Peter Nieman wrote:
On 04/11/14 03:53, Jerry Stuckle wrote:
On 11/3/2014 8:36 PM, Joel Rees wrote:
<snip>
I suppose it may be polemic to assert that forking debian and
setting up
a new community would be labor-intensive, fractious, divisive, and
general not a wise use of precious free/libre/open community resources,
in short, "dumb".
But just the fact there are people who consider systemd to be
problematic enough to consider forking Debian should not be ignored.
I very much agree with this sentiment - any good designer should take a
high level of negative feedback as a sign to at least take a pause for
review. That the systemd proponents have not, is, in itself cause for
concern.
I agree it would be labor-intensive, fractious and divisive. However,
if the people feel it is that important, I think it would be a wise use
of community resources.
Forking often makes things worse (classical example: libav) and it
should always be the last resort. But when two entirely different
"philosophies" exist inside a project and the two parts of a whole
start moving in opposite directions and keep doing so for some time it
might be a natural and perhaps the only sensible thing to do, and in
that case I would call it "dumb" to simply call people suggesting a
fork "dumb".
Well said.
In Debian we have two different groups of people with entirely
different visions. One that tries to stick to the "traditional" Linux
(or Unix) way of doing things and one that tries to create something
that I would call a copy of MS Windows, something that the first group
ran away from. The latter group is backed by powerful commercial
companies and paid developers, which brings the first group into a
situation where it increasingly feels compelled to fight in order not
to lose what it has learned to love. That's my experience with Debian
over the last few years at least.
Now, my impression is that some people advocating things like Gnome
and systemd here are so much "experts" and concerned with technical
details that they fail to see the overall picture and the fundamental
differences. They essentially ask the critics (of systemd in this
case) to just give in unless they have precise technical problems, in
which case they should start coding or at least report these problems
because they can all be solved, and in the end everyone can reasonably
be expected to be happy. I guess these people would also deny that
Gnome is intransparent and that it resembles MS Windows, because
everyone can look at the code, after all.
But to the user, things look quite different. Even if the user hasn't
consciously installed anything like Gnome, he will see that more and
more things are happening on his computer that he doesn't want and
doesn't understand, and that he has to spend more and more time
looking for ways to understand things, disable things and restore the
way things were done before, if that is still possible at all. And
when he digs deep enough he will often find that the reason why
something has changed for the worse is that "it's the Gnome way".
I don't think it's quite accurate to characterize this as a clash
between "experts" and "users." There are plenty of "experts" who are
dead set against systemd - for reasons of design philosophy and/or
impact on the configuration and administration of server-side systems.
So to my mind the fundamental question is if you want to keep control
of your computer or if you prefer eye candy and things happening
"automagically". And there is no middle way (only "extremist" ones).
And to the people who have no problem with the way things are going
right now I would say: there's a perfect OS for you already, and it's
called Microsoft Windows 7.
Again. Well said.
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
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