[Nottingham] Someone doesn't like systemd

[Jason Irwin]

On 14/08/14 02:44, Andy Smith wrote:
> you need to sign the Canonical Contributor License
> Agreement to work on Upstart, which many people are unwilling to do.
The recent episodes of FAIF discussed CLAs and (basically) why they
shouldn't be needed.
http://faif.us/cast/2014/jul/30/0x4A/
http://faif.us/cast/2014/aug/05/0x4B/

> Take the "oh no, binary logs!?" thing for example. Structured logs
> are useful. But you can still have plain text logs with systemd if
> you like—any syslogd you have running will get a plain text copy of
> the journal messages too.
That's news, you are the first person to mention it. From what I
understood, systemd was binary only; end of discussion. Good to know. I
was wondering how the various log-watchers (e.g. fail2ban) would
continue to work if they had to start reading binary logs. Hmm...wonder
if there will be some kind of plug-in for them coming, isn't the binary
supposed to be more efficient?

> - Monoculture? "Word we use about groups of people doing things we
>   don't like."
That struck me as a rather odd argument as well.
X is a monoculture, isn't it? Now we will have Wayland and Mir and
there's complaints about that.
One could even argue that the kernel is a monoculture I guess.
For some things I can actually see an argument *for* a monoculture. It
reduces duplicated effort and for critical systems, that could be very
desirable. Of course the monoculture needs to be flexible enough to fit
all (or a vast majority off) use cases.

> - Jerk developers with huge egos? Anyone read lkml much lately?
Heh - I assumed he was alluding to the kernel-spam thing which happened.
That could (should!) have been handled much better by both parties.

>   Linus can be a pretty big jerk in case anyone didn't notice.
I thought the rule was "Linus is only a jerk towards worthy of being a
jerk at"? I guess like in many endeavours, it's those who
are...err...psychotic(?) enough to keep pushing who get there in the end.

>   If the developer being a jerk means we don't use
>   their software then I think we need to pack up and find an
>   entirely new stack of software!
Debian on FreeBSD? :-) Must see if I can try that out for a giggle.

> The rant author hands out some abuse for "Gnome, The Linux
> Foundation, freedesktop.org, …"
Gnome I sort-of followed, they've got a bad-rep of late for, justified
or not, ignoring users but no one is holding a gun to your head and
forcing you to use Gnome. Same seemed to happen with KDE 4, and almost
certainly will happen with KDE 5. Once a design reaches breaking point,
things have to shift and the pain will come.
The others...I didn't quite follow where he was going.

> I think that people who hate [the systemd choice] should spend
> the energy supporting alternatives
A "put up, or shut up" kind of thing? That's probably fair, although not
all those who can see a problem have the time/resources/skill/money to
fix said problem themselves.

I'm trying not to take either side as I simply don't have the technical
chops to make a fair evaluation one way or the other, but I will be
affected by it and therefore do my best to try and follow it.

Is there anyone on the list who could give a small talk on systemd (and
possibly the other options, why it has to be etc? There will be beer.
Or, at least, point out a fair link to same? If such a thing exists...

-- 
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