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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: 2, Informative) by fritsd on Monday November 17 2014, @06:00PM
Very well put; I think the crux is whether systemd is a good idea in the first place (your second argument).
It seems to me that systemd is written by geniuses, but not written *for* common-as-muck sysadmins who use Linux in production, instead for some mythical average desktop use case.
Try to read some of the comments on http://debianfork.org/ [debianfork.org] (scroll down; about 50% rants, 50% complaints of people who sound like real actual sysadmins, and a website that's easy to read for the 60+ sysadmin with poor eyesight)
I think the best comment there (can't attribute; the author is not shown) is:
"There is a debate whether to replace legacy init-systems. It is a good
debate, and imho a new init system is very due.
What should have been done (*):
1.) define interfaces/apis for a new init system by the linux
community/process
2.) standardaize these interface
3.) have somebody provide a reference implementation and
reference-test-suite (an init-system is missing critical, I cannot debug
umteenth servers when they fail initing)
what has been done:
1.) a reference implementation has been pooped into existence with
interfaces/apis 'designed' on the fly
2.) this mix of standards/implemention has then been pushed and force-fed
to the community
3.) now the community is pissed
The discussion about whether or not systemd must be used is moot. If
standards exist, systemd can be replaced. If not, like we have now, it
cannot."