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On Tue, 2012-01-03 at 14:35 -0500, Rich Freeman wrote: |
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> 2012/1/3 Olivier Crête <tester@g.o>: |
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> > A couple years ago, Gentoo was the forward looking distribution, ready |
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> > to try radical changes that break existing assumption, like our init |
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> > scripts with dependencies or our early use of udev. These days, I see so |
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> > much resistance to progress, it makes me sad. |
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> |
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> I think the key is to keep huge changes optional to start with. This |
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> one feels like it is being pushed upon us. |
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> |
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> I don't really have a big problem with moving to /usr and all that. |
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> However, I do have some concerns with the larger direction that |
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> everybody is taking with vertical integration (which this is just a |
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> part of). For example, if eventually you can't run gnome without |
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> systemd where does that leave bsd gentoo users? Gentoo is about |
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> choice, and various upstream efforts are moving in the direction of |
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> giving users only one choice - take it or leave it. How do you |
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> install KDE and Gnome on the same system when they eventually want |
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> different sysvinit implementations. Will the RedHat and Ubuntu of the |
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> future have no more in common than Tivo and Android do today? |
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|
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Well, don't worry, the KDE people don't have the will or the means to |
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make their own init system.. And rumor is that Ubuntu may be switching |
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to systemd in the near future too. |
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|
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With a Linux kernel, you already need some Linux specific things like |
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udev, ifconfig/ip, etc. In the new world, you also have a Linux specific |
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init system. The BSD people are free to do whatever they want, they can |
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try to keep up with the Linux kernel, but good luck to them. Or they can |
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stay in the 80s. My advice to them is to admit that Linux is so far |
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ahead that they can't catch up and just join us. |
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|
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Honestly, we should not promote choice at the expense of quality, |
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maintainability and reliability and these are the decisions that have |
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been made by the udev/systemd/etc upstreams. All of the init systems of |
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each Linux distribution has been doing the same thing in slightly |
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incompatible ways, so everyone has to maintain separate init scripts, on |
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each distro you have to remember where to set things like the hostname |
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(/etc/conf.d/hostname, /etc/hostname, /etc/rc.d/hostname, /etc/system/hostname, etc/wtf), etc. One of the key goals of systemd is to reduce this confusion by standardising the boot process across all distributions. |
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|
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Vertical integration is the only way we can make things "Just Work" for |
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the users, we tried to do abstraction layers (HAL for example), but it |
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has been a failure. In the GNOME project, we're trying to make the Linux |
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desktop awesome, and we plan to fix any part of the puzzle that would |
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prevent us from achieving that goal. |
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|
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-- |
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Olivier Crête |
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tester@g.o |
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Gentoo Developer |