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

[Uoti Urpala]

On Wed, 2014-10-22 at 02:13 +0200, Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> With that I perceive starts an answer on a technical matter ends with what I 
> received as a dire personal attack: I.e. calling me names.

I think it was a mostly justified criticism of your posting style here.

> I will make an effort to reply to your mail and then most likely unsubscribe, 
> cause for me I feel like being in an hostile environment.

If you post such strongly worded criticism of people's work (which I
don't consider really justified criticism either) then IMO you should
tolerate that level negative response without starting to complain about
"hostile environment".


> Upstream systemd has a very high development speed. Which you may view as 
> good. And heck, yes, it has its advantages I agree. But to me it also seems 
> that this speed partly come due to what you wrote above as the easy way of 
> developing things. And that easy way to develop things, I argue now, makes it 
> more difficult for people wanting to port to different platforms, people only 
> wanting a subset of systemd and people who want to adapt systemd.

Those latter are much smaller groups than the number of people who just
need a well-working init system for their Linux machine. It wouldn't
make sense to sacrifice the functionality of init just to make porting
easier.


> > > systemd provides more and
> > > more functionality that desktops like to use, that other tools like to
> > > use.
> > > 
> > > When Microsoft back then did something like this it was called "Embrace,
> > > Extend and Extinguish"¹…

> > > Really… it matches quite closely.
> > 
> > Oh come on! This is just an attack and FUD. You make repeated claims of
> > coming in good faith etc. and seem to dismiss any technical defence
> > being made with vague references and then you bring out a aggressive and
> > argumentative statement like the above.
> 
> That is the impression you get.
> 
> I think I replied to technical arguments as well.

The above does not match the definition of "Embrace, extend and
extinguish" (see for example the Wikipedia definition at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
). It's a lot more specific than just "a product manager to push
competing ones out of the market", and pretty much requires intentional
malice to apply. IMO it was quite accurate to call your claim
attack/FUD.


> What I tried to achieve is to describe and interpret what I see regarding the 
> state of systemd as I understand it now, and granted my understanding may not 
> be complete, sure, and also describe and interpret behavior I have seen. And 
> also summarize some of this from the feedback I read elsewhere.
> 
> What I didn´t try to achieve was attacking persons.
> 
> Yet, I interpret your reaction to me as if I attacked you.
> 
> So I am obviously not producing the outcome I wanted to produce. And thats one 
> reason why I think I will stop doing what I am doing after this mail and 
> unsubscribe from this list for a while.
> 
> Actually I think I made my point. I tried to channel some of the dire concerns 
> and uproar and polarity and split tendencies upstream.
> 
> I see this happening to my beloved distribution Debian and I am not happy 
> about it. The systemd debates and polarity within Debian I consider as being 
> harmful.
> 
> And it was my intention to address some of this upstream in order to discuss 
> what can be done to first *understand* why it triggers this polarity and what 
> can be done to address this.

Maybe your *intention* was to address reasons for controversy in a
constructive manner, but I do not think you succeeded very well. Several
of your points had already been made by others before - many, many
times. You bring up little that systemd authors would not have already
addressed before. Things like your "Embrace, extend and extinguish"
comparison above are attacks with little constructive content. And when
presented with technical justification to develop certain things in the
same project, or keep certain functionality in PID 1, you seem to
largely ignore it. Yes, it is a tradeoff, and you can always find some
negative side. But you won't achieve anything by ignoring the answers
and talking about the negative sides, if you can't make a better
argument why the tradeoff would be wrong overall.


> > Of course this criticism is listened to and often actions are taken
> > because of it, but what do you expect the outcome to be? Do you expect
> > all the repos to be split up? Stable APIs exported and supported? What
> > outcome do you actually *want* here? You seem to be doing lots of
> > complaining, but very little in the actual suggesting what could be done
> > different that has not already been addressed technically. You may
> > disagree about that end decision but that's just the way it is
> > sometimes? The people doing the work ultimately get to make the decisions.
> 
> Yeah, thats the do-ocracy aspect of things. Still if what I do again and again 
> and again triggers much of polarity and resistance, I´d ask myself whats going 
> on there. Which brings me back to the point why I started this thread here.

What *do* you expect to achieve with this thread then? Do you believe
that you have convincing arguments why something should be done
technically differently? Or do you believe the controversy will go away
if the systemd project just has different publicity, even if things are
done exactly the same technically?

You again ignore the replies you've already got and repeat the
implication that systemd must be doing "something" wrong to get
resistance. Several people have already told you that a fairly high base
level of resistance is really something you should expect when doing
things like a substantial init change. But you just ignore that and
repeat the same thing.