It's a problem because it's a manufactured dependency rather than one that is necessary or would usually happen, and again systemd gives you no choice, no control.  It was done to inflate a fragile ego in some one who should perhaps feel some shame over some of his responses to legitimate bugs, security and otherwise.  

seriously, the people making decisions on gnome have fallen into the "one best way trap", much like coca cola did with new coke and discontinuing one of the most successful products world wide.   why, because "most"  people preferred new coke over the traditional flavor.  what they didn't consider was that many people preferred the classic coke, particularly at restaurants, in fact it cost coca cola many of their' restaurant chain clients who switched to pepsi.  

That's what happens when you assume that one size fits all, that one solution is optimal for all situations, and again there's a tremendous level of arrogance and disrespect for the community and the paying customer base in particular.  It's a form of the big company problem, small companies that act like large companies never become large companies, the mega corporations would not exist if they weren't doing it right at one time, but they tend  to be lazy and sloppy, political etc. as they become larger.   If i wanted that I'd use winblows.

And why oh why would you want software on your' system that you don't use?  again one obvious example is embedded systems where all resources tend to be scarce.  And just having code installed creates vulnerabilities and increases the chances that part of the system will conflict with another part.

The input validation issue is a great example of careless coding in a security critical piece of code, specifically that anyone with access of any kind can DOS with a one liner, though it sometimes has to have a loop because this bug is not deterministic, i.e. there's a great deal of randomness to it (i assume and hope this has been fixed, properly).

Dependency based init systems may indeed be the way to go, but the way systemd is doing things is like  a catalog of bad programing practices and bad project administration.  Add to this the way systemd's involvement in everything is increasing tremendously the number of bugs in the code.  It is well understood that complexity decreases reliability.  Beause of this, during peace time, approximately one third of our best jet fighters have a broken system waiting to be repaired, not always a critical system, but considering the importance of reliability of jet fighters, and the tremendous money spent maintaining them it's very impressive to know that 2/3 is the best you can count on, under easy conditions.

Proclaiming the emperors new clothes are fantastically beautiful only proves one to be a fool.

"It just doesn't workk" (tm).  "bail on the bloatware"(tm).  Any one can repeat silly slogans that have no real bearing on anything.  Oh, and of course there's the either or thinking being implied, and the assumption that there aren't other solutions which may well be far more optimal for the average user.  like all sciences and arts computer hardware and software ideals are in flux all the time with genuinely ingenious ideas popping up everywhere that completely obsolete other methods in some or all cases.

mad.scientist.at.large (a good madscientist)
--


11. Dec 2017 12:20 by antlists@youngman.org.uk:


> On 10/12/17 23:08, Walter Dnes wrote:
>>> Oddly enough, although the details are different, that passage I've
>>> quoted pretty accurately describes how I feel about Gnome ...:-)
>>    I can't find it right now on Google, but I vaguely remember that
>> Lennart asked the Gnome people to make systemd a hard dependancy.  Not
>> much later logind, which is required by Gnome, picks up systemd as a
>> hard dependancy.
>
> Imho that's no problem. If a higher level has a hard dependency on a lower level, that's no surprise. And why should I care if someone else's desktop pulls in any particular low-level plumbing. :-)
>
> BUT! If my choice of low-level plumbing (systemd) pulls in a desktop I don't want that is a BIG PROBLEM. If I'm running headless, I don't even WANT a desktop !!! I more and more get the feeling that linux is standardising on the Gnome desktop, which I really just DO NOT get on with.
>
> Cheers,
> Wol