Re: [gentoo-user] from Firefox52: NO pure ALSA?, WAS: Firefox 49.0 & Youtube... Audio: No

[Rich Freeman]

On Tue, Dec 20, 2016 at 5:51 PM, Alan Mackenzie <acm@×××.de> wrote:
>
> As a reference point, just before I start, I'm a contributor to Emacs,
> both new stuff and bug fixing, in both C and Lisp, and (occasionally) I
> write documentation.  ;-)
>

Great.  I don't use any of that stuff.

How would you feel if I told you to just quit doing those things
(which you presumably enjoy) to maintain something else that you don't
care for, like systemd?

That would clearly be wrong of me.  People work on the stuff they're
interested in.  People who are interested in using openrc are going to
work on openrc.  People who are interested in systemd are going to
work on systemd.

It is nice if you run into a situation where you work on software I
like and I work on software you like.  However, that isn't the same as
pointing out that you contribute to something that you like, and
therefore I should also contribute to something that you like.

> On Tue, Dec 20, 2016 at 12:57:02PM -0500, Rich Freeman wrote:
>> On Tue, Dec 20, 2016 at 12:44 PM, Heiko Baums <lists@××××××××××××.de> wrote:
>> > Am 20.12.2016 um 17:47 schrieb Rich Freeman:
>
>> Anybody can run openrc on Arch linux.  They just have to set it up
>> themselves, or form a group to share the work.
>
> There's no "just" to it.  It would be a long, time consuming project;
> unless, of course you were already intimately familiar with both openrc
> and Arch Linux.

Sure, and that is how we end up with stuff in the community-based FOSS
world.  People freely spend their time on long time-consuming
projects, so that others can benefit in turn, and probably so that
they can personally benefit in some way.

If something doesn't work on a particular distro, it is because nobody
cared enough to spend a lot of time on it.

>
> systemd is primarily a political project, not a technical one.

What political benefit do I gain from using and maintaining systemd?
I don't use any Redhat-originated distros at home or at work.  I don't
get paid in any way by them, or by anybody who actually profits from
FOSS much at all.  I'm certainly not going to gain votes on the Gentoo
Council by saying I use systemd, since Gentoo has become a bit of a
refuge for people who seem to despise it, and far more Gentoo
developers prefer openrc to systemd.

I use systemd because I personally find it useful, and the reasons for
that are largely technical in my judgment.

>
> Sadly, there are not enough people in the free software world who were
> politically aware enough, and energetic enough, to fight this purloining
> of our software by Red Hat.

Sometimes when people make different decisions than you do, it isn't
because they don't know something that you know, or because they're
not as smart as you.  Sometimes they just have different priorities.

I don't consider Red Hat taking over the world a serious threat.
Heaven forbid they donate more free software that I can choose to use
or not if I wish.

>
>> > That's true for Gentoo, Slackware, Devuan, and maybe still Debian, but
>> > not for the other Distros like Ubuntu and its derivatives, Arch Linux,
>> > Redhat, Fedora etc.
>
>
>> Anybody can maintain openrc on any distro.
>
> No they can't.  Or at least, not unless they make it their main spare
> time occupation, and already are competent hackers.

They could also hire somebody to maintain it for them, or barter what
they have in some way.  Maybe I could be persuaded to do a little
openrc work for you on Arch if you spent some time improving vim.  :)

>
>> Maybe they can't put it in the official repository, that would be up to
>> the people who control those repositories.  However, as everybody is
>> quick to point out the dependency list for sysvinit+openrc is
>> incredibly light, which makes it fairly easy to run on any distro.  You
>> could probably get sysvinit running on arch in 15min.
>
> Sorry, but that's so far out of kilter with reality I have to object.  If
> you are intimately familiar with openrc, the Linux booting system,
> administrative things (like where to find the source code), technical
> things (how to build it, how to link it into Linux), you just _might_
> manage it in a few hours.  Somebody starting from scratch is not going to
> get sysvinit running on a different distro in 15 hours, never mind 15
> minutes.

You don't need to know anything at all about openrc to get sysvinit
working.  Sysvinit doesn't depend on openrc in any way.

sysvinit consists of one 60-line configuration file (most of which is
comments), 8 binaries, and 5 symlinks.  Oh, and some manpages and docs
and stuff.  It isn't very hard to set up.

And that is how you go about things like this, one step at a time.

>
> I thoroughly dislike all these platitudes that have also annoyed Heiko.
> That "you get what you pay for", "It's free, get up and hack", and so on.

Well, ultimately these are attitudes that benefit the world of FOSS,
because 1 guy that actually contributes back is worth 100 who whine on
mailing lists all day.

Sure, I get that different people contribute in different ways, and
that is fine.  However, nobody is required to support a complex
configuration that you prefer but which they do not.  If you're right
that setting up openrc on another distro is a ton of work and requires
all kinds of expertise, then that is all the more reason that you
won't see it happen.  And it isn't like setting up systemd is any
easier.  The volunteers who got it running on Gentoo chose to invest
that time because they wanted to use it, and that was back when half
the maintainers couldn't be bothered to commit a systemd unit and a
few would actively try to revert such contributions (fortunately that
has not been a problem for a while).

If somebody prefers systemd to openrc, then of course they're going to
spend their time maintaining the one and not the other.

Gentoo supports choice, but only to the degree that people are willing
to invest in those choices.  As long as people want openrc to work
then it will, and certainly nobody is going to try to exclude it from
the repository.  And there are plenty of people around here who do
want to support it, so I don't see it going away anytime soon.

However, unless people actually invest in openrc on other distros,
then it simply won't be an option on other distros.

>
> I don't like the way things are going.  Good night!
>

There are lots of things I also don't like.  In the end this is a
community based distro, so we get what others are willing to
contribute, not what we want them to contribute.  Mark Shuttleworth
gets what he pays people to contribute, and that is another way to go
about it.  There are things I would love to see developed that most
people wouldn't care about, and as a result I might never see them
developed.  That is a shame, but being mad at everybody else for
having different preferences than me won't get me anywhere.

As far as Gentoo goes, we're about choice.  We don't have some
committee on high pick a winner and tell all the maintainers that they
all have to move from supporting x to supporting y.  We set reasonable
policies that let the various options co-exist, and people contribute
to what they want to.  I'm sorry if some other distro makes it harder
to get openrc running.  I'm less sorry if their only sin is to not
donate their time to make it work.  Either way there isn't much I can
do about it.

-- 
Rich