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Interview: Lennart Poettering

linuxvoice.com

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Re: Interview: Lennart Poettering

#11

Post by erglkjahlkh »

bhaak wrote: post #9
antientropic wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to point out which remarks were clueless or trollish?

The interview wasn't as bad as I expected from the OP's opinion but this one seems mind-bogglingly wrong: "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…

He mentioned kernel, c libraries, and "all the tools". Well, kernel is in one repository. The (gnu) c library is in one repository. The tools, well the category of stuff like "ls" and "cat" is afaik in one repository. In similar manner, he seems to think that systemd should manage the set of most crucial processes of the base system.

I am not saying that he is correct, I am just interpreting!

Re: Interview: Lennart Poettering

#12

Post by vezzy-fnord »

pachydermic wrote: post #7
digi_owl wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find myself wondering why the init is supposed to figure out what the computer is to be doing. That kind of "automagical" behavior is what drove me bonkers when trying to use Windows for more than a games console...

I dunno. If it's able to do what you want automatically that's amazing. If I can just plug the printer in and have it work that's amazing. If I can turn the wireless on my laptop on and it works that's amazing. And so on. 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…

Hotplug isn't the job of systemd to begin with, though. It's the job of the device manager, which on Linux is usually udev (but alternatives like eudev, mdev, smdev and vdev exist) - udev being a part of the systemd repository and to an extent coupled with it (which will become complete when kdbus is merged into mainline Linux), however it's still a rather distinct piece of software that maintains the hardware database and listens to kernel uevents.

So if your init system is handling hotplug events, then that's some bad design. systemd doesn't stoop that low, though it still has plenty of mistakes - like putting the INI parser in PID1. As an example, even Apple put launchd's XML parser as a separate process!

Re: Interview: Lennart Poettering

#13

Post by mksaunders »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #8

Lennart seems to harbor this very strange belief that developing your software in one repository makes you Unix-like, and that this alone is sufficient entirely. So by this logic, a standalone Unix kernel is not Unix-like, but a fully integrated DOS clone, is. In addition: Then we convinced the Fedora Technical Committee to adopt it, and then Red Hat internal management accepted it for RHEL, and we managed to convinc…

"So there was, in fact, a PR campaign."

Er, how do you think the Systemd developers convinced these technical teams to use Systemd? With bribes? Sexual favours? Or perhaps, you know, using the software itself?

It's funny. The lead developers of Arch Linux, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Mageia, Debian etc. etc. etc. have all chosen to use Systemd. Yet for some reason, many commentators assume these people -- distro technical leads -- simply don't have a clue, and have switched their projects to Systemd because Lennart is somehow forcing it on them.

All these distro developers, people a LOT smarter than me, and putting in more work than me, have chosen Systemd. That says a lot to me, and I'm not going to judge them. I'm still on the fence about a lot of Systemd, but to say that major distros have switched because of "PR campaigns" is ridiculous.

Re: Interview: Lennart Poettering

#14

Post by Argorak »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #8

Lennart seems to harbor this very strange belief that developing your software in one repository makes you Unix-like, and that this alone is sufficient entirely. So by this logic, a standalone Unix kernel is not Unix-like, but a fully integrated DOS clone, is. In addition: Then we convinced the Fedora Technical Committee to adopt it, and then Red Hat internal management accepted it for RHEL, and we managed to convinc…

>> Then we convinced the Fedora Technical Committee to adopt it, and then Red Hat internal management accepted it for RHEL, and we managed to convince every committee that mattered, bit by bit.

> So there was, in fact, a PR campaign.

So, how would you spread a piece of software without convincing people of it?

I'm not sure what's bad about it?

Re: Interview: Lennart Poettering

#15

Post by fsniper »

bhaak wrote: post #9
antientropic wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to point out which remarks were clueless or trollish?

The interview wasn't as bad as I expected from the OP's opinion but this one seems mind-bogglingly wrong: "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…

Thank you. That's well said. I wish I could read all the piece with the pay per view part. But with this part he is absolutely sure , he is the righteous on every aspect of computing and it's history that he just tries to "create un realistic lines" to make his point.

Re: Interview: Lennart Poettering

#16

Post by jdub »

bhaak wrote: post #9
antientropic wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to point out which remarks were clueless or trollish?

The interview wasn't as bad as I expected from the OP's opinion but this one seems mind-bogglingly wrong: "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…

He's talking about UNIX, not Linux, and he's 100% right. Look at the BSDs some time, or the Solaris forks.

The disconnect between the Linux kernel and basic userland has been a criticism of UNIX traditionalists for years. It's part of the reason why BSD has a few forks and Linux has hundreds of distributions.

Re: Interview: Lennart Poettering

#17

Post by vinkelhake »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #8

Lennart seems to harbor this very strange belief that developing your software in one repository makes you Unix-like, and that this alone is sufficient entirely. So by this logic, a standalone Unix kernel is not Unix-like, but a fully integrated DOS clone, is. In addition: Then we convinced the Fedora Technical Committee to adopt it, and then Red Hat internal management accepted it for RHEL, and we managed to convinc…

> Lennart seems to harbor this very strange belief that developing your software in one repository makes you Unix-like, and that this alone is sufficient entirely.

He is saying that a trait of the Unix systems was the development in a single repository. In that particular aspect, a fully integrated DOS clone might be more Unix-like than, say, Linux. This is a response to the people who mistake the "Linux way" for the "Unix way".

Re: Interview: Lennart Poettering

#18

Post by sudioStudio64 »

bhaak wrote: post #9
antientropic wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to point out which remarks were clueless or trollish?

The interview wasn't as bad as I expected from the OP's opinion but this one seems mind-bogglingly wrong: "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…

I think he is referring to traditional Unix's where you would get all of the tools and such as part of the system. For OSS stuff it would be FreeBSD vs the Linux kernel.

It's a bit trollish though.

Re: Interview: Lennart Poettering

#20

Post by geographomics »

There's a lot of complaint about logical fallacies in the comments of this article. Does anyone know what they're referring to?

Seemed like quite a clear interview to me, and interesting to hear a bit of the history behind such a fundamentally useful piece of software.

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