Hi James,

On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 11:58 PM, James Powell <james4591@???>
wrote:

> I agree T. J.
>
> The problem is too much "thinking" about problems, rather than offering a
> clear solution other than scrapping the fore and replacing it entirely
> seems to be the source of the problem.
>
> One argument I stand by adamantly is that while sysvinit was imperfect in
> design, it left room to allow the tree to branch in various ways with the
> applied tools. OpenRC is a prime example of taking sysvinit and expanding
> upon it in a way that allows for diversity just like daemontools, bsd-style
> scripting, and other service supervisors do brilliantly. Sysvinit doesn't
> have to be the workhorse, but it can be the harness providing the standard
> functions of startup and shutdown for the workhorse of your choosing.
>
> However few people are willing to step outside their boxes and look for
> ways to improve systems without resulting to rampant progressivism with new
> software than isn't even finished in it's goals.
>
> In the late 90s Dan Bernstein's daemontools could have ended the
> overreliance on sysvinit, but few embraced it.
>
> Now we see the rush to "do" when something comes along to create a rift.
> No ill will to anyone, but if anyone had have "done" years ago, there might
> be less a need to "do" now.
>

It's not clear to me how much really needed doing in the first place. The
people who actually needed djb's daemontools went ahead and used them. The
people who actually needed to contain processes in cgroups did so, and they
did so with vserver and openvz before cgroups existed. The people who
actually wanted service socket activation used xinted. The people who
actually needed to start services in parallel either hacked their init
scripts to do so, or wrote Makefiles that started/stopped groups of
services in parallel while enforcing inter-service dependencies as
dependencies between targets.

I think the sudden rush to Fix-All-The-Things we're seeing (the "rampant
progressivism" as you call it) is part of human nature. I have this pet
theory that people tend to progress through three stages of understanding
when applying themselves to a new field:
(1) they know little or nothing about it, and they know it.
(2) they learn more than they thought there was to know about it, and
(wrongly) believe that they know mostly everything about it.
(3) they reach the field's state-of-the-art and see the boundary between
what is known and unknown, and acquire the humility that comes from
understanding that no matter how much they think they know, there's a lot
more that they don't.

At any given point, there are way more people in stage #1 than stage #2,
and way more people in stage #2 than in stage #3.

The people who are comfortable using the tools I mentioned above tend to be
at stage #3 in the field of building and using UNIX-like operating
systems. This is because in addition to knowing what tools are available,
they know the trade-offs between them and how to select them to find the
best solution to a particular problem. They also know when and when not to
create new tools, and they know how to define their scope. There's no
desire on their end to sacrifice flexibility for convenience--they've dealt
with enough problems to appreciate that having lots of small
interchangeable and composable tools is critical to being able to tackle a
wide variety of them.

Unfortunately, this doesn't do people in stages #1 and #2 any favors. The
value proposition of systemd is that it automates a common set of stage #3
problem-solving strategies that a stage #1 or #2 user is likely to
encounter, but without requiring the user to have a stage #3 level of
understanding. I think it's the stage #2 people who appreciate this that
become the loud-mouthed zealots we're all so fond of. They're the ones who
want to Fix-All-The-Things--they know that there are some hard stage
#3-level problems out there, but they mistakenly believe that they (or
their favorite tool) will know how to fix them. It's not that they're Bad
People (quite the opposite, they tend to be Concerned Citizens); the
problem is that they know enough to act on the problems they see, but not
enough to know that their solutions aren't always appropriate or desirable.

As a result, enterprising developers who can capitalize on (or even create)
the concerns of the stage #2 people tend to get their software adopted and
stand to gain power, influence, and money from the community. When stage
#3 people object (as you have), the stage #2 people crowd them out as
"haters", "luddites", "elitists", or "trolls", and the stage #1 people tend
to go along with the stage #2 people since they can't tell stage #2 and
stage #3 people apart, and there are more stage #2 people. I see all the
noise about systemd as just the latest instance of this phenomenon in my
field.

Just my $0.02.
-Jude


>
> Sent from my Windows Phone
> ------------------------------
> From: T.J. Duchene <t.j.duchene@???>
> Sent: 5/13/2015 8:27 PM
> To: dng@???
> Subject: Re: [Dng] Systemd discussions at LinuxQuestions.
>
>
>
>
>
> Unfortunately this seems to be a growing trend following the Microsoft
> playbook of acquisition, suppression, and extinction on various Linux
> communities and mailing lists I've been privy to as of recent.
>
> Fewer and fewer distributions have avoided systemd but discussion into
> alternatives is growingly met with hostilities. ArchLinux took a severe
> hardline approach and rampantly banned any anti-systemd topics and users as
> well as anyone offering alternatives. While LQ has been trying to maintain
> neutrality as a position, growing numbers of systemd fanboys who
> immediately attack and troll people just to get them hushed or banned is
> climbing.
>
>
>
> In advance, I just want to say that what I am about to say is my own
> opinion and in no way reflects or represents anyone else.
>
>
>
> Put politely as possible: "Stuff them."
>
>
>
> I do not think that this is any one person, community or agenda. The
> Linux community for the most part has been dominated by communities
> beholden to a particular version of Linux and never to Linux as a whole.
> This encourages "group think." Once you get them fixated on anything - it
> does not have to be systemd - it could be package format or filesystem,
> everyone else is wrong and they are right. It does not matter what the
> reasons are. Almost all individual impulse is subsumed. When someone
> objects, for example Ian Jackson over at Debian, the community becomes so
> hostile that they leave.
>
>
>
> I just use the code. That is the whole point of opensource, and if people
> do not like my opinions then so be it. I seldom participate in Linux
> communities outside of developer discussions or help topics. Devuan is an
> exception. I came back, because for some reason I am genuinely curious
> about what goes on here. In the main, it is my opinion that the entire
> community is just too toxic. Just like politics, people have become
> intolerant beyond reason. I try very hard to be reasonable, but I frown on
> Linux these days.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Dng mailing list
> Dng@???
> https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
>
>