[systemd-devel] I wonder… why systemd provokes this amount of polarity and resistance

[Uoti Urpala]

On Sun, 2014-09-21 at 15:31 +0200, Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> Did you ever ask yourself why your project provokes that amount of resistance 
> and polarity? Did you ever ask yourself whether this really is just resistance 
> against anything new from people who just do not like "new" or whether it 
> contains *valuable* and *important* feedback?

I think that in general the existence of significant amounts of
resistance is explained by opposition to anything new. Systemd changes
many things, and as distros won't keep support for sysvinit at the same
time, people can't easily keep using the old stuff they're used to.
That's enough to explain complaints, and their existence does not by
itself mean there would be anything wrong with systemd.


> For now I use systemd. I like quite some features. But on the other hand I am 
> vary about it myself. I look at a 45 KiB binary for /sbin/init as PID1 and a 
> 1,3 MiB binary in systemd 215 and wonder myself.

Sysvinit as PID 1 lacks many essential things, so that is not a valid
size comparison (and just having the code running with a PID other than
1 is not an improvement).

In general, any complaints about the size/"bloat" of PID 1 are rather
silly if you still use it with the Linux kernel, which contains a lot
more code in a more central role than PID 1.


>  I had it that it didn´t mount an NFS export and while in the 
> end it was a syntax error in fstab that sysvinit happily ignored, I needed a 
> bug report and dev help to even find that cause. I wonder about the complexity 
> involved in one single large binary.

I think this works as an example of how change leads to people
complaining, completely unrelated to the existence of any actual quality
issues. Sysvinit behavior or debuggability wrt mount issues was not
better than systemd is, much less by so much that this would illustrate
any general issue with systemd (that's not to say that systemd
diagnostics could not be improved). Yet because you were first familiar
with sysvinit and had created dubious configuration which happened to
work with it, you now feel this is a problem in systemd, just because
things have changed. Someone who started with systemd and used it for
years before encountering sysvinit would hit a lot more problems.


> Well… its not about my thoughts about systemd, it is about my perception that 
> I never seen any free software upstream project creating this amount of 
> polarity and discussion in a decade or more.

I don't think the reactions to systemd are in any way unique. I've seen
similar reactions to other changes. The difference in the systemd case
is that a lot of developers interact with the init system at least on a
superficial level, and init system choice is mostly done on the distro
level, so people can't easily ignore systemd and keep using their old
software. That increases the volume of the complaints.


> Is it really all just nay-sayers for the sake of nay-saying? Or do they – at 
> least partly – provide *valuable* and *important* feedback.

"nay-sayers" as in people who oppose the adoption of systemd because
they think that some alternative is less flawed tend to have no clue.
You're more likely to get *valid* criticism from people who are at least
competent enough to recognize that whatever problems systemd has, the
alternatives are worse.