling scum. Guess who wrote it? na85, the EXACT SAME PERSON I replied to. I would LOVE to be hallucinating this. To be the lunatic in this story. But everything in this thread has proven that I'm not.
    - vacri 11y ago
      You are taking comments made by a few people and claiming the entire community makes them. There were eight other responses to your comment excluding mine, all disagreeing with you in some way and doing so politely and largely dispassionately, but you focus on the single simplistic one that called him scum. One person could be described as hating him as you suggested, the other eight are hardly that passionate (nine, including me). So yes, you are putting words in peoples' mouths by describing the community as being voiced by the one instead of the many.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  He can be as technically skilled as there, but his approach to "problems" are ivory tower paternalism. He is just better at covering it with words than his pal Sievers, who has managed to get Torvalds riled at more than one occasion for the same kind of paternalistic attitude.
- makomk 11y ago
  Lennart is very good at the political wrangling required to get code into distros and make it an unavoidable part of using Linux. His actual code quality is not so great. PulseAudio is still a mess a decade on, and I gave up even trying to figure out why it breaks because it's a nightmare of misleading variable names and uncommented code. I finally abandoned hope when I tracked down a crash, found that a patch that was literally unfinished and labelled as such had made it into a release before being backed out, realised they don't do stable releases and the next upstream release with the fix would have other major changes with new bugs, and eventually discovered that reverting it didn't even fix the problem. The underlying code was simply broken and there was no way to see how it was ever meant to have worked in the first place, because it was completely uncommented. systemd seems to have slightly better code, probably because it has kernel developers on the team, but like PulseAudio there are no stable releases. It's up to individual distros to try and turn the stream of upstream releases into something that works. I think this is a Red Hat thing - they're happy to develop new features collaboratively and in the open, but actually turning software into stable, reliable working releases is their secret sauce that people pay them big dollars for. They're also the only major distro that doesn't co-operate with the upstream Linux kernel's process for stable and long-term releases.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    I think your point about code quality is very poorly expressed, but I'll disregard that for now, I wanted to address this: > I think this is a Red Hat thing - they're happy to develop new features collaboratively and in the open, but actually turning software into stable, reliable working releases is their secret sauce that people pay them big dollars for. I'm not sure what you're talking about. Are you saying RH magically makes stuff stable only on their distro, and doesn't fix bugs in master? Because that's not only BS, it's not permitted by the software licenses they themselves choose. And regardless, yeah, making stable releases is not an obligation. Never have been, never will be. It's a nice thing to do, and often it's useful, but still optional. Web Browsers don't do stable releases (in the LTS sense) anymore either.
- jrochkind1 11y ago
  I'd actually never heard of Lennart, I'm not a systems programmer and don't generally follow what's going on in Linux politics. Reading the OP PR thread, I get a very bad impression of him, not informed by any prior bias. Perhaps he has settled into really negative communications and decision patterns as a result of being unfairly combatted so much in the past. But it's still there. His decision and behavior in this PR is pretty ridiculous, it in fact seemed even _more_ ridiculous to me not knowing what a 'big deal' he was.
- na85 11y ago
  Pottering is an appalling human being though. Why would anyone defend him? I think he is scum.
DanBC 11y ago
Sure. > You're being kind of absurd and stupid here. Supplying a broken timeserver as a default is inane and silly. Please accept the pull request. How persuasive is this type of language? How likely is this to change people's attitudes? (Just for clarity: I'm not saying this is one way from not systemd to systemd. I recognize that plenty of systemd supporters use this style of communication.)

For good or ill, Lennart Poettering is not well regarded in these circles.

by Lazare 11y ago

For good or ill, Lennart Poettering is not well regarded in these circles.

Lennart is a skilled dev with some excellent ideas and some controversial ideas. The stuff he designs eventually ends up being picked by distributions and defaulted. And for creating software that simplifies the lives of distros and gets picked up, he is "not well regarded" as you say. But don't mince your words, people fucking hate him for it. They don't even know him yet they despise every fiber of his being. Have you seen some of the hate that goes on even here? And everything he does or writes is getting analyzed like a teenager analyzes every character in his girlfriend's texts because "oh god I'm so in love". Look at this issue. He mis-presses send on a github comment and immediately you have 10 comments without even waiting for an explanation, calling the guy "absurd and stupid". He's not the only one getting treated like that by the community. One day, one of those devs will kill themself, and people will rush him to talk further about them like they know them. Exactly like what happened to Aaron. Yeah I sure would love to get treated like that for working full time on improving foss. /s Edit: It's fucking appalling how I get immediately downvoted, without any reply, just for defending the guy as a human being. Really proves my point.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
As someone who disagrees with but nonetheless respects LP, you seem to misrepresent his character. He isn't as sensitive or shallow as you portray him, he's a provocateur and he embraces it to his leverage. He's really skilled at using technical details while mixing them in with lies by omission, subtle distortions and personal opinion to create some formidably sly arguments that an inexperienced observer takes for granted. Skilled programmer and speaker. That he makes distribution maintainers' lives easier is mostly true. This isn't really an argument in favor of systemd, though. The things that distro maintainers did with sysvinit for so long has been anathema to any good design principles, so just about anything is an improvement in comparison. Yet even still practical systemd integrations are quite flaky and unoptimized (https://wiki.freedesktop.org/www/Software/systemd/Optimizations/ https://wiki.freedesktop.org/www/Software/systemd/Optimizati...), as there are no magic bullets and systemd being an informal spec is breeding ground for lots of cargo cult wisdom.
- belorn 11y ago
  I would like to see the face of a non-technical police officer that get to handle the reports of death threats. A person who develops and gives away software that makes people lives easier for free is so provocative that harassment, death threats and general hatred is directed at him. The actions of those people is then defended by a community because the developed software do not follow good design principles or is considered flaky and unoptimized.
  - pessimizer 11y ago
    That is a desperate non-sequitur. It might be easier to choose the worst person you can think of to reply to, but it's silly to pretend like this comment is a response to the comment above.
beedogs 11y ago
"Lennart is a skilled dev with some excellent ideas and some controversial ideas. The stuff he designs eventually ends up being picked by distributions and defaulted." He works for RedHat. That's why his generally-not-so-great software ends up in distributions. That he has characterized the entire Open Source community as "full of assholes" really doesn't endear him to folks here and elsewhere, especially in light of his own behavior.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  > He works for RedHat. That's why his generally-not-so-great software ends up in distributions. As an archlinux TU, an LXDE/LXQt developer and someone close to a lot of distro maintainers, I can assure you, it's not. Systemd got popular because it's good, and it fixes and standardizes a lot of pain points. Red Hat being behind the development just means the product gets actively developed. Not all software has the chance to flourish like that.
  - AdieuToLogic 11y ago
    As a multi-platform Unix developer and someone often responsible for system administration, I can assure you that systemd does in fact "standardizes [sic] a lot of pain points." It being good is where we certainly disagree. Red Hat funding the product means more than it being actively developed. It also implies control over the offering's compatibility, functionality, and direction. It means control over everything an OS using it can do as all processes will have systemd as its parent.
- bkor 11y ago
  > He works for RedHat. That's why his generally-not-so-great software ends up in distributions. Systemd was chosen by various distributions because it works and was way better than what was there before. Works for Red Hat is not a consideration in this. Note: I actually follow Mageia, openSUSE, Debian, Fedora. In each of these distributions, the decision was not never "works for Red Hat". Even for e.g. Ubuntu, the decision was more or less: "Debian chose it". > That he has characterized the entire Open Source community as "full of assholes" Can you provide evidence of that? He's pretty easy to deal with, that is one of the reasons. You get a clear answer each time. Might totally disagree with it, but that's different matter.
carlisle_ 11y ago
A couple of issues with your position: > Look at this issue. He mis-presses send on a github comment and immediately you have 10 comments without even waiting for an explanation, calling the guy "absurd and stupid". Why should people have to assume that he "mispressed" send? Isn't it more likely people would take his comment at face value and respond accordingly? If there is a problem with something he's said, that's on him for not being more concise and clear about his point. > He's not the only one getting treated like that by the community. One day, one of those devs will kill themself, and people will rush him to talk further about them like they know them. Exactly like what happened to Aaron. This is so overly dramatic and completely unrepresentative of what happened with Aaron Swartz. The fact you threw his name in is borderline offensive, seeing how with Aaron Swartz he was a victim of perverted justice, not abusive comments on Github. You're just trying to garner sympathy based on his name alone, shame on you. I'm all for being reasonable and giving people the benefit of the doubt but your comment comes off as so fanboyish no wonder you're getting downvoted.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  I disagree with Lennart and am disgusted at the community for how they're treating other people. Human beings. That is some serious leap to fanboyism... And I didn't imply anything regarding why Aaron killed himself but how the community reacted after he did. You should re-read the comment. > Why should people have to assume that he "mispressed" send? I dunno, maybe because it was clearly incomplete and ended in the middle of a word?
  - carlisle_ 11y ago
    >And I didn't imply anything regarding why Aaron killed himself but how the community reacted after he did. You should re-read the comment. YOU should reread your comment because the way you're phrasing it sounds /exactly/ like you're implying devs are going to start killing themselves because of abusive comments. And honestly, even if we read your comment as how you're saying you intended it to sound, what's your point? People die and others might exaggerate their relation to the deceased? That happens with everyone, not just Aaron Swartz, or even celebrities as a whole. Your use of his name is without any relevance. Your comment isn't "defending a human being". You're just pandering.
viraptor 11y ago
To be honest, I've never seen anyone attacking Lennart as a person on HN. At least not in the not dead comments. Did I miss it? There's a lot of attacks on what his doing, people despising him as a project leader, and criticizing him for the way he interacts with other projects. And what's wrong with that? I see what he's doing with his projects as replicating MS's EEE strategy. Do we need to defend as a human being everyone who we think is doing something you can't stand? Do we need to write for example that Elsevier management hurt the world of research, but I'm sure they're sensitive and good as humans?
- DanBC 11y ago
  It's possible to vigorously and robustly attack software without resorting to insulting the people behind that software.
  - viraptor 11y ago
    But this actually does not have anything to do with software. Parts of systemd are pretty good. For many people it's Lennart decisions and leadership that are the problem. This doesn't change even if systemd becomes a bugfree software masterpiece.
    - scrollaway 11y ago
      Systemd enjoys a steady stream of regular and new developers and pretty much all of them seem happy with Lennart. The criticism comes from internet forums and other places, like this one here, which are completely disconnected from the people actually doing the work. Armchair problematism.
      - viraptor 11y ago
        Same description applies to MS's EEE. (they retained and hired developers) Yet, we probably agree the results were terrible. BTW, I'm somewhere in systemd changelog with a security bugfix to an issue in systemd resolver. So I became a "new developer" and I fixed it, because practically I have no choice of init in my system, not because I'm happy with Lennart. I still disagree that systemd should have its own resolver. (and the bug wouldn't even exist if they didn't decide to write their own resolver)
vacri 11y ago
You're doing a good job of putting words in peoples' mouths, and then denouncing them for it. People "despise every fiber of his being"?
- scrollaway 11y ago
  Do you disagree? Look at the comment right below you, calling him appalling scum. Guess who wrote it? na85, the EXACT SAME PERSON I replied to. I would LOVE to be hallucinating this. To be the lunatic in this story. But everything in this thread has proven that I'm not.
  - vacri 11y ago
    You are taking comments made by a few people and claiming the entire community makes them. There were eight other responses to your comment excluding mine, all disagreeing with you in some way and doing so politely and largely dispassionately, but you focus on the single simplistic one that called him scum. One person could be described as hating him as you suggested, the other eight are hardly that passionate (nine, including me). So yes, you are putting words in peoples' mouths by describing the community as being voiced by the one instead of the many.
digi_owl 11y ago
He can be as technically skilled as there, but his approach to "problems" are ivory tower paternalism. He is just better at covering it with words than his pal Sievers, who has managed to get Torvalds riled at more than one occasion for the same kind of paternalistic attitude.
makomk 11y ago
Lennart is very good at the political wrangling required to get code into distros and make it an unavoidable part of using Linux. His actual code quality is not so great. PulseAudio is still a mess a decade on, and I gave up even trying to figure out why it breaks because it's a nightmare of misleading variable names and uncommented code. I finally abandoned hope when I tracked down a crash, found that a patch that was literally unfinished and labelled as such had made it into a release before being backed out, realised they don't do stable releases and the next upstream release with the fix would have other major changes with new bugs, and eventually discovered that reverting it didn't even fix the problem. The underlying code was simply broken and there was no way to see how it was ever meant to have worked in the first place, because it was completely uncommented. systemd seems to have slightly better code, probably because it has kernel developers on the team, but like PulseAudio there are no stable releases. It's up to individual distros to try and turn the stream of upstream releases into something that works. I think this is a Red Hat thing - they're happy to develop new features collaboratively and in the open, but actually turning software into stable, reliable working releases is their secret sauce that people pay them big dollars for. They're also the only major distro that doesn't co-operate with the upstream Linux kernel's process for stable and long-term releases.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  I think your point about code quality is very poorly expressed, but I'll disregard that for now, I wanted to address this: > I think this is a Red Hat thing - they're happy to develop new features collaboratively and in the open, but actually turning software into stable, reliable working releases is their secret sauce that people pay them big dollars for. I'm not sure what you're talking about. Are you saying RH magically makes stuff stable only on their distro, and doesn't fix bugs in master? Because that's not only BS, it's not permitted by the software licenses they themselves choose. And regardless, yeah, making stable releases is not an obligation. Never have been, never will be. It's a nice thing to do, and often it's useful, but still optional. Web Browsers don't do stable releases (in the LTS sense) anymore either.
jrochkind1 11y ago
I'd actually never heard of Lennart, I'm not a systems programmer and don't generally follow what's going on in Linux politics. Reading the OP PR thread, I get a very bad impression of him, not informed by any prior bias. Perhaps he has settled into really negative communications and decision patterns as a result of being unfairly combatted so much in the past. But it's still there. His decision and behavior in this PR is pretty ridiculous, it in fact seemed even _more_ ridiculous to me not knowing what a 'big deal' he was.
na85 11y ago
Pottering is an appalling human being though. Why would anyone defend him? I think he is scum.

DanBC 11y ago

Sure. > You're being kind of absurd and stupid here. Supplying a broken timeserver as a default is inane and silly. Please accept the pull request. How persuasive is this type of language? How likely is this to change people's attitudes? (Just for clarity: I'm not saying this is one way from not systemd to systemd. I recognize that plenty of systemd supporters use this style of communication.)