Re: [gentoo-user] Re: [ANNOUNCE] I like systemd now :)

[Alan McKinnon]

On Mon, 12 Nov 2012 02:37:13 -0600
Canek Peláez Valdés <caneko@×××××.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 2:20 AM, Alan McKinnon
> <alan.mckinnon@×××××.com> wrote:
> > On Sun, 11 Nov 2012 20:17:50 -0600
> > Canek Peláez Valdés <caneko@×××××.com> wrote:
> >
> >> On Sun, Nov 11, 2012 at 7:57 PM, Alan McKinnon
> >> <alan.mckinnon@×××××.com> wrote: [snip]
> >> > In trying to solve a general problem, Lennart has a knack for
> >> > breaking Gentoo - this distro does not fit the general problems
> >> > he works on.
> >>
> >> Oh, really? Didn't get the memo. I suppose all my machines
> >> (laptops, desktops, servers and media center) running with
> >> Gentoo+systemd (and what is more, *without* OpenRC) are a fidget
> >> of my imagination.
> >>
> >> Regards.
> >
> > Are you in discussion mode or pick a fight mode?
> >
> > I'm hoping it's the former.
>
> Just in discussion mode. The statement "this distro does not fit the
> general problems he [Poettering] works on" doesn't make much sense; I
> thought Gentoo fitted basically everything the user wanted to.
> Therefore, in particular fits the model set by the systemd/udev
> developers.
>
> Case in point: in my use cases, it fits. I just used sarcasm to refute
> said statement.

OK.

I was speaking in broad terms, and unfortunately English is a very
overloaded language; it doesn't do absolute precision very well.

I well know that any of us can configure a Gentoo system to work
correctly with just about any sane software; even if we have to get
under the hood that's all just part of the deal using Gentoo.
Quite obviously that's what you did with systemd to greater or lesser
degree.

But that's not what I was referring to, and you shouldn't take what I
said to imply I meant something universally true either. Like I said,
English is overloaded and more often than not when humans talk, the
precision is fuzzy.

Gentoo systems tend to be tweaked extensively by the owners (we have
that freedom), in contrast to binary distros that usually have a much
more rigid basic layout - you get what the maintainer gives you.
Switching the startup system on Fedora is quite straightforward - the
next release comes out with different software packages compared to the
previous version (and the user gets to figure out this new thing) but
it mostly works. On Gentoo the user gets to deal with the breakage of
such low-level changes themselves, so we open the hood and break out
the spanners. This is breakage - the fuzzy definition. 

But all of this is a side issue anyway. The main thrust of my post was
that some software and developers have a tendency to get tempers riled
up around here (remember /usr, separate volumes and initrd?) and with a
volatile audience, well they are volatile. So Bruce shouldn't consider
a thread like this one to be representative of very much at all


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@×××××.com