Hi All What an interesting diatribe of views and opinions it's been with clearly many individuals letting their guard down ever so slightly. initially I was of the opinion that the original subject line of this thread was incorrect and should have been "Petition to not implement SystemD." although I now realise that too would have been pointless for two reasons, firstly, based on the responses on this thread, the SystemD advocates have no intention of listening to anyone other than fellow SystemD advocates so therefore any petition is pointless. Secondly having looked at the said poll results it would appear the SystemD advocates are in a majority, although any anonymous poll is open to abuse this is why on petitions they ask you to put your name on what is in effect a vote.
As far as I'm concerned SystemD has, and is being implemented badly it seems like a square peg is being hammered in a round hole and the gaps filled in with symlinks and patches this tells me that if symlinks and manual intervention is required there is something amiss with either the file system or SystemD itself. My friends at Red Hat inform me there is little marked improvement with SystemD however "It would be jolly nice if we was all the same." so I'm slightly mystified at the vehement determination to adopt it? I am of the opinion that development of Arch Linux should have in effect halted at the decision to implement the wholesale ravaging of the distribution namely the removal of such things as the installer etc and the new elements and working practices being applied. Really it should have been "Bye bye Arch-A and Hello to our new shiny shiny Arch-B" firstly that would have avoided all the heartache a heck of a lot of people (Including myself) went through after the so called transition steps failed, and secondly everyone would have been clear on the new direction Arch Linux was taking. I know some people are horrified at forks but that's the very nature of FOSS and society in general, things move on, I'm neither for or against SystemD now (I was at first) I am against the intransigent attitude, users are in effect customers and they deserve to be treated a tad better in my opinion. Oh and as a side note a rolling release means it rolls, http://www.thefreedictionary.com/roll if it stops because of a breakage or a change in file structure or manipulation that then means it is not rolling it has come to a halt. Just wanted to add that for those I keep seeing on the net saying "It's a rolling release what do you expect?" Judd Vincent meant "You'll never have to upgrade because every pacman- Syu gives you the most recent version." ergo 'It's rolled over to the latest. If a package breaks your system that's fair enough, if changing the file structure or core of your system breaks it that has nothing to do with 'rolling' that's called "I just ripped the wires out of your radio but hey you get to keep all the parts." just wanted to clarify that. All hate mail. bricks and bottles to /dev/null :-)
