Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Is gnome becoming obligatory?

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Marc.

On Wed, Dec 13, 2017 at 12:34:03 +0100, Marc Joliet wrote:
> Am Sonntag, 10. Dezember 2017, 11:13:30 CET schrieb Alan Mackenzie:

> > On Sun, Dec 10, 2017 at 09:55:45 +0000, Wols Lists wrote:

[ .... ]

> > > Granted he's not necessarily the most politic of people, and has ruffled
> > > a lot of feathers, but I'd much rather a system he's cleaned up, than a
> > > system where everything hangs together on a knife-edge.

> > His motivation seems to be ego.  To force everybody to use his software.
> > He did this by, amongst other things, abusing the trust placed in him to
> > maintain udev.  Early on he abandoned support for udev for everybody but
> > users of his new init system, systemd, in an attempt (sadly successful)
> > to force "everybody" into using systemd.

> Of course, the previous maintainer of udev fully supported whatever changes 
> were made, so you're painting a false picture of a potential different 
> history.

Previous maintainers have little, if any, influence on the direction
taken by their successors.

> > I've no idea how good systemd is.  It's not been through the normal
> > process of choice and selection that other successful packages have.  It
> > was forced on people.  But being forced to have a binary system log,
> > being forced (so I have heard) to have an http server running, ....,
> > doesn't make it an attractive package for me.

> *All* of this is "so I have heard".  What happened to researching stuff as the 
> better alternative to speaking out of your ass?

What have I done to deserve this abusive style of repartee?  I have never
doled this out to anybody on this list in the past, and have no intention
of doing so in the future.

Yes, there are a lot of "so I have heard"s in my posts.  Asking people on
this list to confirm or refute things is a form of research, and a lot
more efficient than many other ones.

There are several tens of thousands of packages in Gentoo, and I lack the
time personally to investigate each one.  Asking people who already use
them and post on this list is a normal thing to do.  Answering questions
about packages one oneself uses is the flip side of that coin.

> Speaking for myself, I *switched to* systemd fully on my own, and definitely 
> do *not* regret it.

This is a fair enough thing to say, but it is lacking any technical
detail.  Most posts on this list praising systemd are similarly lacking
in such detail, leaving people like me depending on the vague "so I have
heard"s we pick up.

> I can't speak for all distros, but all of the ones I know of switched
> willingly, because for them (as for me), systemd was the better choice.

And it had nothing to do with the withdrawal of support for udev, an
essential component of PC GNU/Linux systems, for every init system but
systemd, did it?  Or is that what you mean by "the better choice"?

> You're not against choice, are you ;-) ?

Indeed not, which is why I've found the actions of the originator of
systemd so regrettable.  He attempted to remove the choice of init
system.  The maintainers of gnome did the same.  I regret these actions
and more.

I use Gentoo, partly because here I have a deal of choice.

My choices are not merely technical but also political.  GNU/Linux
originated for political reasons, laudable ones, including giving end
users choice.  systemd also originated for political reasons, less
laudable, including reducing users' choice.

> > > Cheers,
> > > Wol

> Greetings
> -- 
> Marc Joliet
> --
> "People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we
> don't" - Bjarne Stroustrup

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).