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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) by PiMuNu on Monday November 17 2014, @02:14PM
Well if you aren't hiding something, why post as AC? Why are all the anti-systemd posts AC? Smells fishy to me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @03:05PM
Maybe because creating an account and logging in is a dumb waste of time?
That's why I post as AC, at least. Maybe it is the same for the GP.
Besides, it's the message that matters, not who wrote it.
Systemd will always be terrible, regardless of the names on the comments.
Sorry, there's no conspiracy here. There are just a lot of different, independent people who have been wronged by systemd in one way or another, and aren't happy about it.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 17 2014, @03:42PM
Maybe because creating an account and logging in is a dumb waste of time?
I'll add to this (I'm not any of the other ACs) that the damn SoylentNews site logs me out every few days, and the login fields don't seem to auto-fill with Firefox, so staying logged in is just a pain in the ass. There would probably be a lot fewer AC posts if the system didn't make it so tedious to be logged in.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday November 17 2014, @07:41PM
The trouble with being an AC is that you can't be told from the other ACs. E.g., I don't know that you aren't posting a reply to yourself.
OTOH, I'm very skeptical about systemd. There are lots of small reasons to distrust it, and nothing that I've ever heard about it makes me want to use it. (OTOH, I still prefer grub over grub2.)
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, @10:07PM
And how can the rest of us be assured that you aren't also the AC you just replied to?
It's trivially easy to create multiple accounts here, and registered members can post as AC easily, too.
Somebody used to constantly point out how that Torx (or whatever his name is) admitted to posting as AC just to enflame arguments. How do we know you aren't doing that, too? How do we know you aren't also posting here as Torx?
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday November 17 2014, @03:35PM
Why are all the anti-systemd posts AC?
They aren't. I've seen the better part of a dozen logged-in users identifying themselves as sysadmins and saying they don't like it. But that's on Slashdot.
Or did you mean "pro-systemd"? ;)
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by arashi no garou on Monday November 17 2014, @08:58PM
Not AC. Not a fan of systemd. Not a *nix sysadmin either, at least not my day job. But I do build out and support GNU/Linux and BSD servers in my spare time, bare metal and hosted/virtualized, and I have a few *nix boxes at home serving various purposes.
I'm not a rabid systemd hater; I just don't think it's ever going to be a good thing for me. My specific issues with it, beyond the obvious political furor, are what most would consider minor things. I don't like the commands, they are redundant and unnecessarily long compared to traditional commands[1]. I don't like binary logs, the whole idea of that just screams "inaccessible during an emergency".
Call me when systemd is past the political shenanigans, and when it actually offers me something more than a ~2 second savings on boot times.
[1] Call me crazy, but "service foo start" is just easier to type and makes more sense than than "systemctl start foo.service". Even worse is changing runlevels; "telinit 3" is simple and quick, unlike "systemctl isolate runlevel3.target". It's like they added words just to be different, not caring that it's needlessly complicated and that much more to memorize. One of the tenets of *nix is do one thing and do it well. Why complicate things?
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Tuesday November 18 2014, @05:23AM
Astro-turfing can occur whether an account is used or not. The only difference is that some posts are tied to one account but this does not imply that a single user accesses the account or that a single user has a coherent or honesty advanced position.
For the record, I'm against systemd. At best, it seems to be re-implemention of launchd, daemon-tools, djbdns and anything else a bunch of greenfield programmers can devise. Although they develop at a furious rate, they think they can solve difficult problems [cr.yp.to] in an afternoon but fail in obvious ways [soylentnews.org].
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