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Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

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Re: Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

#51

Post by LeonidasXIV »

count wrote: post #49
lucian1900 wrote: post #14

I think blaming someone for innovating is possibly the stupidest thing one could do. dbus is awesome. Best bus we have. systemd is really nice and useful, overall a better upstart. The reason it's not a patch for upstart or sysinit is that their designs preclude certain features that systemd provides. I don't know about pulseaudio, and I'm not sold on Journal.

systemd doesn't appear to solve a problem, it seems to just add a layer of indirection and complication, as well as a single point of failure for ALL system startup services, rather than letting each service just handle it's own deal. `init` already exists to kick things off properly - now init just runs systemd which then kicks things off, for no appreciable gain.

Seriously, do you even know what you're talking about? init does not start systemd at all. systemd replaces init, in a way that I can even select whether I want to use the traditional init or systemd, on boot time, with a kernel option.

And have you seen proper systemd integration? I installed Fedora lately, and man, that boots fast. Fedora solves so many things in a sane way that Ubuntu has been struggling since years. usplash, xsplash, splashy? Fedora has FDO's plymouth. Guess what, it works. SYS V init, the stupid Arch init, ubuntus upstart? Fedora has FDO's systemd, and it's faster than any of those.

Re: Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

#52

Post by lvillani »

ColdAsIce wrote: post #40
lvillani wrote: post #30

Honestly, I don't understand why move this personal attack against Lennart. From my point of view he just wrote pieces of software he deemed necessary. I would rather put the blame on distributions other than Fedora¹ for trying to integrate his stuff early and poorly (thus starting a chain-reaction which caused even more distributions to rush with integration attempts). I think he's getting a lot of flak for choices…

He could have improved esd or jack. But no.

Sure he could, but things like that happen all the time. Countless people start forks and new projects every day, while they could improve the existing ones (the world is full of examples).

I have this darwinian vision of the software world where it's extremely positive to experiment with new stuff. Only time will tell which things surpass the test of time.

Attacking someone publicly this way just because he doesn't contribute to your¹ favorite project is, in my opinion, a sick thing to do.

______

1: Not addressing you in particular.

Re: Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

#53

Post by LeonidasXIV »

toyg wrote: post #16
hasmoo wrote: post #5

Haha, "Wolfgang Draxinger" signed 28 days ago. Check out this epic battle between Draxinger and Poettering: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0

The way Poettering dismisses the "1970s unix mindset" is really sad. Here we have a big Linux contributor who apparently doesn't appreciate his heritage, which explains why he's constantly trying to reinvent it... and poorly, as the saying goes. I'm one of those who really didn't see the need for PulseAudio or any of the *Kit stuff, and even HAL was kind of a train wreck (all those years to make it stable and support…

And I am tired of the 1970 Unix mindset, don't fix what is not broken. Can we please have filesystems with a consistent encoding, like in Plan 9 or, woohoo, Windows? Or do we really need to support a mixture of Shift-JIS, EUC-JP, CP-850 or whatever else an application chooses to use?

Re: Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

#54

Post by LeonidasXIV »

adestefan wrote: post #42
sjs wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand what the big deal is. If his systems aren't useful distros won't adopt them and no harm is done. If they are useful and distros adopt them then he has advanced the state of the entire Linux community. This petition seems childish.

He's a Red Hat employee so everything he does ends up in Fedora at some point.

Don't use Fedora?

Re: Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

#55

Post by LeonidasXIV »

sigzero wrote: post #46
RexRollman wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A non-plain text syslog? That sounds stupid to me. Plain text is one of the reasons I love Unix in the first place.

Yup, incredible stupid. That means it will go into Fedora.

So who of you actually read Lennarts blog postings about the rationale? Or do you just dismiss it because SYSV didn't do that, some fourty years ago?

Re: Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

#56

Post by zecg »

Quoth Dziuba: "A long time ago, the original neckbeards decided that it was a good idea to chain together small programs that each performed a specific task, and that the universal interface between them should be text. If you develop on a Unix platform and you abide by this principle, the operating system will reward you with simplicity and prosperity."

Re: Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

#57

Post by ominous_prime »

count wrote: post #49
lucian1900 wrote: post #14

I think blaming someone for innovating is possibly the stupidest thing one could do. dbus is awesome. Best bus we have. systemd is really nice and useful, overall a better upstart. The reason it's not a patch for upstart or sysinit is that their designs preclude certain features that systemd provides. I don't know about pulseaudio, and I'm not sold on Journal.

systemd doesn't appear to solve a problem, it seems to just add a layer of indirection and complication, as well as a single point of failure for ALL system startup services, rather than letting each service just handle it's own deal. `init` already exists to kick things off properly - now init just runs systemd which then kicks things off, for no appreciable gain.

> `init` already exists to kick things off properly - now init just runs systemd which then kicks things off, for no appreciable gain.

NO, systemd in an init replacement. Yes, init may get the job done, but it can be done so much better. Solaris dropped init years ago, but unfortunately licencing prevented their implementation from being ported to Linux distributions.

Upstart (by Canonical/Ubuntu) was the first major attempt in Linux, and has been running services in Ubuntu and Fedora for a few releases now. Lennart saw that upstart may not have gone far enough, and started his own implementation. Systemd may not be the panacea we want, but the it is on the right track for innovation, which we need.

Re: Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

#58

Post by zokier »

toyg wrote: post #19
microtonal wrote: post #4

Blaming Lennart (not Leonard!) is a bit counterproductive. There's a general tendency in the desktop Linux community to rewrite components every few years, rather than improving what exists. I guess this is mainly caused by the failure of Linux as a commercial desktop. Except for heroic efforts by Red Hat, SUSE, and previously Sun, it's mostly a hobbyist affair. As a hobby, people prefer to do the fun work, not the t…

The failure of Linux as a commercial desktop is also (not entirely, of course) his responsibility, considering the crap he pulled with all the desktop components he messed with (PulseAudio, HAL, DBUS etc etc), so clearly it's not a causal factor for his behaviour.

He is responsible for distributions choosing to use his software?

Re: Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

#59

Post by count »

LeonidasXIV wrote: post #51
count wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

systemd doesn't appear to solve a problem, it seems to just add a layer of indirection and complication, as well as a single point of failure for ALL system startup services, rather than letting each service just handle it's own deal. `init` already exists to kick things off properly - now init just runs systemd which then kicks things off, for no appreciable gain.

Seriously, do you even know what you're talking about? init does not start systemd at all. systemd replaces init, in a way that I can even select whether I want to use the traditional init or systemd, on boot time, with a kernel option. And have you seen proper systemd integration? I installed Fedora lately, and man, that boots fast. Fedora solves so many things in a sane way that Ubuntu has been struggling since yea…

You're right, I misunderstood the integration.

It still seems like it's optimizing for the wrong thing for the vast majority of linux users. The # of linux servers, which don't care about boot time (or where software init is a very tiny part of boot time anyway) is way larger than the number of people using it as a desktop. Boot time isn't the thing that's keeping linux off the desktop.

Rewriting scripts and rolling them into a C daemon defeats the whole point of scripts in the first place - the administrator of the system can't make quick changes or easily troubleshoot things (or, optionally, selectively enable/disable small sections of initialization). It's also a large amount of new work for folks busy fixing actual broken or buggy parts of their software.

Lennart complains that the starting PID on his linux desktop is too high, because init scripts call 'grep', 'awk', etc. - and that developers should rewrite all of that into their own startup daemons. It seems like he's complaining about the 'UNIX way' of small, text-oriented tools each doing one job and piping the results between them for flexibility and power for the the system administrator. Moving all of that into a C-based daemon, hiding it entirely from the administrator (short of a unsupported-by-your-contract recompile and source mod) doesn't seem like a net win for me, especially for a few seconds saved two or three times a year.

Most scary is the way he wants to handle socket based services - it's already the source of one remote DOS against a machine running systemd: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=739538

Re: Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

#60

Post by rwmj »

adestefan wrote: post #43
hasmoo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except for heroic efforts by Red Hat, SUSE, and previously Sun, it's mostly a hobbyist affair. Lennart Poettering is a Red Hat employee.

And some argue that this is the only reason why these things actually make it into the Linux desktop ecosystem. If he wasn't a Red Hat employee would they ever make it into a distribution?

PulseAudio is used in Ubuntu, and systemd is in other non-Fedora distros, so I guess the answer is yes.
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