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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, 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.