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PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

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Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#111
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole Lennart Poettering thing of naming and bundling otherwise completely independent pieces of software "systemd-${thing}" even when they are at best just sightly related to "things you might want managed for you in your computer" doesn't make a lot of sense, and doesn't help in his defense that "systemd is supposed to be modular". My guess is that if PulseAudio had came later, it would be called "systemd-audi…

Things which talk to the systemd dbus endpoints to add/stop/create/manipulate units are systemd-blahblah. This isn't that confusing. If it dynamically creates systemd units or sets their properties (systemd-homed, systemd-networkd, systemd-resolved) using the dbus endpoints, it's systemd-something. If it uses systemd libraries and lives in the systemd repo because it shares baseline docde, it's systemd-something. sys…

> Things which talk to the systemd dbus endpoints to add/stop/create/manipulate units are systemd-blahblah. This isn't that confusing.

It is because systemd confuses what should be split concepts into one big overarching thing.

'org.freedesktop.systemd1' (the actual systemd init D-Bus interface) somehow is still implied that it is vital to the entire systemd-something ecosystem while it's not really.

A example being systemd-hostnamed and hostnamectl complaining that 'System has not been booted with systemd as init system (PID 1). Can't operate.' [1] while in fact they use 'org.freedesktop.hostname1.${something}' [2] and that is supposed to not be bolted with the entire rest of systemd besides using sd_bus.

[1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/93258c7d72fae23c9f81... [2] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/93258c7d72fae23c9f81...

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#112
post #43
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the comments in this thread are uselessly snarky and uncivil, but Lennart Poettering is not just a single person who wrote software people don't like. PulseAudio has, deservedly or otherwise, been the face of audio issues in desktop Linux for coming on two decades now, and the tumultuous changeover to systemd as very nearly the mandatory init system for Linux left a sour taste for many long-time users.

I don't think anyone would care (probably most of us here wouldn't even know his name) if these projects had been written and integrated such that it was trivial to avoid them in favor of alternatives. No-one who hated Upstart, say, is pissed off at the people who made it. Between Red Hat's maneuvering and Poettering's choices, though, it's not trivial to avoid them.

It's very trivial to bypass those: just delete the packages off your system. Of course this means your system now won't boot, and you must expend effort to deploy a replacement. That's the actual non-trivial part. There's nothing the systemd developers can do to make that any easier for you, unless you expect them to suddenly start developing two or more init systems for some rather unclear reasons.

If the problem is that your employer has required you to only use packages supported by some vendor, that's a different problem and it extends to a lot of other things besides systemd. For some perspective you might want to go talk to some people who still have to use COBOL at work...

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#113
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things which talk to the systemd dbus endpoints to add/stop/create/manipulate units are systemd-blahblah. This isn't that confusing. If it dynamically creates systemd units or sets their properties (systemd-homed, systemd-networkd, systemd-resolved) using the dbus endpoints, it's systemd-something. If it uses systemd libraries and lives in the systemd repo because it shares baseline docde, it's systemd-something. sys…

> Things which talk to the systemd dbus endpoints to add/stop/create/manipulate units are systemd-blahblah. This isn't that confusing. It is because systemd confuses what should be split concepts into one big overarching thing. 'org.freedesktop.systemd1' (the actual systemd init D-Bus interface) somehow is still implied that it is vital to the entire systemd-something ecosystem while it's not really. A example being…

That looks like a bug, if you really have a need to do that you should report it.

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Desktop Linux is not Red Hat's core business and it hasn't been for a long, >It is getting paid to help companies make Linux work for them There's an obvious joke there :p But I think it's reasonably clear that I wasn't saying they were trying to build a moat around desktop linux, but around those enterprise offerings. One part of that is making their init system the defacto standard. >The only reason why there's a…

> There's an obvious joke there :p > But I think it's reasonably clear that I wasn't saying they were trying to build a moat around desktop linux, but around those enterprise offerings. One part of that is making their init system the defacto standard. Frankly, no, it was not, or I wouldn't have written that. Those "enterprise offerings" have zero interaction with Pulse outside of some edge cases in SPICE for VDI. Th…

I don't think we're going to reach and real agreements here, a lot of these things are going to be subjective. I think there's a certain amount of "if everyone around you is an asshole maybe you're actually an asshole" but I doubt I'm going to be changing anyone's minds today.

That being said there is a bit of hard data, this post nicely shows gnome contributions over time, as less and less non-redhat developer contribute.

https://hpjansson.org/blag/2020/12/16/on-the-graying-of-gnom...

Now I'm sure you have a dozen explanations lined up for why that might be the case, most of them involving how good redhat is and how they're a bastion of light all that, which sure I have no way to definitively prove that there's any malfeasance going on.

Still, I think it's clear that at the very least gnome has a bit of an image problem going on. Where we're not debating any kind of concrete facts as just shouting our subjective opinions of who's the asshole at each other, well I don't expect us to come to any sort of an understanding.

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#116
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be worth pondering what Poettering and Red Hat did that make people hate their work so much, and to make Poettering uniquely infamous in the open source world. No-one's upset with the creators of dozens of other init systems and audio daemons, including ones that are pretty bad, and even ones that were promoted by major distro vendors.

From my point of view as an old guy who remembers the hell of init scripts, what they did was make an alternative to remembering arcane details of how each os and distro chose to set up their scripts. This: * made debugging a random system a lot more straight forward * made putting up software for packaging a lot easier * made customizing the start-up of a daemon a lot easier (this ties in with the first point) * mad…

How many different servers of non-systemd and systemd types, have you set up and managed?

Where you had ultimate responsibility for the correct operation of the box and any VMs or services that it ran?

The reason I ask, is that despite running many more non-systemd than systemd boxes over the past 22 years, I have had far more time taken up by systemd issues than issues with other init script systems. And that includes Solaris both sysV and SMF based.

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never experienced any trouble with audio in linux before pulseaudio. There is no memory repression here; only gaslighting from you, telling me I experienced something I didn't.

Have you by chance checked the bug tracker, or reported this bug, or attempted to do any debugging to find the root cause?

That would required the "bug" to exist in the first place.

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#118
post #35
post #21

My god the comments in this thread are terrible. How can grown ass adults be so pathetically mean to a single person because he wrote (free & gratis!) software they don't like. Seriously, it's mystifying.

People dislike his work for various reasons but are still forced to use it thanks, in part, to his employer promoting it aggressively (it's not like he did all this for free). That's a recipe for saltiness. Kinda like Bill Gates back in the day (remember that "Kill Bill" game, and other similar ones?)

It was XBill, and there was a fork called XLennart.

Funny how his detractors spend more time on jokes than on shipping a better init daemon.

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#119
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone would care (probably most of us here wouldn't even know his name) if these projects had been written and integrated such that it was trivial to avoid them in favor of alternatives. No-one who hated Upstart, say, is pissed off at the people who made it. Between Red Hat's maneuvering and Poettering's choices, though, it's not trivial to avoid them.

It's very trivial to bypass those: just delete the packages off your system. Of course this means your system now won't boot, and you must expend effort to deploy a replacement. That's the actual non-trivial part. There's nothing the systemd developers can do to make that any easier for you, unless you expect them to suddenly start developing two or more init systems for some rather unclear reasons. If the problem is…

OK so in some hypothetical sense it's fine, but in practice it's a pain in the ass to avoid. So let's go with I dislike systemd in practice.

Re: PulseAudio and Systemd Creator, Lennart Poettering, Reportedly Leaves Red Hat

#120
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People dislike his work for various reasons but are still forced to use it thanks, in part, to his employer promoting it aggressively (it's not like he did all this for free). That's a recipe for saltiness. Kinda like Bill Gates back in the day (remember that "Kill Bill" game, and other similar ones?)

It was XBill, and there was a fork called XLennart. Funny how his detractors spend more time on jokes than on shipping a better init daemon.

I'm like 90% sure that at some point in that era there was one called "Kill Bill" on Windows, though I do remember XBill.

> Funny how his detractors spend more time on jokes than on shipping a better init daemon.

Part of this might be because a high percentage of his detractors already have multiple init daemons they prefer to his.

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