On Mon, 17 Sep 2018 at 11:37, Dhaval Giani via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On Mon, Sep 17, 2018 at 3:11 AM Russell Reiter <rreiter91@gmail.com> wrote:
The Poettering hit man story is four years old. It didn't stop him from his own rant, they are after all just words.
They are just words for you. But you ignore a phone call from an unknown number. And then you listen to voicemail, and it a voicemail threatening to kill you because of systemd, at that point in time, it has stopped being mere words. Yes, 4 yrs old. Has it stopped having impact? No.
It bothers me that it occurs to people to do this sort of thing. Free software has this; SF fandom has this; I'm sure it exists in plenty of places.
I am just going to ignore the last bit. I bring up systemd, because it is quite a bit my baby as well. I take every attack on it personally (rightly or wrongly, and that is my problem, not _yours, as you have quite pointed out later on in your email). Which quite brings to my point, you have folks who are directly impacted by your words. Am I right in defending my baby? Am I right in getting defensive about it? Am I right in not being able to separate out the project from the person? These are all personal questions.
With regards to systemd, I'm not quite sure what to think. I keep hearing troublesome things about scope creep and about Poettering; what I can't tell is whether the troubling things are being made up by the sorts of people whose edge cases include calling in death threats, or just what. Personally, I think I'm more or less with Torvalds; there certainly seem to be some good things about systemd; the "good old init scripts" needed to become something better. I step back to the analysis process that Debian did when they took the (rather controversial step) of adopting systemd; I was reasonably satisfied by the analysis at the time, that they made the best decision available. (Here's a pointer into the debate material: https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/initsystem) I'm not sure how open the project is; it's always difficult to tell from outside. For sure, given that they've got evil monkeys outside flinging poo, they can't just accept anything offered, as someone's sure to fling in commits intended to cause trouble. My own evidences... - I have written a few service files; it has mostly not been terribly painful. - I found it remarkable how long it took for service files to get integrated into debian for ISC DHCPD, so apparently some things can be problematic. - I found it a pain when I wanted to force BIND9 to use IPv4, and managing the configuration for that seemed to involve some fight between BIND maintainers and systemd maintainers. I have to call my own situations a bit of a mixed bag. Nothing indicating systemd as being a full on disaster, but it's not without some pains in the neck.
All that matters is, everything people say, has an impact, and a result. You might call it illogical (in your opinion), but it has happened. There have been times where I felt I could participate in discussions and talk about it.
Spectre/Meltdown was one such. I talked about the importance of it, and it was immediately shot down as corporate conspiracy. Of course, we are still dealing with the fallout. What is my relation with this? For the last many months, I have been part of the response force for my employer to deal with the intel flaws. But feeling (note the word) attacked, doesn't make me feel inclined to share. Certainly not my loss.
That one's sufficiently hard to get a grasp on that I'm not surprised that some would head straight down conspiracy road; it's way easier to rant than to understand a difficult problem. And of course, that means you're getting insults flung at you, which is understandably no fun. -- When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"