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no, the alternatives are

(1) systemd (2) write and advocate the usage of a different init system. (3) a horrible death

I'm certainly not opposed to having a better alternative, but the systemd people managed to write something that is better than sysvinit and made the package good enough to get people to use it. Now people complain that they're taking over the linux world by force, but they actually don't. They just provide something people want - it's not that they forced the gnome people at gunpoint to use systemd.

exarch 4223 days ago

>better than sysvinit

Better in some ways, worse in others. If systemd were unequivocally better in all areas, nobody would be complaining. By saying what you said, you're subtly but deliberately telling every one of those people that their concerns are irrelevant and/or a result of their ignorance. This is the systemd developers' M.O. and a large part of the reason why there's so much drama over systemd.

Right, "better" is a relative term in software. I'm not disputing that there certainly are problems in systemd, but as a package I still think that systemd does more things "better" than sysvinit than it does things worse. There's certainly a lot of room for improvement - build upon it and create and advocate an init system that is better than systemd in more areas than it is worse.

> This is the systemd developers' M.O.

So far I've mostly seen "we believe this is better and we'll build it this way, like it or leave." That's certainly opinionated, but hey, they're totally entitled to have that view (why would they build it if they thought it's worse?!) My view and your view may differ, but we don't get to complain unless we provide something that we think is better and get a lot of people to agree on that.

exarch 4223 days ago

>I'm not disputing that there certainly are problems in systemd, but as a package I still think that systemd does more things "better" than sysvinit than it does things worse.

The community seems pretty evenly split on this point, with folks like myself taking the opposite view: systemd is a regression in so many fundamental areas that its improvements in things like boot times and init script syntax just are not worth the tradeoffs that it imposes. I don't care if the frogurt is free when it's full of potassium benzoate.

Sure, if that's your view, I'm fine with that. If the people that build the distro-of-choice for me decide that frogurt is the best init system for the distro they want to build, I'll either swallow that or move on to something that uses guaranteed potassium-benzoate-free-frogurt as init, but I'm not going to tell them that they're not allowed to do this. Because they are. You don't have to like it, you don't have to eat it but they're free in their choice just as you are free to build something else.

exarch 4223 days ago

>You don't have to like it, you don't have to eat it but they're free in their choice just as you are free to build something else.

And I'm also free to correctly identify that their poor leadership decisions are ruining a wonderful piece of software and causing the community, including Ian fucking Jackson, to abandon the group that made it possible.

I happen to like modern daemontools-like init systems a lot, (runit, s6) but I use various init systems depending on what I want, and that's great IMO.

The problem is that systemd is that is being forcefully pushed to all distros. For instance, by merging udev with systemd. We want to keep all the alternatives available.

I don't see any force involved. udev is their code. Don't like how they use it - fork.

I understand your pain, I sometimes don't like the direction things that I use move or the ways they change, but I'm not sitting at the sidelines complaining about being pushed around. I get to use stuff others provided for free, I'm grateful for that and I either fork/change it or move on to something else. I'm not in a position to tell them what they should be spending their time on.

Lennart Poettering could just stop developing and supporting udev any second, that's his personal decision and I couldn't say "he forced me to use windows" and I don't see anybody else could.

Don't like the (maybe) coming systemd dependency for udev? Build the code to set up the bus yourself or pay someone or wait until someone knowledgeable gets sufficiently fed up and builds something. Same for the gnome dependency on systemd: Either accept it or contribute the time to make it work without while retaining the features it has.

Not only udev, they roadmap is to pack the whole system so as to remove any difference between linux installs, their words, not mine. Currently, we can fork udev, but in the future, are you telling my to fork the whole operating system? And all applications that unnecessarily depend on said system? That would require millions of dollars, at least.

Also, Windows can also be forked, by distributing patches instead of binaries. So that argument is a red herring, DOS has been forked before, and every proprietary application, but that doesn't mean I can't ask other developers a bit of respect for those of us who are using other init systems, I will maintain my software, just let me do that. All the discourse about democracy around GNU/Linux wasn't supposed to be summed up as "Fork or GTFO".

> Currently, we can fork udev, but in the future, are you telling my to fork the whole operating system? And all applications that unnecessarily depend on said system? That would require millions of dollars, at least.

Yes, indeed, I do. Because most applications will not unnecessarily depend on systemd, but rather because the dependency provides some (perceived) benefit to the developers. And if the developers decide that the benefit is worth the dependency, they'll do it. And if you want to prevent that future, you need to provide something that offsets the benefit - write the test and compat code to support gentoo, write the docs, provide the money (or other incentive) for the developers to do so. That's how it works. You don't have to do all of that yourself, you can form a group, build your own distro, run a fundraiser, whatever you choose. But you don't get to sit back and complain and hope the world changes for you and neither do I.

There's no democracy in the OSS scene, users don't get to decide what the software they use looks like and even maintainers or other software have no vote. It's more like a market - we use what's best for our personal cause. You pick and choose and the software with the most users will prevail, others either hold their ground or disappear (ConsoleKit).

Who are this developers you keep talking about? When Microsoft bundled IE, WMP with Windows, we said, OK, developers decided that the benefit is worth the dependency, they'll do it, but we didn't like that, I'm not talking about legal issues, what I'm saying is this is an attack to the GNU/Linux philosophy. If GNU/Linux closed its source and went proprietary, you would say exactly the same things: Fork or GTFO. But I would say, this is not right. I just don't want systemd bundled with necessary GNU/Linux components, like the Linux kernel, in the future. As simple as that.

All this discussion doesn't and won't preclude me from do all the things you said under "preventing the future".

the_why_of_y 4223 days ago

If there are really "dozens of init systems" out there that "do much more, markedly better than systemd, and are modular" how come exactly zero of them have been adopted by any Linux distro of note?

I've been hearing this for decades: If Linux and *BSD are better than Windows, how come exactly zero people have made the switch?

Except they've been adopted, systemd has been mandatory only in some bigger more commercial distros.