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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: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @01:02PM
I don't see why this Debian systemd maintainer is being painted as the victim here.
His work on forcing systemd into Debian in such a way as to make it unavoidable has hurt many people, too.
This maintainer's work has wasted people's time. It has prevented their systems from booting properly, among other problems. It has caused issues worse than we'd typically see from Windows malware, even!
Here's an example [debian.org] of somebody who was a systemd victim. He was clearly hurt by a simple updating bringing in systemd, which then trashed his system, preventing it from booting properly.
And here's another victim of systemd [slashdot.org]. And yet another victim of system [debian.org]. And of course, even one more victim of systemd [debian.org]. And yet again, there was another victim of systemd [debian.org]. And those are just from within the past couple of weeks! All of these poor souls probably wasted significant time, and suffered considerable pain, all thanks to systemd.
I can't feel sorry for somebody who has caused so many others so much pain. There are real victims here, and they are the people who have been forced to use systemd, and the people who have had their systems utterly trashed and destroyed by systemd. The victims of systemd are the only victims in this case.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by arashi no garou on Monday November 17 2014, @06:32PM
Oh please. The plain and simple fact is that he is the victim, because he received death threats. That is inexcusable. I don't like systemd; I don't want it on any system I maintain and I hope it stays out of Slackware in particular. But death threats? Even Poettering himself doesn't deserve threats, let alone some Debian developer who happens to work on that part of the distro and had nothing to do with creating systemd in the first place. Get a grip.
Bottom line: Anyone who would threaten any other person over something like a software choice is mentally unstable and needs help.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @11:12PM
While I agree that death threats are not acceptable, the fact that somebody did receive such threats doesn't absolve them of harm they've brought to others.
His work has caused unwanted harm to people. That cannot be denied. Even one system that fails to boot due to systemd is too many, and we're well past that threshold at this point.
(Score: 2) by arashi no garou on Tuesday November 18 2014, @02:54PM
His work has caused unwanted harm to people. That cannot be denied.
Ok so it's obvious at this point that you're trolling. But just in case you're only being obtuse by accident: Heen didn't create systemd nor did he have anything to do with its creation (he doesn't work for Red Hat). He didn't ask for systemd to be placed in Debian, and there are signs that he didn't agree with the way it was forced into Debian. He was put on the team packaging it, that's it; he is also on several other teams within Debian, and so far hasn't left those posts. Attacking him is just shooting the messenger and does nothing at all to prevent systemd from being a part of Debian. All it does is make systemd opponents look bad, even those of us who simply don't wish to use it and have no other interest in the matter.
In short, stop trolling please. You're not helping.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday November 17 2014, @07:20PM
Well, it made my system unbootable, too, but there's a reason that Jessie is called Debian testing. If you want stable, you pick stable.
That said, I don't support systemd, and nobody has yet made a decent case for it that I understood. I've seen lots of arguments against it that I understood. But I'm *NOT* an expert in the field. I don't trust systemd, and it looks like a disaster waiting to happen, but I could easily be wrong.
So after my system crashed, I switched to Debian stable. I did modify it to NOT install systemd. And I'm going to wait awhile before deciding...say 5 years. (FWIW, though, Ubuntu 14.04 worked on my system without problems, so systemd isn't inherently unusable.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by arashi no garou on Monday November 17 2014, @08:41PM
FWIW, though, Ubuntu 14.04 worked on my system without problems, so systemd isn't inherently unusable.
If you're using 14.04 you're using Upstart. Ubuntu didn't start using systemd until 14.10.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday November 19 2014, @09:30PM
Thanks. I'm not using it anymore, but I used it to test that my system wasn't actually broken, just the installation. So I couldn't check by looking. (I went back to Debian stable.)
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 Wednesday November 19 2014, @12:14PM
That's a bit of hyperbole. Debian testing/unstable are not stable distros. Updates are expected to break things; it's great that that doesn't happen often, but there's no guarantees to that effect. I've had my Debian Sid system rendered unbootable by updates on multiple occasions (the install is 8 years old now so it's been through a lot). Yes, systemd was one of them. I fixed it (I believe it was a known bug in some configuration so it was pretty simple to fix once I figured out the right thing to Google for). (The others were due to grub, I think.) If I didn't want to deal with debugging issues like that I would run a stable distro. And, in fact, for exactly that reason most of my computers run Xubuntu (Mint, etc. work too if you don't like Canonical).