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

[Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek]

On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 06:25:56PM -0400, Dale R. Worley wrote:
> > From: "Lennart Poettering" <lennart at poettering.net>
> > 
> > Please, let's discuss this elsewhere. Let's keep a strict technical
> > focus on this ML!
> 
> I believe that you mean that outsiders are welcome here to provide
> assistance to systemd as it has already been implemented.  One
> difficulty is that outsiders are usually not able to provide such
> assistance.
No really, people do feature requests here and on the bug trackers all
the time [1].

Nevertheless, systemd is a low level compenent, and not really
directed at *users* as such, more at os developers, packagers, etc.
So the distinction between "development" and "use" is not clearly
cut. Questions and bug reports often lead directly to changes in
the codebase. Creating a split into two lists would only slow
things down here.

Creating a separate systemd-users list was discussed, but who would
answers the questions there? If you expect the developers do it,
then there isn't much difference than simply answering those questions
on -devel. If you expect other people to do it, then wiki style
distribution-specific documentation is better in the long run,
since systemd is a fast moving target and the best practice often
changes over time.

What I think you're really thinking about is "systemd-advocy" to
discuss lofty ideals and deep motivaitions. But nobody has time for
that ;)

[1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&bug_status=NEEDINFO&bug_status=PLEASETEST&component=general&known_name=systemd%20RFEs&list_id=485720&product=systemd&query_based_on=systemd%20RFEs&query_format=advanced&resolution=---&short_desc=^RFE&short_desc_type=regexp

> It would be useful if there was a mailing list where outsiders could
> come with problems -- "systemd does not implement what I need as it is
> provided by the distro".  I would expect such a mailing list to be
> named "systemd-users".  But no such list seems to exist.  (And thus,
> they show up in systemd-devel.)
> 
> This leaves users with the sense that they are expected to use systemd
> as it is provided, and it makes it hard for them to customize systems
> that do what they need.  This reminds them of Microsoft products and
> makes them unhappy.
That mostly applies to people who actually don't use systemd and are
commenting from the peanut gallery. Actual *users* when they are unhappy
are unhappy about bugs.

Zbyszek