Russ Allbery:
But change sucks, and part of what accreted was decades of subtle
workarounds to poorly-documented issues for which we have minimal
institutional memory.
Like fulfilling the 1970s Unix promise of italics in manual pages, on
the wide range of terminals that /can/ /do/ /italics/: stymied on Debian
and only documented by a note at the bottom of a closed and forgotten
bug report filed roughly a decade and a half ago against a long since
superseded version. A couple of Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
quotations come to mind.
* https://jdebp.eu./Softwares/nosh/italics-in-manuals.html
Russ Allbery:
And the actual position appears to be something around "we're building
it as separate components because that's just good engineering, but we
don't particularly care about use cases that involve picking and
choosing specific components and are not really prioritizing them,"
which is essentially perfectly positioned to make no one happy and all
discussions around modularity arrive at frustratingly inconclusive
loose ends.
This is another thing that falls under the umbrella of the world
changing since 2014, note. There have been discussions amongst the
systemd developers about modularity, more recently. They've been
tentative and limited in scope, haven't resulted in any concrete outcome
yet, and haven't filtered through to the Debian/Ubuntu world, but they
have been there.
Russ Allbery:
I mostly pipe up here occasionally to poke at evidence from the
"systemd is horrible" side [...] there's a bunch of nonsense on the
pro-systemd side too [...]
I don't think that I've pointed you to this already, but if not you
definitely need to read this:
* http://uselessd.darknedgy.net./ProSystemdAntiSystemd/
The same person (whose name I don't know) later wrote these:
* http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/09/05/0/
* http://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2015/10/11/0/
