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Longtime Debian contributor Tollef Fog Heen has announced his resignation from the Debian systemd maintainer team. His announcement states that "the load of the continued attacks is just becoming too much."
He has since written a detailed blog article surrounding the circumstances of his resignation. As he puts it,
I've been a DD for almost 14 years, I should be able to weather any storm, shouldn't I? It turns out that no, the mountain does get worn down by the rain. It's not a single hurtful comment here and there. There's a constant drum about this all being some sort of conspiracy and there are sometimes flares where people wish people involved in systemd would be run over by a bus or just accusations of incompetence.
This is yet another dramatic event affecting the Debian project in recent months. The adoption of systemd has been extremely controversial, even going so far as to result in calls for Debian to be forked. There have been other problems as of late, too, ranging from a serious bug breaking Wine just days before the Jessie freeze deadline, to the possibility of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD being dropped from Debian 8. And it was only just over a week ago that Joey Hess — another longtime Debian contributor — left the project, citing the "very unhealthy directions" that Debian has been led in lately.
Is the internal tension and strife caused by systemd about to tear the Debian project apart? Recent events such as the aforementioned have suggested that this is becoming more and more of a possibility. The repercussions of this drama will no doubt be felt wide and far, given Debian's own popularity, as well it forming the basis of other major Linux distros such as Ubuntu and Linux Mint.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bot on Monday November 17 2014, @12:10PM
I can understand not contributing to a project that is not taking the direction you want, given that's voluntary.
But ceasing contribution to a project that basically has abandoned its own slogan ("the universal operating system") to take your direction?
I wonder what he'd done if he'd been maintaining upstart instead.
But I am asking for sanity in a systemd thread, not gonna happen.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @12:19PM
He didn't quit to go his own direction. He quit because of the stress of the "abuse" he feels he was receiving due to his involvement with the systemd package. He seems passionate about contributing to Debian but does not think that he should be a target of other people's unhappiness with what he is contributing to.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by lizardloop on Monday November 17 2014, @12:37PM
That was the impression I got. He didn't seem to have anything to say about the technical merits of systemd.
Interestingly at the bottom of his blog post he mentions having reservations about the Debian constitution. I get the feeling he may be a bit disenfranchised with how the Debian organisation makes it's decisions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @01:31PM
There's nothing to be said about the merits of systemd. It has no technical merit at all.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Monday November 17 2014, @05:05PM
But... but... BINARY LOGS!!!11
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @05:37PM
Don't forget the always mentioned 'faster boot times!' even though it's just a couple of seconds.
(Score: 2) by sudo rm -rf on Monday November 17 2014, @08:16PM
I know you're joking (you are, aren't you?), but what always made me wonder is why faster boot time is thought to be a valid argument for server software. That coulpe of seconds sum up to not even half a minute / year for my testing server....
(Score: 2) by everdred on Tuesday November 18 2014, @12:06AM
> I know you're joking (you are, aren't you?), but what always made me wonder is why faster boot time is thought to be a valid argument for server software.
I'm neither defending systemd nor approving this argument, but I believe I'd read that this has to do with near-instantly spinning up virtualized server instances quickly to meet spikes in demand.
(Score: 2) by caseih on Tuesday November 18 2014, @06:42AM
Running RHEL 7 now. Rsyslog works just fine. systemd works just fine with syslog facilities and enterprise distros will probably all have syslog in them for many years.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Monday November 17 2014, @07:32PM
I *think* you're joking, but just to be sure...
I'm quite sure that it has many technical merits, but they don't seem to be very well explained to someone who isn't expert in the field.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @11:18PM
I don't think that's meant as a joke.
It really has no technical merit, or at least none that justify the devastation is has brought to Debian. Can you name any?
No, I don't think that "booting 200 ms faster" is a valid merit in this case.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday November 17 2014, @04:47PM
I dont know, the very first sentence of his blog post makes it obvious this guy has mushy-head SJMW disease, which makes it seem very plausible this was nothing more than one of those undisciplined temper tauntrums that SJMWs are so prone to.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Monday November 17 2014, @05:29PM
SJMW? Care to expand that acrynom? (unless you actually mean Schweizerischer Jugendmusikwettbewerb)
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Monday November 17 2014, @06:01PM
social justice ______ warrior.
I can't guess the blank
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday November 17 2014, @06:51PM
They call themselves Social Justice Warriors, but I find the expanded term a much better fit, as they dont seem to accomplish or even attempt anything other than to garner media attention.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Informative) by steveha on Monday November 17 2014, @06:06PM
ceasing contribution to a project that basically has abandoned its own slogan ("the universal operating system") to take your direction?
0) He hasn't ceased contribution to Debian; he has resigned from the SystemD team. So this statement is just wrong.
1) Stating that Debian has abandoned its slogan is flamebait. You should feel remorse for saying that. Debian BSD is still available and won't be going away; and there were no plans to remove SysV Init (just make it an option instead of the default).
2) He plainly explained why he resigned, and it had nothing to do with whether Debian "took [his] direction"; he just couldn't handle the endless torrents of vitriol and abuse he was receiving. Are you okay with anti-SystemD people being so nasty to Debian developers that they resign their positions? I'm not.
I wonder what he'd done if he'd been maintaining upstart instead.
Gee, that's an easy one. Nobody is dumping torrents of vitriol on the Upstart guys, so he wouldn't have felt the need to resign.
But I am asking for sanity in a systemd thread
Are you? Are you, really?
P.S. Tollef Fog Heen posted about this on Slashdot: http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6078013&cid=48398675 [slashdot.org]
So what we have here is: the volunteers who were doing the actual work of making new releases of Debian did a bunch of research, and they concluded that SystemD was the best choice for Debian. A bunch of people took strong exception to that, which is okay. Some of those people made Mr. Heen's life so miserable that he quit, which is not okay.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday November 18 2014, @01:23PM
> So this statement is just wrong.
Ok, what about: ceasing contribution to the item (systemd) for which a project (debian) basically has abandoned its own slogan ("the universal operating system")?
It's the same point as before, just stronger.
Some have already replied it's because of abuse. Ok, but if I am convinced that I'm doing the right thing, it is my perseverance the thing that would shut people up.
> Stating that Debian has abandoned its slogan is flamebait. You should feel remorse for saying that.
It is my opinion, so I wrote "basically", because it's a de facto situation. If projects like void, BLFS, gentoo, slackware and others manage without systemd, my definition of "universal" implies that Debian should make it possible too.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 18 2014, @05:01PM
if I am convinced that I'm doing the right thing, it is my perseverance the thing that would shut people up.
I doubt it. The anti-SystemD crowd is very vocal and does not seem to care about facts. They say things like "SystemD is not the UNIX way" which means whatever they want it to mean; facts don't touch them, no arguments persuade them. Especially the ones who are so bad they will harass a Debian developer.
If projects like void, BLFS, gentoo, slackware and others manage without systemd, my definition of "universal" implies that Debian should make it possible too.
Debian's plan was to make SystemD the default, but still continue to provide SysVInit as an option. Thus Debian would "make it possible too" as you request.
Maybe what you actually want is for Debian to not even ship SystemD, but that's not what you said you want. Debian is giving what you said you want.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday November 18 2014, @07:27PM
Crappy multi-architectural support. Not available for my powerpc workstation, or my MIPS or ARM servers.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday November 19 2014, @05:40PM
Nope. It's already been dropped. [linuxtoday.com]