Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Optional /usr merge in Gentoo

[Daniel Campbell]

On 08/19/2013 12:52 AM, Mark David Dumlao wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 5:54 AM, pk <peterk2@××××××××.se> wrote:
>> On 2013-08-18 23:08, Mick wrote:
>>
>>> I honestly cannot understand why we/Gentoo are allowing the RHL
>>> monolithic development philosophy to break what we have.  Is
>>> Poettering the only developer available to the Linux world?  Are
>>> RHL dictating what path Debian and its cousin distros should
>>> follow?
>>
>> Problem is that Linux is dependent on udev and udev is in the hands of
>> Kay Sievers which also develops systemd together with Lennart
>> Poettering which in turn used to be a Gnome developer... With that
>> said, what I cannot understand is why people advocating systemd (and
>> the kitchen-and-sink model) are using Gentoo in the first place. Are
>> they just trying to make the rest of the Linux distro landscape as
>> miserable as Fedora? Why don't they stay with Fedora instead of trying
>> to turn Gentoo into Fedora?
>>
>
> This kind of response has been repeatedly grating on my nerves
> on this mailing list. It's just so TECHNICALLY WRONG, but more than
> that I feel that it hints at a deeper problem about user attitudes and the
> need to act like a know-it-all that is so prevalent on this mailing list.
>
> Systemd is _not_ a monolithic design. I don't know how anyone who
> has taken even a casual glance at it, or its documentation, can say
> otherwise. It's so reminiscent of qmail or postfix, where you have a
> bunch of small programs each doing one thing well, but for init
> systems rather than for mail, that it's just one step away from being
> the kind of program you show to kids to teach them how to Unix.

It's not monolithic? Okay, then why won't logind work separately after
systemd-206? QED. If you cannot separate its parts and use them
piecemeal, it's monolithic. Period. Separation of concerns within a
project as vast as systemd is to be expected if you want to be able to
read the source. That doesn't mean that systemd isn't monolithic when
used in an actual system. Systemd swallowed udev and is doing whatever
they can to tie logind behavior into the init system to get people to
use it. That's the very definition of monolithic.

>
> Scroll up further on the random systemd rants on this mailing list and
> you'll "learn" that systemd has a binary / xml configuration format
> (it doesn't, it's plaintext INI, like samba) that requires binary code to
> run daemons (um, no it doesn't), or that thanks to systemd, old,
> perfectly working servers will just stop running...
>
> You know what I think? You can't understand why some people
> like or want to support systemd because you don't _want_ to
> understand. It requires you to learn something new. There's an
> old problem, _mostly_, but not entirely, solved, where we've swept
> the ugly parts out of sight so that they don't bug you. The parts of
> systemd that you don't understand why they should be there
> are the parts that deal with those ugly things you don't want to learn.
> I know that feeling, of being forced to learn something new and thinking
> "do I really have to?" and I know I hate it. It's the same reason why
> RTFM is considered rude. But it's basically the appropriate response
> here. You wanna figure out why systemd does what it does? RTFM.
>
> Yes, system initialization SHOULD be simple. Just like
> mail or web SHOULD be. And heck, If you want to run some bash
> script to do your web or mail or init, nobody's stopping you.
>
> But somebody, somewhere, is going to want features, which is why
> we have apache or postfix, and what-have-you. And if other projects want
> to use those features, they're free to want to require those software
> as they please. You don't like it? Don't use those projects. Or fork
> them. But stop acting like a pompous know-it-all, quoting software
> design witticisms as if you've actually looked at the problem domain
> even half as seriously as the developers involved.
>
> Oh but systemd is going to eat up all our software so that nothing
> will run without it! Don't be ridiculous. They said that about Emacs,
> Java, Lisp, GNOME, kdepim, The Browser(tm), etc etc etc. If you've
> paid any attention at all to the history of software, it's obvious that it's
> not happening. Why the hell would apache, which runs on windows,
> require systemd? Or firefox? Or google chrome? Or qmail? Or postfix?
> Or MySQL? Or samba? etc etc etc
>
> If there's anything surprising, it's that you seriously thought a software
> development house (cough cough Redhat) wouldn't try to dogfood their
> own stuff into their other products (cough cough GNOME) _which
> already have forks by the way_, so what are you worried about?
>

What he and others are worried about is a single company homogenizing
the distribution landscape, starting at the bottom with the init system.
By making every distro dependent on them for init, they can
systematically homogenize the software ecosystem and kill (mainstream)
FOSS. This would benefit their business immensely. It's hard to deny
that this isn't being attempted with the spread of systemd and GNOME
(which has Red Hat devs working on it) requiring systemd. It's a perfect
storm and the community has drank the kool-aid. Gentoo is considered the
last bastion of choice for most users, lest we go as far down as
Slackware and LFS to maintain things. While Gentoo (for now) states that
systemd will not become the default, other distros (Arch) claimed the
very same thing before they pushed systemd on their users. There is
little reason to trust things won't go downhill from here. I'd love to
be wrong (seriously, Gentoo's been a great experience for me), but all
signs point to Gentoo falling to systemd as well. All it takes is a
majority vote among the Council and it happens.

Homogenizing the software stack will kill FOSS and turn Linux into
another corporate OS.