etbe.coker.com.au/2015/04/26/anti-systemd-people/

Anti-Systemd People
For the Technical People

This post isn’t really about technology, I’ll cover the technology briefly skip to the next section if you aren’t interested in Linux programming or system administration.

I’ve been using the Systemd init system for a long time, I first tested it in 2010 [1]. I use Systemd on most of my systems that run Debian/Wheezy (which means most of the Linux systems I run which aren’t embedded systems). Currently the only systems where I’m not running Systemd are some systems on which I don’t have console access, while Systemd works reasonably well it wasn’t a standard init system for Debian/Wheezy so I don’t run it everywhere. That said I haven’t had any problems with Systemd in Wheezy, so I might have been too paranoid.

I recently wrote a blog post about systemd, just some basic information on how to use it and why it’s not a big deal [2]. I’ve been playing with Systemd for almost 5 years and using it in production for almost 2 years and it’s performed well. The most serious bug I’ve found in systemd is Bug #774153 which causes a Wheezy->Jessie upgrade to hang until you run “systemctl daemon-reexec” [3].

I know that some people have had problems with systemd, but any piece of significant software will cause problems for some people, there are bugs in all software that is complex enough to be useful. However the fact that it has worked so well for me on so many systems suggests that it’s not going to cause huge problems, it should be covered in the routine testing that is needed for a significant deployment of any new version of a distribution.

I’ve been using Debian for a long time. The transitions from libc4 to libc5 and then libc6 were complex but didn’t break much. The use of devfs in Debian caused some issues and then the removal of devfs caused other issues. The introduction of udev probably caused problems for some people too. Doing major updates to Debian systems isn’t something that is new or which will necessarily cause significant problems, I don’t think that the change to systemd by default compares to changing from a.out binaries to ELF binaries (which required replacing all shared objects and executables).
The Social Issue of the Default Init

Recently the Debian technical committee determined that Systemd was the best choice for the default init system in Debian/Jessie (the next release of Debian which will come out soon). Decisions about which programs should be in the default install are made periodically and it’s usually not a big deal. Even when the choice is between options that directly involve the user (such as the KDE and GNOME desktop environments) it’s not really a big deal because you can just install a non-default option.

One of the strengths of Debian has always been the fact that any Debian Developer (DD) can just add any new package to the archive if they maintain it to a suitable technical standard and if copyright and all other relevant laws are respected. Any DD who doesn’t like any of the current init systems can just package a new one and upload it. Obviously the default option will get more testing, so the non-default options will need more testing by the maintainer. This is particularly difficult for programs that have significant interaction with other parts of the system, I’ve had difficulties with this over the course of 14 years of SE Linux development but I’ve also found that it’s not an impossible problem to solve.

It’s generally accepted that making demands of other people’s volunteer work is a bad thing, which to some extent is a reasonable position. There is a problem when this is taken to extremes, Debian has over 1000 developers who have to work together so sometimes it’s a question of who gets to do the extra work to make the parts of the distribution fit together. The issue of who gets to do the work is often based on what parts are the defaults or most commonly used options. For my work on SE Linux I often have to do a lot of extra work because it’s not part of the default install and I have to make my requests for changes to other packages be as small and simple as possible.

So part of the decision to make Systemd be the default init is essentially a decision to impose slightly more development effort on the people who maintain SysVInit if they are to provide the same level of support – of course given the lack of overall development on SysVInit the level of support provided may decrease. It also means slightly less development effort for the people who maintain Systemd as developers of daemon packages MUST make them work with it. Another part of this issue is the fact that DDs who maintain daemon packages need to maintain init.d scripts (for SysVInit) and systemd scripts, presumably most DDs will have a preference for one init system and do less testing for the other one. Therefore the choice of systemd as the default means that slightly less developer effort will go into init.d scripts. On average this will slightly increase the amount of sysadmin effort that will be required to run systems with SysVInit as the scripts will on average be less well tested. This isn’t going to be a problem in the short term as the current scripts are working reasonably well, but over the course of years bugs may creep in and a proposed solution to this is to have SysVInit scripts generated from systemd config files.

We did have a long debate within Debian about the issue of default init systems and many Debian Developers disagree about this. But there is a big difference between volunteers debating about their work and external people who don’t contribute but believe that they are entitled to tell us what to do. Especially when the non-contributors abuse the people who do the work.
The Crowd Reaction

In a world filled with reasonable people who aren’t assholes there wouldn’t be any more reaction to this than there has been to decisions such as which desktop environment should be the default (which has caused some debate but nothing serious). The issue of which desktop environment (or which version of a desktop environment) to support has a significant affect on users that can’t be avoided, I could understand people being a little upset about that. But the init system isn’t something that most users will notice – apart from the boot time.

For some reason the men in the Linux community who hate women the most seem to have taken a dislike to systemd. I understand that being “conservative” might mean not wanting changes to software as well as not wanting changes to inequality in society but even so this surprised me. My last blog post about systemd has probably set a personal record for the amount of misogynistic and homophobic abuse I received in the comments. More gender and sexuality related abuse than I usually receive when posting about the issues of gender and sexuality in the context of the FOSS community! For the record this doesn’t bother me, when I get such abuse I’m just going to write more about the topic in question.

While the issue of which init system to use by default in Debian was being discussed we had a lot of hostility from unimportant people who for some reason thought that they might get their way by being abusive and threatening people. As expected that didn’t give the result they desired, but it did result in a small trend towards people who are less concerned about the reactions of users taking on development work related to init systems.

The next thing that they did was to announce a “fork” of Debian. Forking software means maintaining a separate version due to a serious disagreement about how it should be maintained. Doing that requires a significant amount of work in compiling all the source code and testing the results. The sensible option would be to just maintain a separate repository of modified packages as has been done many times before. One of the most well known repositories was the Debian Multimedia repository, it was controversial due to flouting legal issues (the developer produced code that was legal where they lived) and due to confusion among users. But it demonstrated that you can make a repository containing many modified packages. In my work on SE Linux I’ve always had a repository of packages containing changes that haven’t been accepted into Debian, which included changes to SysVInit in about 2001.

The latest news on the fork-Debian front seems to be the call for donations [4]. Apparently most of the money that was spent went to accounting fees and buying a laptop for a developer. The amount of money involved is fairly small, Forbes has an article about how awful people can use “controversy” to get crowd-funding windfalls [5].

MikeeUSA is an evil person who hates systemd [6]. This isn’t any sort of evidence that systemd is great (I’m sure that evil people make reasonable choices about software on occasion). But it is a significant factor in support for non-systemd variants of Debian (and other Linux distributions). Decent people don’t want to be associated with people like MikeeUSA, the fact that the anti-systemd people seem happy to associate with him isn’t going to help their cause.
Conclusion

Forking Debian is not the correct technical solution to any problem you might have with a few packages. Filing bug reports and possibly forking those packages in an external repository is the right thing to do.

Sending homophobic and sexist abuse is going to make you as popular as the GamerGate and GodHatesAmerica.com people. It’s not going to convince anyone to change their mind about technical decisions.

Abusing volunteers who might consider donating some of their time to projects that you like is generally a bad idea. If you abuse them enough you might get them to volunteer less of their time, but the most likely result is that they just don’t volunteer on anything associated with you.

Abusing people who write technical blog posts isn’t going to convince them that they made an error. Abuse is evidence of the absence of technical errors.


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>Later in the comments section there is a doubling down:
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etbe
April 27, 2015 at 20:38

Matti: thanks for the “not all anti-systemd people” response.

aL: In my post I said “for some reason…”, I really don’t know why the misogynists have banded together to make dislike of systemd their issue. I don’t choose to relate these issues, I just report on what I observe.

Dmitry: Thanks for pointing that out, this post has been in my drafts folder for a while. ;)

Larry: I guess to some extent this is driven by people who don’t have the ability to influence things through technical work. If I had any problems with the way things were going I could develop my own patched packages, run my own APT repository, etc – I’ve done all this and more in the past. People who lack such skills can only comment. But if they restricted themselves to useful comments such as bug reports and analysis of technical features then it would be better for everyone.

Recently there was a discussion about systemd on my local LUG mailing list, it turned out that none of the people who had the strongest objections to it had even tested it once. There was only one person who had any serious disagreement with systemd who had actually used it.

Shlomo: I cited adequate references to support my assertions, feel free to read them.

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etbe
April 27, 2015 at 20:50

http://www.dailydot.com/politics/8chan-pedophiles-child-porn-gamergate/

Shlomo: From your anti-SJW rant I guess you found my post from the thread on 8ch.net. The above article about 8chan is worth reading.

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etbe
April 27, 2015 at 23:19

http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15%2F04%2F26%2F0231205

Soylentnews has a thread titled “Debian Systemd SJWs”, user Marand makes some insightful comments including “Unfortunately, all he’s managed to do so far is convince the Debian folks that anybody that doesn’t approve of the move to implement systemd for Jessie is a Mikee apologist and supporter, such as the remark made in this post by Russell Coker [coker.com.au]. If Mikee’s real goal was to get legitimate anti-systemd sentiment ignored because everyone’s more focused on his attention-grabbing bullshit, he did a great job.”

I should have stated in my post that I don’t think that all opposition to systemd is based on people like Mikee, it’s merely the most vocal commentary that comes from crazy assholes.

It is possible to disagree about which option is best on technical merits. But such disagreement has to be based on the fact that both options have been proven to work and that the sky isn’t going to fall if the option you prefer doesn’t get chosen.

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etbe
April 28, 2015 at 03:04

Nate: Very few people directly admit to hating women. But people who are prepared to associate with someone like MikeeUSA are implicitly admitting to it. Also the fact that this matter is being discussed on 8chan which is the home of GamerGate is strong evidence for that conclusion.

But really just look around, track the discussions and see what positions people take.

Systemd systems boot faster than systems running SysVinit. Booting with systemd requires involves systemd doing most things instead of the mass of scripts that you get with SysVinit. I think that disproves the claims about bloat and performance.

It’s ok to think that SysVinit is a better choice, Debian still supports using it. But all the threats and abuse aren’t ok.

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etbe
April 28, 2015 at 13:31

moatib: I don’t read the Debian User Forums, why would I want to read that? Dealing with jerks who comment on my blog posts is bad enough.

aurora: Minix never became popular because the license didn’t allow free distribution so all development was restricted to what the owner was prepared to accept. Linux got the developers because we could freely do what we wanted with it. The developers made it a product that people wanted to use.

Bernhard: Are you claiming that following the Debian procedures regarding the technical committee and the GR process counts as “blindly shooting”? Are you claiming that my blog post which gives a quick summary of how to use systemd is “blindly shooting”?

What do you think we should do with the people you consider to be “rabid”? The standard practice when dealing with rabid animals is to kill them. Presumably you aren’t advocating that solution.

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etbe
April 28, 2015 at 16:54

oz: In page 2 of the PDF you cite it shows E1115 as total outgoings for the 2014 year of which E541 is for a laptop and E450 is for “financial admin”.

My claim was that most of the money that was spent went to accounting fees and a laptop. To be precise 48.5% of the money spent was on a laptop and 40% was on “financial admin”.

Unless you are claiming that “accounting fees” and “financial admin” mean entirely different things then I think that we can agree that my description of 89% as being “most of the money spent” is reasonable.

Also I think that describing 48.5% of something as “a tiny part” is entirely unreasonable. If you asked people to describe 48.5% in English words I think that the most common answer would be “half” and I doubt that anyone would say “a tiny part”.

81% of all money spent that didn’t go to financial admin went to buying a laptop. The laptop is the main that was purchased in 2014.

Are reports about 2015 out yet?

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etbe
April 28, 2015 at 22:28

oz: the fact that they have enough money left to buy another 9 laptops doesn’t change the fact that half the outgoings were related to that laptop.

Tom: I said nothing like that. I merely noted the strong correlation between misogyny and dislike of systemd and the fact that the most hateful misogynist who bothers Debian people is involved in the anti-systemd thing. The fact that the 8chan people appear to be against systemd is further evidence, for those who are unaware 8chan is the home of GamerGate since it was banned from 4chan.

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etbe
April 28, 2015 at 23:02

oz: If they are going to actually fork Debian then they need build servers to automatically build the software. They need build/test servers for all the different supported architectures if they want to do more than just amd64 and i386. They need servers to distribute the software, if you get even 100,000 systems using your APT repository then you need some big servers and a mirror network.

This isn’t a major issue to me, I’m only replying to correct you. You seem very desperate to prove me wrong as after so much effort to find errors you are now doing the “what is your point” thing.

As for your comparison with Ubuntu you should keep in mind the amount of money that was invested in Canonical. The Ubuntu way isn’t a viable option for Devuan.

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etbe
April 30, 2015 at 03:24

richardo: MikeeUSA is going to keep spouting misogyny, he’s been doing it for over 10 years now and there’s no reason to expect him to stop. Does anyone know why he’s taken a dislike to systemd?

The fact that you think systemd is great isn’t relevant to this discussion. It doesn’t bother me that some people think it’s not great, I would be happier if we could have a discussion of features in init systems. When I wrote about how to use systemd that was an opportunity for interested people to discuss the relative merits of systemd and sysvinit – but no-one took that opportunity. Instead I got abusive comments.

Why does a post about how to use systemd get comments that are primarily gender and sexuality based abuse?

Jude: I have known about MikeeUSA for many years. Some years ago he sent me a death threat and I also suspect that he was the author of a rape threat I received (which from the nature of the comment indicated that the author had spent a lot of time fantasising about such things).

AFAIK Weev isn’t involved in the discussions on Debian mailing lists. I don’t think it’s relevant when awful people comment on software and everyone else just acts normally. But when awful people get abusive and others follow their example we have to question the motives of the followers.

If Devuan is not going to compile all of the packages and is based on users taking most packages from Debian servers (which is totally acceptable) then it’s not really a fork of Debian.

https://git.devuan.org/devuan-doc/manuals

The Wiki link at the above page is broken.


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etbe
April 30, 2015 at 18:16

Jude: You don’t seem to have understood anything about this post.

My dealings with anti-systemd people makes me want to have nothing to do with them. I am not interested in reading about devuan, as far as I’m concerned the only good thing about it is that it keeps the anti-systemd people away from Debian. My patience for those people ran out before the Debian fork was even announced. My definition of “abusive” in this case is messages that have little substance other than profanity.

One thing we can take away from the commentary on this post is that the way to make anti-systemd people behave is to make it a PR issue. My last post about systemd received abusive comments. This post didn’t receive any, apparently because I made it a PR issue.

Doing the GamerGate thing isn’t a viable way of influencing software development decisions.


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etbe
May 2, 2015 at 20:47

Jude: I don’t think you understand Godwin’s law. It was never just about references to Hitler (or other evil people) but inappropriate references. The fact that this post has been discussed on 8chan and that 8chan users have joined the discussion here makes 8chan relevant. We’ve even had someone in this discussion defend GamerGate.

Anon: If MikeeUSA liked Wayland it wouldn’t be relevant unless a heap of Wayland supporters started using the same tactics. Even then it wouldn’t be particularly relevant to technical issues as which protocols are used for display is determined by applications. The X protocol must be supported because of all the ancient applications but the interfaces provided by SysVInit can easily be provided by all other init systems.

Jamie: OK then, please explain why a strict technical post that informs users who want to use systemd attracts the attention of immature jerks on the Internet.

Also the “pushback” on this post hasn’t included profanity or abuse linked to gender or sexuality. It’s proof that “immature jerks” can refrain from such things if they want to. Why can’t they do that all the time?

dugans: Are you seriously saying that the lack of homophobic and sexist abuse in comments on this post is doe to this post being a “childish level of name-calling”?

Also in the past I’ve maintained a fork of sysvinit for SE Linux support (by the standards of the devuan people I’ve forked Debian). I’ve also written SE Linux policy for SysVInit and systemd which involves having a reasonable knowledge of how they work. My experience with init systems hasn’t given me any reason to think that systemd is unsuitable.



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