[dredmorbius]

Systemd does touch numerous parts of Unix as it existed in 1978: logging, authentication, and devices come to mind. But much of what it's interacting with came along afterward: networking, far more services than existed at the time, a much more complex security scope, and more.

But that's still a good 25-30 years of work, experience, practices, and smoothing out the rough edges that will be shot down the drains.

Systemd also fundamentally changes the control locus of key features within Linux and how applications, the kernel, and OS as a whole are constructed and constrained. Putting all of that under the control of a small group with highly evident disdain for any "outside" concerns (in quotes as these are of the larger Linux community, and the concerns are most decidedly inside that group), contempt, and plays-poorly-with-others attitudes.

I'm not impressed.

Nor with your comment, FWIW.

[XorNot]

Authentication is done with PAM and Kerberos these days - Kerberos is late 1980s, PAM came along in the 90s. Unix evolves and had continued to do so since its inception. udev certainly changed how we do devices.

The rest of your comment is fear mongering which could be applied to any group of core devs on any OSS project in existence. After all who controls Debian and security defaults? Do YOU trust them?

[dredmorbius]

You're missing the point: there was no networking (outside of UUCP and dial-up connnections) in 1978 Unix, so there were large classes of functionality since added which simply didn't exist.

What 1978 Unix did have was security and authentication. The OS was multi-user from the very beginning -- hence the pun in the name: uniplexing operating system (Dennis and Ken created a two-user OS to play Space Traveller).

As Bruce Perens recently discussed in a set of comments at LWN, the first thing he did as DPL of Debian was decentralize the management of Debian packaging. He recommends a very similar process for Systemd. The Systemd proponents in that discussion aren't particularly taken with the idea.

http://lwn.net/Articles/621022/

It's not a matter of fear mongering when the stated goals and practices of Systemd are to intentionally break compatibility with other Unixen, to reject compatibility patches, and to provide "choice" in the form of allowing users the option of any Linux distro on which they can run systemd:

http://imgur.com/r/linux/Is9vjRJ

As Jon Corbet noted at LWN in his Grumpy Editor post on the topic, it would greatly behoove systemd leadership and proponents to demonstrate a modicum of gracious victory.

As for Debian's governance, that process has been more than slightly troubled of late, with at least four key departures (Joey Hess, Ian Jackson, Russ Allbery, and Tollef Fog Heen), only in the past couple of weeks. The cabal question was raised by former DPL Bruce Perens in the LWN post linked above. And, frankly, no, I haven't been happy with the recent directions of Debian's Technical Committee of late. Joey Hess's resignation (as well as those of Ian and Russ) calls into question more than just the specific decisions, but the process as a whole.

Your attempts to smear my own comments which are based on actual events, facts, and highly considered views of those with deep and broad experience in the field is, I'm really sorry to say, far too typical of what I see from systemd proponents (the attacks on Perens in the LWN thread strike a pretty similar tenor).

Something is sick in this process. That more than anything is what's bothering me about it, though I've also grave doubts over the technical direction.