[toolz]

I want to know how this even became an argument in the first place.

It's not that I don't like systemd, it's that [insert affiliated party] is way too cocky

It blows my mind to see people regress so far back into arguments that this because an issue of emotions in a technical debate.

[dredmorbius]

It's not a matter of emotions.

It's a matter of having observed similar behavior in other projects which went similarly off the rails.

Poettering's own track record with Pulseaudio comes to mind. There's also the GNOME project, which I identified as actively intelligent-user-hostile around 2004. It's been somewhat gratifying to see that particular perception bear out with time.

There are other projects which have shown similar levels of arrogance, though mostly with more limited and self-contained damage.

And being prickly or hard to deal with has shades. Neither Linus nor Theo de Raat are pussycats, but both focus very much on technical issues and are generally highly responsive to specific technical complaints. Sure, they make mistakes and bad calls occasionally, but on balance they've tended to get things right.

The attitudes expressed by Poettering and Sievers in particular aren't simply cocky, but contemptuous. And they're getting called on it. Including by Linus.

I could give a shit about personalities themselves, I really could. For the most part I really don't care how socially awkward someone is if they're good at their job. And if they don't start going out of their way to do harm to me or others. Personality disputes in discussions bore the piss out of me.

But I'm also not blind to technical failings with roots in personality traits. And those are what I'm seeing in the systemd crowd and leadership.

[microtonal]

I could give a shit about personalities themselves, I really could.

Then stop poisoning the well.

But I'm also not blind to technical failings with roots in personality traits. And those are what I'm seeing in the systemd crowd and leadership.

The problem that I see that most arguments against systemd are first and foremost about Lennart Poettering. And if technical reasons are brought forward, they can all be summarized as: does not conform to the UNIX philosophy (monolithic, replaces existing tools with tightly-coupled equivalents, binary logs).

I think that a reasonable argument can be made that, with the exception of binary logs, these things are true for many UNIXen. You will find only few people who would say that BSD does not conform to the UNIX philosophy. However, the BSDs have the aforementioned traits as well: developed by one project and tightly coupled (e.g. you cannot just take most BSD utilities and libraries and compile them on Linux or Solaris, it requires serious effort).

People always argued that this was a good trait of the BSDs (and I agree to some extend), because it allows better integration and use of BSD-specific features.

However, when systemd does it, it's suddenly violating the UNIX philosophy.

[dredmorbius]

"Then stop poisoning the well."

I've dithered on whether or not to respond, but this bugs me.

Your response, again, typically of many systemd supporters, looks at the option of responding to the relevant points of my argument (personalities can have relevant technical consequences), and dives to the personality dispute "stop poisoning the well".

I'm not poisoning the well. I'm pointing out that the well has been poisoned.

The elements of the Unix philosophy which you allude to exist for good reasons, and violating them imposes very high costs. This is a lesson that those of us who've been around for a while, and have multi-platform experience (check on both counts for myself) are well aware of.

Monolithic systems transcend ready replacement. Generally you've got to toss the whole mess out. Pluggable systems avoid that. There are instances in which monolithic design does seem to be at the very least hard to avoid, but you'd best be very aware of this and defend your position well. Systemd violates this principle by assuming gratuitous monolithic nature and explicitly refusing compatibility and modular alternatives.

Tightly-coupled systems are similarly brittle. The classic case of this is probably the Windows platform as a whole. Among the best arguments for loose coupling comes from Steve McConnell's 1990s classic Code Complete (ironically, McConnell was a Microsoft developer). I strongly recommend you read the relevant sections on tight vs. loose coupling.

Binary logs (and binary file formats in general) preclude use of alternative tools. The Windows Registry (again from Microsoft) comes to mind. One of the better hacks of this I know of are Unix/Linux compatibility systems which treat the registry as a filesystem interface. This originated with UWIN (from Steve Korn of AT&T and Korn shell fame), and has since been adopted by Cygwin. The ability to grep the registry, process it with scripting tools (sed, awk, perl, etc.), and modify it (using specific commandline utilities offered for the purpose) makes dealing with that particular hairball _slightly_ less annoying. The lack of self-documenting formats for registry values themselves (a trait shared by GNOME's gconf system) is another fatal flaw.

Even packaging formats are subject to this. Red Hat (gee ... aren't they involved with systemd....) designed a binary file format for RPM which requires specific tools to unpack. Joey Hess's 'alien' links to the RPM libraries for this purpose, and a set of Perl tools I'm aware of has to apply specific offsets (varying by RPM version) to extract data from the files. Contrast this with Debian's DEB format: tarballs packed in an ar archive. This can be unpacked with standard shell tools, or busybox.

Putting together the concepts of monolithic, loosely coupled, non-binary, standard tools, I've more than once rescued Debian systems which failed to pivot-root from initrd by breaking into the initrd shell, unpacking, and installing DEB packages using shell tools, facilitated by the use of an interactive shell, busybox for tools, and the DEB format. I'm thwarted on several levels from a similar recovery option in Red Hat systems due to the use of a special and explicitly noninteractive shell used in initrds (which is larger than Debian's 'dash' used for the same role), and the binary format of RPM packages. Working in cramped quarters and difficult situations, I can assure you of which system I'd prefer to be working with.

Systemd's violation of these principles is objectionable because it's not necessary (see OpenBSD's shim replacement for functionality, or uselessd, among others), gratuitous (decisions are being deliberately made), and, as your comment above illustrates, the very valid reasons for not doing just this are belittled.

[deirdres]

LOL. Exactly. When you don't have any good response based on the merits of the argument, attack the presentation. This tactic is very familiar to those of us who call out sexism or racism: "You should be nicer when asking for your problems to be taken seriously."

But, ultimately, what happens in tech is as much about people and personalities as it is about actual technical merit. To delude ourselves otherwise is dangerous. When someone claims to be arguing from technical merit, look very closely at their history and probable motivations. There's always more there.