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posted by LaminatorX on Friday September 19 2014, @05:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the voice-from-on-high dept.

Systemd has turned into the Godzilla of Linux controversies. "Everywhere you look it's stomping through blogs, rampaging through online discussion threads, and causing white-hot flames that resemble Godzilla's own breath of death," writes Jim Lynch. Now Sam Varghese reports at iTWire that although Linus Torvalds is well-known for his strong opinions, when it comes to systemd, Torvalds is neutral. "When it comes to systemd, you may expect me to have lots of colorful opinions, and I just don't," says Torvalds. "I don't personally mind systemd, and in fact my main desktop and laptop both run it."

Oh, there's been bitter fights before. Just think about the emacs vs vi wars. Or, closer to systemd, the whole "SysV init" vs "BSD init" differences certainly ended up being things that people had "heated discussions" about. Or think about the desktop comparisons.

I'm not really sure how different the systemd brawls are from those. It's technical, but admittedly the systemd developers have also been really good at alienating people on a purely personal level too. Not that that is anything particularly new under the sun _either_: the (very) bitter wars between the GPL and the BSD license camps during late-80s and early-90s were almost certainly more about the persons involved and how they pissed off people than necessarily deeply about other differences (which existed, obviously, but still).

Torvalds was asked if systemd didn't create a single point of failure which makes a system unbootable if it fails. "I think people are digging for excuses. I mean, if that is a reason to not use a piece of software, then you shouldn't use the kernel either."

 
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  • (Score: 1) by Arik on Friday September 19 2014, @04:31PM

    by Arik (4543) on Friday September 19 2014, @04:31PM (#95547) Journal
    Computer hardware is a single *necessary* point of failure, in most deployments. (Serious projects can afford redundant hardware though.)

    Systemd is a single *unnecessary* point of failure, anywhere it is used. The best you can say about it is it reduces apparent boot time. Which is probably the last thing I would allocate resources to doing. How often do you spend booting? For me it averages out to a few seconds per week last I checked.
    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?