Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: Boycott Systemd

[Harry Holt <harryholt@gmail.com>]

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On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 10:28 PM, Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 9:15 PM, Frank Peters <frank.peters@comcast.net>
> wrote:
> >
> > FOSS developers have to maintain an awareness that there is no One True
> > Way.  A computer has always been and always will be a general purpose
> machine.
> > Therefore, the only rational philosophy for OS development is for an OS
> > to empower the user to apply this generality for his own needs.
> >
>
> You're basically arguing that if somebody putting together an OS has a
> working solution for something, they should spend just as much effort
> maintaining 3 other solutions for that something, and ensure that none
> of the solutions becomes any better than the others.  OpenRC and
> Portage should work just as well with only csh installed as it does
> with bash installed, etc.
>

No.  Just no.  If somebody is putting together an OS, they maintain the
interfaces / APIs that applications on top would use.  That's all.  If one
solution for, say, package managers or daemon startup works better than
another, so be it.  It's not the responsibility of the Kernel / OS
developer, unless some application reveals a bug that others do not.  Other
than that, pick the package manager / initializer / etc. that works best
for YOU.

>
> That just isn't realistic.


The above scenario is ABSOLUTELY realistic, and the way it should work.
The straw man you've created above, not so much.  But it's just a straw man.


>   Most distros would rather support 47
> features that users want, and not 3 features implemented 5 different
> ways each in a manner that is completely interchangeable.  If a distro
> did things the way you wanted, very few would bother to use it, and
> likely fewer would bother to maintain it.
>

But isn't that the point of Gentoo in the first place?  You're selecting
packages for various functions that are typically source compatible, and
you compile them yourself.  How many text editors can you choose from?  How
many cron implementations?  How many development languages and libraries?
How many email servers and clients?  What would happen if the maintainers
decided Gentoo should only support one desktop environment, one shell, one
option for everything?  Would emacs users look elsewhere because only VI is
available in Portage?  I suspect so.

The beauty of Gentoo is that even options not available from official
sources can be integrated with either an overlay, your own ebuild, or even
just building from source.


> You'll always have alternative solutions in FOSS because volunteers
> will work on things that interest them.  Even after 99% of everything
> supports systemd exclusively you'll still find people writing sysvinit
> implementations from scratch in Ruby, just for the fun of it.
> However, you'll never find those alternative solutions receiving
> mainstream support, unless one actually tips the scale to the point
> where it is considered an equal.  Heck, look at postgres - most would
> say that it is superior to mysql in many ways and yet many packages
> still don't support it.
>

Ah - but au contraire. For that type of thing, it is very rare that any
application that needs a relational database can't be plugged into
postgresql through some mechanism or another.  Sure, server-specific
support packages don't (phpmyadmin won't work with it any more than pgAdmin
will work with MySQL), but out side of that, you will find very few
applications that have a hard dependency on a specific relational
database.  That's the kind of thing that Oracle does.  Even though they now
own MySQL, you still can't run Oracle's PeopleSoft on top of it - you need
Oracle 11g or whatever.


> Nothing is preventing you from starting a "Foundation for Redundant
> Solutions" - with the express aim of maintaining all the stuff nobody
> uses any longer.  I can't imagine you'll get a lot of donations - even
> if people might agree with you philosophically at some level, they're
> going to want to spend their money investing in stuff they actually
> use.
>

Before all these deep dependencies on borked does-it-all-but-nothing-well
solutions like Pulse Audio and systemd came along, we used to call that
Foundation "The Open Source Community".


>
> --
> Rich
>
>

Harry Holt, PMP
Cyber Architect
Social Media Strategist

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