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posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday October 07 2014, @11:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the Mr-Popularity dept.

From El Reg:

Lennart Poettering, creator of the systemd system management software for Linux, says the open-source world is "quite a sick place to be in."

He also said the Linux development community is "awful" – and he pins the blame for that on Linux supremo Linus Torvalds.

"A fish rots from the head down," Poettering said in a post to his Google+ feed on Sunday.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday October 07 2014, @05:05PM

    by Arik (4543) on Tuesday October 07 2014, @05:05PM (#103190) Journal
    "Also your two examples "could" at least theoretically be poisoned by systemd and even worse by systemd architecture / philosophy / culture / dev style but there's too much linux-ism in it to ever poison freebsd, so I don't have to worry as much."

    You're entitled to your view but I doubt it is accurate. Gentoo allows systemd as a choice, and seems very unlikely to remove the other options, while Slack gets by just fine without systemd, or GNOME, or PAM, and has for years.

    "From about 15 yrs ago I remember the idea behind gentoo was academically fascinating but I didn't / don't feel it practical to always be compiling all the time on prod boxes. Dev box sure. Test box sure. Prod box probably shouldn't be compiling anything, ever. To each their own"

    There's no reason whatsoever you should be 'compiling all the time' with gentoo. You dont have to compile at all with it, in fact. If you WANT to recompile world with different options it makes it easy to do, but it's certainly not obligatory.

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  • (Score: 1) by boltronics on Wednesday October 08 2014, @02:00AM

    by boltronics (580) on Wednesday October 08 2014, @02:00AM (#103411) Homepage Journal

    Question: Can you install Gentoo these days without a compiler? Ideally a compiler toolchain wouldn't even be installed on a production machine.

    --
    It's GNU/Linux dammit!
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Wednesday October 08 2014, @02:19AM

    by frojack (1554) on Wednesday October 08 2014, @02:19AM (#103418) Journal

    Gentoo allows systemd as a choice, and seems very unlikely to remove the other options, while Slack gets by just fine without systemd, or GNOME, or PAM, and has for years.

    Ah, but going forward is what we are concerned with, not what has been happening for years.

    When Systemd gets it hooks in every piece of user space software, you will have nothing to run on Gentoo or Slack without a massive patch list to remove all the dependencies on systemd.

    Not many people want JUST a terminal anymore. The want a desktop environment (or three) and the resources required to keep those working without systemd just do not exist. Gnome, KDE, et al are just not going to support alternative builds when all the money is coming from red hat and ubuntu.

    systemd will extinguish everything that doesn't get in line.

    Its ok for you to not think his opinion is right, but for god sake look around you. Its happening before your very eyes!

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @05:22AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 08 2014, @05:22AM (#103450)

      systemd will extinguish everything that doesn't get in line.

      How's that? I thought this was all open source stuff. It'll only extinguish things that let themselves be extinguished, things that simply roll over and die instead of creating alternatives.

    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 08 2014, @11:42AM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 08 2014, @11:42AM (#103528)

      "Not many people want JUST a terminal anymore. The want a desktop environment"

      No, they don't, thats the craziest part of the whole story.

      99.9% of the population wants a web browser and the occasional full screen video viewer or full screen game, and the admins/devs want a terminal. Almost nobody wants a "desktop environment" or the features that come with it. Enormous amounts of code, unused.

      At work one of my desktops runs windows 7 with all this desktop crap piled on top of it. All it does is firefox/chromium because the corporate world has been moving to the web since the mid 90s, and outlook because for no clear reason that has webmail disabled (security paranoia, probably). None of my coworkers use desktop applications either.

      It never fails to amaze me how stuff that used a desktop app and GPIB or RS232 in the 90s, or USB and a desktop app in the 00s, is all moving to a web interface over ethernet in the 10s. You can see the lure for the devs. No software installation, no desktop support, no troubleshooting, its just a web page. Works fine on my phone, tablet, or desktop, as long as their web designers don't do stupid things.

      Management uses Excel as their DBMS, word processor, report generator, numerical analysis platform, and well, frankly, their desktop environment. Personally all my spreadsheets are in google docs, but they aren't very important to me. So they need like one app. There are specialists who need like "one" application. Not a whole environment. The CAD blueprint lady, I know all prints come from exactly one app. The HR people used to use powerpoint for those boring PCI/DSS and harassment training but that all moved online. Higher level mgmt does occasionally still use powerpoint but that fad kinda peaked a decade or so ago. The receptionist used to have a desktop application that talked to the PBX for advanced fast call routing, but that all went online on a web page interface. I don't really know what the accounting people use. I can't think of any employee at work who uses more than 3 applications. You don't need an "environment" for that.

      The desktop environment as a metaphor is dead and was buried a long time ago but people just keep flogging the horse. Its just a grease stain on the pavement now. "But we gotta change everything because without that nothing will ever work again, I order you to pay no attention to the horse that worked perfectly well before" and then they get all pissed off when someone points out horses are dead and its all cars now.

      • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday October 10 2014, @03:50AM

        by frojack (1554) on Friday October 10 2014, @03:50AM (#104309) Journal

        The point I was trying to make, and with which I accidentally stepped on your bee's nest, was that nobody running linux wants just a shell account any more.

        Hence, they will all want SOME FORM of desktop environment, or graphical environment. Which means that when ALL the graphical environment projects adopt systemd, those distros like slackware who want to avoid it will have to custom build of even the simplest graphical environment, backing out all the systemd hooks for sysVinit, or what ever.

        But, I, still wondering, in a discussion of systemd, how did I get sandbagged with a windows rant?

        --
        No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
        • (Score: 2) by VLM on Friday October 10 2014, @03:22PM

          by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday October 10 2014, @03:22PM (#104502)

          "how did I get sandbagged with a windows rant"

          Because this mythical "they" that everyone has an opinion on but no data actually want a program launcher, not an "environment"

          Trying to hyper-tightly couple everything together is a losing system design strategy. Your USB shoudn't have anything to do with your IRC client.