Interview: Lennart Poettering

Interview: Lennart Poettering
linuxvoice.com

the bit where he picks apart upstart, gentoo, etc., are nothing more than callous, myopic opinions yet he answers them with cheerful conviction.

technical arguments can be made for or against any piece of code. but, he dismisses other projects with a wave of his hand firmly stating that systemd is the "only" correct evolution.

i'm am neutral on systemd. do i think the old init system(s) are the right way? not really. do i think systemd is the right way? not really. would i be fine with systemd in the future? perhaps. would i be fine with another bit of code? perhaps.

but to dismiss the concerns of a large number of community members, to neglect or downright deny bugs and issues, to shoehorn a project into _everything_ while closing your ears to everyone else, these are my issues with the project.

if it works, great. but at least open your eyes and ears and work with everyone.

i migrated my home kit to freebsd from debian because i was having errors. failed boots. crashes. config problems. and i didn't have a decade of old crusty init scripts to begin with.

what used to be rock solid on my hardware became annoying to deal with.

i'm all for change and evolution in software/systems and i don't personally have a problem with poettering or what he is trying to do, but he's doing it in a piss poor way.

"...to make it clear, I think Upstart actually has its benefits. The source code is very, very nice, and it’s very simple, but I think it’s too simple. It doesn’t have this engine that can figure out what the computer is supposed to be doing."

is callous and myopic?

The problems arise when it doesn't automatically do what you want it to do and you don't have a good way of fixing it yourself. I'm not in a position to understand init systems so I will be in this camp if there's ever any problem with any init system. What matters to me, as the end user, is how likely it is to work automatically.

If systemd 'just works', then what's the problem? If systemd is broken... well, that's a problem, isn't it. But from what I've seen a lot (though not all, of course) of the arguments against it are highly political/philosophical and aren't based on whether it's actually working or not.

"What’s typical for Unix, for example, is that all the tools, the C library, the kernel, are all maintained in the same repository, right? And they’re released in sync, have the same coding style, the same build infrastructure, the same release cycles – everything’s the same. So you get the entire central part of the operating system like that. If people claim that, because we stick a lot of things into the Systemd repository, then it’s un-Unixish, then it’s absolutely the opposite. It’s more Unix-ish than Linux ever was!"

I don't even know how you could get this misconception. This really does sound clueless or trollish.

The rest of the interview is of a better quality and you follow his reasoning much better even if in the end you would still disagree with him.