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Phoronix reports the systemd developers are having their first conference. Here is a direct link to the YouTube video channel.
Whether you love systemd or hate it, it looks like it's not going away. If you dislike it maybe one of these videos might change your mind.
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'systemd' Developers Have First Conference
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Fascinating is a word I use for the unexpected.
-- Spock, "The Squire of Gothos", stardate 2124.5
(Score: 1) by Alias on Wednesday November 11 2015, @02:53AM
"That's what happens when you don't think things through properly before you start hammering out the code, I guess..."
I would love to agree with you, but I believe they did think of this and decided against giving users the freedom to do that easily. Anyone who understands enough about how Linux works to write systemd knows enough about the Unix way and the principles behind it that this *must* have crossed their mind. Systemd's current design doesn't seem to have internal interfaces that allow easy use of individual modules. There are lots of executables, but the whole thing is basically a huge POSIX noncompliance. It is almost like they thought that making a bunch of executables would make it look enough like the Unix way that it might pass muster while still allowing them to prevent people from making derivative works that are actually useful without integrating systemd source code directly into another code base. Perhaps they think they are going to be able to passively torpedo a million other projects by making them legally related to systemd code?
Yes, I think the design was very deliberately poisonous.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Wednesday November 11 2015, @09:07AM
I'm kind of divided on that point. Hanlon's Razor says that you should never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity, and the clusterfuck of bad design and implementation that is PulseAudio certainly supports that view. On the otherhand, there is more than a whiff of "embrace, extend and extinguish" about the whole architecture of systemd, how it's not possible to entirely shutdown some parts of it even when you have a fully functional alternative running alongside and how various other unrelated projects, many of which are also heavily backed by Red Hat, all but require systemd to work themselves. What I'm not seeing in that though is the end game; is there *really* that much benefit from getting a given piece of code so entrenched into the Linux ecosystem that it's all but impossible to switch it out for an alternative?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 12 2015, @06:24AM
There have long been a refrain from Gnome/Freedesktop that if only Linux had a unified userland, everything would be so much easier and shinier...
(Score: 1) by Alias on Friday November 13 2015, @10:09PM
"Is there *really* that much benefit from getting a given piece of code so entrenched into the Linux ecosystem that it's all but impossible to switch it out for an alternative?"
Good question. I'm not completely sure. It would depend on exactly which piece of code. What is scaring me is that they have already managed to get lots of people on lots of projects to make changes for systemd. I know some of those changes are trivial. They are more like supporting systemd as an option. This looks like a hard dependency to people who aren't looking at the code because the package will require systemd to be present as a dependency, even though one could just comment out 3 lines and recompile to make the systemd dependency go away. I have heard, (though not personally verified,) that some of them are quite a bit worse, including at least something in the kernel.
If the community is willing to trust the systemd people to not have an alterior motive, I can see how the systemd people might end up effectively controlling the architecture of other projects. All I am really saying here is that people need to look out for the "extend into left-handed coordinate system" takeover attempt.