His positions are mostly controversial because he challenges the way things have been done for a long time. Whenever he presents some new idea/architecture my first reaction is often confusion. Why would he change something that has worked so well for such a long time? But then I take the time to read up on the reasoning behind his ideas and then things start to make sense. Even when something isn't exactly broken, there is still room for better solutions.
There have been lots of suggestions for how to improve linux / unix for a very long time.
The first great war I remember, and I'm sure there were more before I was around, was DJB vs everyone. For the most part, I think his designs, "weird" as they were / are, are still better than almost every crackpot variation of them that's come since.
DJB is a genius, responsible for all of the non-NSA asymmetric cryptosystems, symmetric cryptosystems, and authenticated encryption algorithms supported by TLS (curve25519, chacha20, Poly1305). He's also the one who got us off of the footgun-by-design, broken-random-number-generator-will-spray-your-privatekey-everywhere nondeterministic nonce signature schemes prior to Ed25519 (the first standardized signature scheme which required deterministic nonces). Oh yeah and the only post-quantum cryptosystem that OpenSSH was comfortable shipping.
And pottering gave us pulseaudio. The gift that keeps on giving.
What I said was that the first holy war of unix I remember is the DJB vs everyone else.
As far as I can tell, as odd as DJB's designs may have seemed, they were and are ... way better than what was and still hold up today; most of the following "lets unix better" designs seem to just adopt some of DJB's designs, typically poorly.
Systemd certainly seems to have cribbed elements of daemontools et al, but seemingly none of the notion of "least privilege" ...
The great thing about unix is that there are no "wars" over these things, because everybody gets to decide for themselves.
Well at least that's how it was before systemd -- and all of DJB's unix work long predates systemd. By the time systemd came around DJB had been focusing on ECC exclusively for almost a decade.
The way I remember it is that most people didn't understand DJB and just kinda ignored his work, while a bunch of other people recognized what he was on to and integrated his ideas into software with frendlier user interfaces. For example, runit, which is PID1 for Void Linux to this day, and s6, which is PID1 for both Liminix ("NixOS-on-your-wifi-AP") and Spectrum ("Qubes for Nix"). Indeed increasing numbers of NixOS users are ditching systemd for s6.
Anyways I don't remember anything close to a "holy war".
The "people hate him because he makes new stuff" narrative is just more ego-protecting cope. Many developers of other new systems are widely respected and appreciated because their stuff works and they stay humble. Wireguard and Pipewire devs don't get hate poured on them in HN discussions because their shit works, solves problems people have, and because they know how to deal with people.
It does become a problem when you have a system service developer who
thinks the universe revolves around him, and nobody else matters, and
people sending him bug-reports are annoyances that should be ignored
rather than acknowledged and fixed. At that point, it's a problem.
But even then, system service developers don't try to 'own the whole world' so to speak and so they do need to play nicely with others. Mr. Poopering philosophy is the minute a dependencies maintainer becomes a thorn in his side - he absorbs that project into systemd. The distribution packagers follow like starving dogs on a hunt
Interesting! IANAL, but I think this should be basic functionality, ever since the recent-ish European and Californian privacy regulations. Although I think a quick e-mail to hn@ycombinator.com would suffice.
Even if you delete your account, it wouldn't really matter that much. Whole HN is probably crawled and archived on a daily basis due to a simplistic API
1. He gave a clear reason why it is how it is
2. He realizes it is/might be frustrating
3. even `adduser` will not allow it by default
4. The issue that it still runs the unit even with config errors has been addressed: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/bb28e68477a3a39796... (~2 weeks after the issue was opened)
His reason, although clear, is also plainly wrong. Such usernames although bizarre may be encountered by SystemD so it shouldn't break when it sees them. Computer programs, particularly important ones, should be conservative in what they emit and liberal with what they accept and that means not breaking when they encounter weird but technically permissible usernames. His response should have been "Golly, that's a weird username, I didn't think that was possible" and then fix the bug.
There is a certain personality type that likes to reimagine that their original thinking was not flawed, even when presented with a detail that they did not incorporate into their original thinking. If the detail had been in their awareness from the start, they would have arrived at a different position, but they are bound to a strict sense of linearity for reasons inexplicable to me except for ego protection.
Alternatively, if, like he says in the comments of that bug, he really means that SystemD shouldn't support systems that allow such usernames, then he should ensure SystemD won't run on such systems.
Silently doing the wrong thing is not a good thing, especially when "doing the wrong thing" is running stuff as root that wasn't supposed to run as root.
Disclaimer: I know nothing about the particular bug.
Postel's Law has its tradeoffs, and its fuzzy lines are a nice place for security issues to arise.
For sure, there are limits. In this particular case, maybe we say that SystemD shouldn't support weird usernames beginning with numbers, but the other half of the law should still apply. The conservative emission would be logging an error message, not running that unit file as root.
5. useradd does allow it (as noted in a comment). 6. Local users, and the utilities that create them, are not the only source, there things like LDAP and AD.
And another of the systemd devs, Kay Sievers, was banned from contributing to the Linux kernel due to his bad attitude and unwillingness to collaborate.
Poettering and Sievers are skilled devs with huge egos.
"Poettering is known for having controversial technical and architectural positions regarding the Linux ecosystem"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering