On Sat, 25 Jun 2016 21:01:28 +0200
Didier Kryn <kryn@???> wrote:

> Le 25/06/2016 18:34, Steve Litt a écrit :

> > My suspicion is that the --without-systemd switch represents a huge
> > defeat for Lennart and the Redhats. When Debian decided to switch in
> > the summer of 2014, the systemd cartel were strutting and boasting
> > that they would soon own the world.
> >
> > Now, 2 years later, Samba, a bedrock "killer app" for Linux, still
> > has a --without-systemd compile option. If Redhat had truly
> > succeeded in their plans, such an option would be unneeded and
> > useless in 2016.
>

>      Yet I would prefer if there was a --with-systemd option and the 
> default was without :-)

>

>      Didier

That would be my preference too. The point I was making is that the
very existence of --without-systemd in 2016 means Redhat did not
complete their takeover.

Take a time machine back back to September 2014. Debian had kangaroo
court approved the switch to systemd and only systemd, unless a few
maintainers wanted to do us "greybeards" a "favor" and keep
maintaining sysvinit. All the Debian descendants, including Ubuntu, were
going along. All of a sudden it was very hard or impossible
*work-worthy* non-systemd distro. Lennart was busy gloating about the
takeover, and the systemd fanboiz were feeling the juice enough to
almost chant "na na na na na" to advocates of init choice. A group
calling themselves the Veteran Unix Administrators threw up a web page
threatening a fork if Debian didn't walk back their decision, but
almost everybody thought this was an empty bluff. The various BSD
versions were discussing putting a systemd like thing in *their*
software. Things looked bleak: It looked like Redhat would win quickly,
mop up, and all work-worthy Open Source operating systems would be
systemd.

Back around that time, I discovered that my plan B wouldn't work.
OpenBSD, which in other ways is one of the finest OSs I've ever worked
with, had no support for hardware assisted virtual machines, meaning
that any program not available through OpenBSD wouldn't be available at
all. It looked like Redhat had won: I began seriously contemplating
switching to a Mac, and those of you who really know me know how much
that hurt: I have no use for the entire Apple culture.

Put in the context of the preceding two paragraphs, the fact that Samba
has --without-systemd in June of 2016 is nothing short of a miracle,
and nothing short of a repudiation of Redhat's quick victory plans.

Of course, if you look at it from today's perspective, it's not
miraculous, because you know that the Veteran Unix Administrators went
on to back up their supposed bluff with Devuan, stealing a heck of a
lot of Debian's mental assets in the process. You know that some
Manjaro people came out with Manjaro-OpenRC. You know that Gentoo,
Funtoo, Alpine, Void, and I hear Anti-X, as well as several others,
stayed put and didn't go to systemd.

But anybody in late 2014, who saw Samba's 2016 --without-systemd in a
crystal ball, would have jumped for joy.

SteveT

Steve Litt
June 2016 featured book: Troubleshooting: Why Bother?
http://www.troubleshooters.com/twb