Re: [gentoo-amd64] Boycott Systemd

[Canek Peláez Valdés]

On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 12:58 PM, Barry Schwartz
<chemoelectric@×××××××××××××.org> wrote:
> Lie Ryan <lie.1296@×××××.com> skribis:
>> Diversity isn't about feeding people who feels everything not-invented
>> here is godawful. When you have a clearly defined problem and you can
>> create a solution that satisfies that niche better than any other
>> solutions, that is diversity.
>
> ‘Diversity’ here is deviation from established Unix/POSIX philosophy
> in system design. Years of effort to simplify programming are being
> thrown away on grounds that resemble common arguments in favor of the
> ‘tight integration’ that is Microsoft Windows. I mean, seriously, many
> of the pro-systemd arguments are like those I have heard for using
> Windows: that applications ‘just work’, because they were written for
> a dominant system.
>
> But I view this like a programmer, not like a Windows user; I want my
> software to be portable because it is written portably (in a POSIX
> sense), not because it is written for a universally available
> particular POSIX variant. What I see is something like a return to the
> days when you had to write different code for variants of USG, BSD,
> and whatnot, except that now, unlike then, one of the variants is
> overwhelmingly dominant.
>
> What I really fear, though, is what if one day the kernel team is a
> different entity, more like other entities in the Linux world?

As a professional programmer, I completely disagree with any dogma
based on "philosophy" rather than technical merits. I will not rehash
here the same discussion we have had several times in gentoo-user, so
I will just paste what Linus recently had to say about "the
traditional unix"[1].

"So I think many of the "original ideals" of UNIX are these days more
of a mindset issue than necessarily reflecting reality of the
situation.

"There's still value in understanding the traditional UNIX "do one
thing and do it well" model where many workflows can be done as a
pipeline of simple tools each adding their own value, but let's face
it, it's not how complex systems really work, and it's not how major
applications have been working or been designed for a long time. It's
a useful simplification, and it's still true at *some* level, but I
think it's also clear that it doesn't really describe most of reality.

"It might describe some particular case, though, and I do think it's a
useful teaching tool. People obviously still do those traditional
pipelines of processes and file descriptors that UNIX is perhaps
associated with, but there's a *lot* of cases where you have big
complex unified systems."

Let me emphasize the important part:

"There's still value in understanding the traditional UNIX [...] model
[...], but let's face it, it's not how complex systems really work".

So, I'm sorry, but if I'm going to take a programmer's word, is going
to be Linus over almost anyone else. And to quote Rob Pike: "Not only
is UNIX dead, it’s starting to smell really bad."

Regards.

[1] http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/65402-torvalds-says-he-has-no-strong-opinions-on-systemd
-- 
Canek Peláez Valdés
Profesor de asignatura, Facultad de Ciencias
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México