Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Is gnome becoming obligatory?

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Wols

On Sun, Dec 10, 2017 at 09:55:45 +0000, Wols Lists wrote:
> On 09/12/17 12:08, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> > I'm all in favour of Lennart-bashing, but let's keep the bashing to what
> > he's responsible for.

> <flame suit on>

<flamethrower on>

> As far as I can tell, the most egregious thing he's responsible for is
> for wanting a well-designed system that works!

No, he's done far worse than that.

> Face it, linux is a hodge-podge of things thrown together, and held
> together with baling wire and sealing wax.

It's a hodge-podge, yes, but held together with robust protocols.

> Lennart doesn't want a system where a small failure in one place
> cascades and brings down a load of stuff elsewhere.

Neither do I, and neither does anybody.  GNU/Linux is not like that, and
never has been.  It has traditionally been a massive pain to set up,
though, something which has improved dramatically over the last ten or
twenty years.

> Granted he's not necessarily the most politic of people, and has ruffled
> a lot of feathers, but I'd much rather a system he's cleaned up, than a
> system where everything hangs together on a knife-edge.

His motivation seems to be ego.  To force everybody to use his software.
He did this by, amongst other things, abusing the trust placed in him to
maintain udev.  Early on he abandoned support for udev for everybody but
users of his new init system, systemd, in an attempt (sadly successful)
to force "everybody" into using systemd.

I've no idea how good systemd is.  It's not been through the normal
process of choice and selection that other successful packages have.  It
was forced on people.  But being forced to have a binary system log,
being forced (so I have heard) to have an http server running, ....,
doesn't make it an attractive package for me.

> Cheers,
> Wol

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).