Lennart Poettering on Systemd's Tumultuous Ascendancy in the Linux Community (opens in new tab)

(thenewstack.io)

4 pointsbenballjr9y ago11 comments

11 comments

Ugh, of all the references they could find for Torvalds being "enthusiastic" about systemd.

Oh and Poettering should be reminded that printers can show up as files under /dev (never mind that a basic printer is pretty much a teletype, aka tty, without the keyboard).

Damn it, you could do sound by cat pcm to /dev/dsp even.

Every response he gives in this article solidifies him as a architecture astronaut.

benballjrOP9y ago

I messaged the author about finding an example of the attributed enthusiasm or removing it entirely, since I'm not sure I believe it. Though others have pointed out that not aggressively attacking it is almost endorsement from Linus...

digi_owl9y ago

He, like many others, can't find anything technically wrong with systemd. But he has mentioned that he is less than happy about the people involved.

JdeBP9y ago

Duplicates https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13494355

zeveb9y ago

Upvoted because I think it's worth reading to get where his mind is at, not because I agree with him.

mindcrime9y ago

Same here.

I'm actually OK with the possibility of getting away from "everything is a file". Although I still think that's a good starting point and should probably be the default case for most things.

Where I am not a fan of systemd is the extent to which it violates the single responsibility idea. That is, it does too many different things, and it's basically a monolith. Make it easy to substitute alternative implementations of logging and the like, and I wouldn't necessarily object to it.

zeveb9y ago

> I'm actually OK with the possibility of getting away from "everything is a file".

I actually much prefer going all the way with everything-is-a-file; when Poettering tried to claim that his printer is not a file, I really wonder if a) he's even heard of Plan 9 b) he knows about PostScript.

Where I'm not a fan of systemd is that it's all written in C, instead of a higher-level, safer language, and that we're getting to a point where systemd-terminal, systemd-browser and systemd-nano aren't a joke but mandatory.

2 more replies

fbreduc9y ago

i just want audio on linux not to suck llama

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

11 comments

digi_owl9y ago

Ugh, of all the references they could find for Torvalds being "enthusiastic" about systemd.

Oh and Poettering should be reminded that printers can show up as files under /dev (never mind that a basic printer is pretty much a teletype, aka tty, without the keyboard).

Damn it, you could do sound by cat pcm to /dev/dsp even.

Every response he gives in this article solidifies him as a architecture astronaut.

benballjrOP9y ago

digi_owl9y ago

He, like many others, can't find anything technically wrong with systemd. But he has mentioned that he is less than happy about the people involved.

JdeBP9y ago

Duplicates https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13494355

zeveb9y ago

Upvoted because I think it's worth reading to get where his mind is at, not because I agree with him.

mindcrime9y ago

Same here.

I'm actually OK with the possibility of getting away from "everything is a file". Although I still think that's a good starting point and should probably be the default case for most things.

zeveb9y ago

> I'm actually OK with the possibility of getting away from "everything is a file".

2 more replies

fbreduc9y ago

i just want audio on linux not to suck llama

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse