

Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs. - mariuz
https://www.change.org/petitions/lennart-poettering-stop-writing-useless-programs-systemd-journal

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danieldk
Blaming Lennart (not Leonard!) is a bit counterproductive. There's a general
tendency in the desktop Linux community to rewrite components every few years,
rather than improving what exists.

I guess this is mainly caused by the failure of Linux as a commercial desktop.
Except for heroic efforts by Red Hat, SUSE, and previously Sun, it's mostly a
hobbyist affair. As a hobby, people prefer to do the fun work, not the tedious
and boring maintenance, bugfixing, and polishing.

The quality of Linux as a desktop operating system is in stark contrast with
Linux as a server operating system. Thanks to the enormous amount of money
invested in server-related components, Linux as a server is generally very
polished and reliable.

On a personal note, the effort required to maintain a stable Linux desktop
made me switch to OS X in 2007, after using Linux for 13 years.

~~~
toyg
The failure of Linux as a commercial desktop is also (not entirely, of course)
his responsibility, considering the crap he pulled with all the desktop
components he messed with (PulseAudio, HAL, DBUS etc etc), so clearly it's not
a causal factor for his behaviour.

~~~
danieldk
I think the 'failure' of the commercial Linux desktop can mostly be attributed
to economics. Most importantly, consumers do not want to pay for a desktop
operating system (even if it were proprietary). Microsoft effectively shut
down the alternative market by making Windows-hardware coupling mandatory for
large hardware vendors. This gives the perception (through scale and coupling)
that Windows is nearly free. So, why would one spend money on an alternative
operating system?

Then, there are social factors. A vocal minority of the Linux community is
outright hostile towards proprietary software or even towards any form of
capitalism. It is not a very attractive market to operate in - one misstep,
and elaborate PR campaigns are set up.

~~~
ColdAsIce
"Microsoft effectively shut down the alternative market by making Windows-
hardware coupling mandatory for large hardware vendors."

How did they do that, how?!

That is exactly why GNU/Linux on the desktop isnt used by more people.

~~~
toyg
monopolistic behaviour and a solid, conservative set of well-documented APIs.

~~~
ColdAsIce
Why would a hardware vendor care about APIs or monopolistic behaviour?

Why would a hardware vendor make a deal which said vendor can only use this
software on the hardware they make but not other?

~~~
nate_meurer
Unless I am misunderstanding you, your second question makes it appear that
you didn't read the material cited in spot's response to your earlier post. If
I'm wrong, could you perhaps rephrase your question?

------
lucian1900
I think blaming someone for innovating is possibly the stupidest thing one
could do.

dbus is awesome. Best bus we have.

systemd is really nice and useful, overall a better upstart. The reason it's
not a patch for upstart or sysinit is that their designs preclude certain
features that systemd provides.

I don't know about pulseaudio, and I'm not sold on Journal.

~~~
count
systemd doesn't appear to solve a problem, it seems to just add a layer of
indirection and complication, as well as a single point of failure for ALL
system startup services, rather than letting each service just handle it's own
deal.

`init` _already exists_ to kick things off properly - now init just runs
systemd which then kicks things off, for no appreciable gain.

~~~
LeonidasXIV
Seriously, do you even know what you're talking about? init does not start
systemd at all. systemd replaces init, in a way that I can even select whether
I want to use the traditional init or systemd, on boot time, with a kernel
option.

And have you seen proper systemd integration? I installed Fedora lately, and
man, that boots fast. Fedora solves so many things in a sane way that Ubuntu
has been struggling since years. usplash, xsplash, splashy? Fedora has FDO's
plymouth. Guess what, it works. SYS V init, the stupid Arch init, ubuntus
upstart? Fedora has FDO's systemd, and it's faster than any of those.

~~~
count
You're right, I misunderstood the integration.

It still seems like it's optimizing for the wrong thing for the vast majority
of linux users. The # of linux servers, which don't care about boot time (or
where software init is a very tiny part of boot time anyway) is way larger
than the number of people using it as a desktop. Boot time isn't the thing
that's keeping linux off the desktop.

Rewriting scripts and rolling them into a C daemon defeats the whole point of
scripts in the first place - the administrator of the system can't make quick
changes or easily troubleshoot things (or, optionally, selectively
enable/disable small sections of initialization). It's also a large amount of
new work for folks busy fixing actual broken or buggy parts of their software.

Lennart complains that the starting PID on his linux desktop is too high,
because init scripts call 'grep', 'awk', etc. - and that developers should
rewrite all of that into their own startup daemons. It seems like he's
complaining about the 'UNIX way' of small, text-oriented tools each doing one
job and piping the results between them for flexibility and power for the the
system administrator. Moving all of that into a C-based daemon, hiding it
entirely from the administrator (short of a unsupported-by-your-contract
recompile and source mod) doesn't seem like a net win for me, especially for a
few seconds saved two or three times a year.

Most scary is the way he wants to handle socket based services - it's already
the source of one remote DOS against a machine running systemd:
<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=739538>

~~~
ominous_prime
This isn't about boot time, that is just a nice side effect for desktop users.

This is about servers, and better ways to manage the services on them. A
service shouldn't need to daemonize itself, and monitor it's own process via
shell scripts and PID files. Having infrastructure to _run_ services (as
apposed to just _starting_ them), monitor them, and resolve dependencies
between them is a huge step forward.

(I also don't agree with the handling of socket-based service in systemd, but
it's an experiment, and maybe I'm wrong, so its worth a try).

------
Maxious
"You seem to know a lot of stuff about me. I am not particular fond of people
who turn their dislike of software I wrote into personal accusations and
judging in a public forum." - Lennart Poettering Sep 21, 2008
<http://lwn.net/Articles/299615/>

For what it's worth, 4 years on I still struggle daily with audio and only
audio on Linux. I'm not in a position to tell if it's ALSA or PulseAudio that
makes nothing come out unless I plug/unplug, mute/unmute in the correct order
everytime I come back from suspend/open a different app/want to use
headphones. But I didn't have these problems before Fedora 8 when I was using
ESD ;)

And just recently I've resorted to manually starting couchdb in a console
instead of using the init scripts on fedora because after upgrading to 15 they
do some bad things to file permissions. Is it the distributors fault or is it
systemd? Correlation does not imply causation?

~~~
Tichy
Why does nobody else create a better sound system?

~~~
EdiX
ALSA already is the better sound system as long as you don't need all your
applications to have one extra redundant volume control or playing audio on a
remote computer over the internet. However de-pulsifying a linux install
correctly isn't easy.

~~~
ColdAsIce
" or playing audio on a remote computer over the internet".

I thought thats the point of pulseaudio and really wanted to try it.

How can I say... it FAILS at even that! I got it working with ssh and mpd
faster than... oh dont make remember.

~~~
EdiX
> " or playing audio on a remote computer over the internet". > > I thought
> thats the point of pulseaudio and really wanted to try it.

AFAIK (but I wasn't using linux at the time) the point of pulseaudio was that
it was very easy for an application to lock your audio exclusively with ALSA
or OSS (and still is unless ALSA is properly configured) and there were
several competing "sound daemon" trying to solve this problem. Pulse audio was
supposed to be the one true sound daemon, emulating everything else under the
sun. Then it got sound mixing and networked audio bolted on because Poettering
is the master of the kitchen sink.

~~~
rwmj
The right thing to do would have been to fix ALSA so that applications
wouldn't lock each other out, or whatever other problems ALSA may have.

~~~
EdiX
They did, eventually, with dmix.

------
lvillani
Honestly, I don't understand why move this personal attack against Lennart.
From my point of view he just wrote pieces of software he deemed necessary. I
would rather put the blame on distributions other than Fedora¹ for trying to
integrate his stuff early and poorly (thus starting a chain-reaction which
caused even more distributions to rush with integration attempts). I think
he's getting a lot of flak for choices made by others.

_________

1: Fedora is known to ship with lots of experimental software/wide-scale
changes. Its users expect breakage/major innovations from time to time.

~~~
ColdAsIce
He could have improved esd or jack. But no.

~~~
lvillani
Sure he could, but things like that happen all the time. Countless people
start forks and new projects every day, while they could improve the existing
ones (the world is full of examples).

I have this darwinian vision of the software world where it's extremely
positive to experiment with new stuff. Only time will tell which things
surpass the test of time.

Attacking someone publicly this way just because he doesn't contribute to
your¹ favorite project is, in my opinion, a sick thing to do.

______

1: Not addressing you in particular.

------
hasmoo
Haha, "Wolfgang Draxinger" signed 28 days ago. Check out this epic battle
between Draxinger and Poettering: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0>

~~~
toyg
The way Poettering dismisses the "1970s unix mindset" is really sad. Here we
have a big Linux contributor who apparently doesn't appreciate his heritage,
which explains why he's constantly trying to reinvent it... and poorly, as the
saying goes. I'm one of those who really didn't see the need for PulseAudio or
any of the *Kit stuff, and even HAL was kind of a train wreck (all those years
to make it stable and supported by desktop managers, to then throw it all
away).

I'm sure he's just the most visible advocate of this approach, not the only
one, but he's certainly responsible for a lot of the misery Linux desktop
users like me were and are subjected to. After a decade of Linux on my
desktop, I've switched back to Windows 7 in early 2011 and, to be honest, I'm
quite happy I did.

~~~
hasmoo
> I've switched back to Windows 7 in early 2011 and, to be honest, I'm quite
> happy I did.

Yes, because Windows 7 and OS X already have all this modern non-70s-stuff
that Lennart is trying to bring to Linux.

~~~
toyg
No, it's because they're coherent experiences, developing single components
over 10 or even 20 years. They don't chuck out entire subsystems on a whim,
breaking compatibility with everything and then blaming anybody but themselves
for the resulting mess.

Edit: it's quite astonishing how such a wide ecosystem of developers continues
to misunderstand how you build successful developer ecosystems.

------
zokier
Why shouldn't Poettering be allowed to write whatever programs he wishes,
useless or not? I think distributions are responsible for choosing the best
selection of software, and nobody should be blamed for providing new
alternatives to the table.

------
rmc
I hear a lot of people complaining about these new programmes, like
PulseAudio, but as far as I'm concerend, with PulseAudio I can now have proper
working sound. No more of this "Oh I have pidgin open, which wants to do
sound, so Firefox with flash can't watch youtube" problems that used to
happen.

------
grifaton
What's the back story here?

~~~
Despite
Lennart is a Fedora dev known for writing replacements for linux subsystems.
For example, he started PulseAudio and systemd, a replacement for init.
Recently, he's suggested a replacement for syslog where the logs aren't
written as plain text.

I would guess the last one was the impetus for this petition.

~~~
sjs
I don't understand what the big deal is. If his systems aren't useful distros
won't adopt them and no harm is done. If they are useful and distros adopt
them then he has advanced the state of the entire Linux community.

This petition seems childish.

~~~
adestefan
He's a Red Hat employee so everything he does ends up in Fedora at some point.

~~~
LeonidasXIV
Don't use Fedora?

~~~
despite2
What's a better use of my time -- converting my 1000+ machines to another
distro (which may turn out to be worse) or convincing Fedora not to make a
stupid decision?

~~~
LeonidasXIV
If you don't like this change, you probably also don't like the other Fedora
changes that came in the past and surely also in the future, so yeah I'm with
sjs. In the long time you will save time if you switch to a distribution that
aligns with your choices.

Plus, you can do a dry-run with a limited number of machines and you can
select a distribution which seldom changes (Gentoo switched to baselayout2
after.. years, Slackware still has tarballs as packages). Unlikely that they
will push radical changes soon.

------
zecg
Quoth Dziuba: "A long time ago, the original neckbeards decided that it was a
good idea to chain together small programs that each performed a specific
task, and that the universal interface between them should be text. If you
develop on a Unix platform and you abide by this principle, the operating
system will reward you with simplicity and prosperity."

