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posted by martyb on Monday November 17 2014, @11:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the more-systemd-fallout dept.

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.

 
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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by lizardloop on Monday November 17 2014, @12:37PM

    by lizardloop (4716) on Monday November 17 2014, @12:37PM (#116676) Journal

    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.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @01:31PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @01:31PM (#116710)

    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

      by Geotti (1146) on Monday November 17 2014, @05:05PM (#116816) Journal

      But... but... BINARY LOGS!!!11

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @05:37PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @05:37PM (#116828)

        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

          by sudo rm -rf (2357) on Monday November 17 2014, @08:16PM (#116924) Journal

          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

            by everdred (110) on Tuesday November 18 2014, @12:06AM (#117017) Journal

            > 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

            by caseih (2744) on Tuesday November 18 2014, @06:42AM (#117140)

            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

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 17 2014, @07:32PM (#116903) Journal

      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

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @11:18PM (#116988)

        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.