This is a CADT attitude. Improving existing interfaces while maintaining compatibility is hard; it's also what makes the difference between a serious software professional and an incompetent vandal.
The fact that the logind developers came to a different solution than you, after spending much more time thinking about it and actually implemented it, doesn't exactly imply logind developers are the ones with an attention deficit, or that logind is bad. ("CADT" apparently means "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers")
Also, never call out others as "incompetent vandals" if you think of yourself as a "serious software professional". This is the kind of toxic behavior that makes communities non-inclusive and leads to impostor syndrome.
The logind developers went against the established wisdom of experience (that big rewrites are generally a bad idea) with the predictable result: high costs (both in migration and in handling outright bugs) for nebulous benefits, with the result that desktop linux is flakier and (understandably) less popular than ten years ago.
> This is the kind of toxic behavior that makes communities non-inclusive and leads to impostor syndrome.
Is that supposed to be a bad thing? We should be less "inclusive" of people who want to rewrite everything. They should feel like impostors. You can't produce good quality if you're not willing to call out bad quality; Linux succeeded (for a time) because Torvalds had high standards and was willing to maintain them.
I'm making a humble request, please do not bring this attitude in open source projects. Really I mean it. It's not helpful and it only makes people angry. You are also misinterpreting the behavior of Mr. Torvalds and confusing things. The kernel developers have actually been some of the most adamant about rewriting major parts of the kernel and breaking internal APIs over and over again (not syscalls) because it's known that the only way to thoroughly improve on the code is to aggressively iterate on it like this. This is actually a major strength of open source: anyone who wants to try to rewrite something can pick up the code and just do it. If it's bad then you throw it away and forget about. If it's good then you keep it. This is precisely how the "high standard" even gets maintained.
I respect your position but I disagree. Projects shying away from criticism in the name of inclusiveness has gone hand in hand with a drop in quality, not just in terms of unwise rewrites but in terms of plain old bad/buggy code - which should not be surprising.
> You are also misinterpreting the behavior of Mr. Torvalds and confusing things.
My point is that Torvalds - historically - used language on the level of "incompetent vandals" freely where appropriate. In a serious software project people are, and should be, willing to state those kind of views very clearly and directly.
> The kernel developers have actually been some of the most adamant about rewriting major parts of the kernel and breaking internal APIs over and over again (not syscalls)
They have; at the same time they've been adamant about the need to avoid regressions, both in terms of maintaining external interfaces and in not ripping things out before a replacement offers feature parity and there's a reasonable migration plan in place. The bottom line is that they caused nowhere near the level of user-facing breakage that the systemd/gnome folks have, and that speaks to higher standards and better judgement.
I want to exclude incompetent vandals from the software community; they are impostors.
Some people consistently make bad decisions. Some of them can change, but others cannot. I do not want the ones who cannot or do not learn to make good decisions to make decisions which affect me (I acknowledge that I myself may be one of those people!).
Quality matters. Reckless vandalism matters too. Breaking nohup was and is indefensible.
