On Thu, 05 Jun 2014 22:48:07 +0100 Martin <m_bt...@ml1.co.uk> wrote: > Resend (gmane appears to be losing my email for this list... :-( )
OK, forwarding to the list too (with a bit less snippage than normal, to keep your message intact as I'm relaying) and replying below. > > On 05/06/14 16:35, Martin wrote: > > On 05/06/14 03:00, Duncan wrote: > >> So things should really be simmering back down pretty shortly. > >> =:^) > > Thanks for the good summary. > > > > Yep, I hit all the red "B" blockers... Quickly saw it was upower and > > some confusion with systemd even though I've not selected systemd > > anywhere and... > > > > I was too rushed to investigate much further and so added into my > > /etc/portage/package.mask: > > > > # Avoid pulling in systemd! > > =sys-power/upower-0.9.23-r3 > > > > > > Thanks for letting me know to await the news item and for the bits > > to settle... [Just forwarding that part and would delete it as I'm not replying to it, were I not forwarding it for you too. But I'm replying to the below.] > > As for systemd... I'm just wondering if the various heated air being > > generated/wasted is as much rushed arrogance on the part of the > > implementation as due to the grand ripples of change. > > > > The recent kernel DoS debacle due to misusing the long used kernel > > debug showed a certain 'cavalier' attitude to taking over > > functionality without a wider concern or caution to keep projects > > outside of systemd undisturbed... Or at least conscientiously > > minimise disturbance... Agreed, and for quite some time I that attitude was why I was delaying my own switch, tho I expected I'd eventually make it. But backing up a bit to reveal the larger picture... Developers in general aren't always exactly known for their ability to get along with each other or with others or necessarily the wider community. Certainly there's many examples of this in the FLOSS community, and from what I've read of the proprietary development community it's no different, save much of it happens behind closed doors, with public appearances moderated by the PR folks. Actually, I've a personal experience that rather changed my own outlook on things, that I believe explains a lot of the problem here. The following gets a bit franker and more personally honest than most discussions and I'm not really comfortable saying it, but it's important enough not to skip as it illustrates a point I want to make. I don't ordinarily talk about myself in this way, but the fact is, on most tests I score well above 90 percentile IQ. Typically, depending on the test and whether I'm hitting my groove that day or not, I run 95-97 percentile on average in most areas (tho in composition I'm relatively low for me, 70s). (FWIW, I've always been slightly frustrated. The MENSA cutoff is supposed to be 98 percentile and I typically score tantalizingly close, but not quite! It'd be nice... =:^( ) In technology and computer areas I'd guess I'm a bit higher, perhaps 98 percentile or so. 95 percentile means about 19 out of 20 people score lower, 98 percentile is 49 out of 50. But, this level of attainment presents its own set of difficulties, difficulties I'm intimately familiar with, but obviously not to the level these /real/ geniuses, the big hero coders of our community, are. I still remember the day I actually realized what dealing with a mentally challenged individual actually was, back in about 8th grade or so. He had come to visit a next door neighbor and we set out to climb a local butte, me not yet understanding his difficulty -- I knew there was /something/ different about him, but I didn't know what, I just accepted it, and him, as basically my equal, as I had been taught to accept and treat everyone. But climbing this butte didn't simply involve a hike, as is the case with many hills/buttes. It involved a bit of relatively minor technical climbing, "chimneying", etc. I had done it with a group previously, but wanted to try it again, for the exercise and challenge. But I didn't want to do it alone, and this guy was agreeable to trying it, so we set out. Everything went well, considering, but it did take somewhat longer than I had planned and our ride back got a bit worried and alerted the authorities. Fortunately, they didn't have to pull us off the mountain (or scrape us from the bottom of the chimney), but we got in a bit of trouble. When I got home, Mom asked me why on earth I'd take a r* guy up a mountain like that. I was flabbergasted! I didn't know! And to think I took him on that climb that was slightly challenging for me (something I'm not sure my Mom knew, and that I didn't tell her!), what must it have been for him? I was perhaps rather fortunate something /didn't/ happen, altho now I realize that despite (or even perhaps because of) his challenge he was remarkably resilient, and may well have picked himself up and continued better than I would have if something had gone wrong and either one of us was hurt That night or perhaps the next day, as I thought about it, I realized what had happened. I was so used to, as a matter of course, dropping to whatever level was required to meet people at their own level and treat them as equal, that I didn't realize I was even doing it. To me it was just the way one interacted with others. What I had originally noticed different about him, that I couldn't put into words before as I simply didn't have the experience or concept, was that I had to drop a bit more than normal, but I was so used to doing it for pretty much everyone, that I didn't even realize I was doing it, or know what it was... until I was forcibly confronted with the fact that this guy was (to others) noticeably below average. But to me he was simply a bit more of the normal that I always did, and that I thought was just the way it was to interact with /anyone/. Since then I've obviously become a bit wiser in the ways of the world, but realistically, I really do seldom meet people /really/ my equal in the real world, and that has really distorted my experience, and to some extent my attitude and picture of the world. But that was only experiencing the one side. I consider myself fortunate to have actually had the opposite experience as well. A bit over a decade ago I was with a Linux and Unix friendly ISP that had a lot of real knowledgeable folks as customers, including one guy that was one of only about a dozen with direct commit privs to one of the BSDs, and several others that were in the same knowledge class. While I may well be at the 95-97 percentile range, for the first time in my life I was well outranked, as several of these guys were at the 99th percentile or better I'm sure, plus they had likely decades of experience I didn't (as a newbie fresh from the MS side of the track) have! That was a humbling experience indeed! To that point, I had been used to being at least /equal/ to pretty much anyone I met, and enough above most that even if I happened to be wrong I knew more about the situation than pretty much anyone else, that I could out-argue them even in my wrongness. Here the situation was exactly reversed, *I* was the know-nothing, the slow guy that everyone else had to wait for while someone patiently explained what was going on so I could follow along! I **VERY** **QUICKLY** learned how to shut up and simply read the discussion as it happened around me, learning from the masters and occasionally asking a question or two, and to be *VERY* sure I could backup any claims I DID make, because if I was wrong, for the first time in my life I was pretty much guaranteed to be called on it, and there was no bluffing my way out of that fix with THESE guys! That had roughly the same level of effect on me as the earlier experience, but at the opposite end, something I rather badly needed as I NEEDED a bit of humbling at that point! Now here's the critical point that I've been so brutally honest to try to present: What happens to the *REAL* 99 percentilers, the guys who *NEVER* have that sort of humbling "OOPS, I screwed up and better shutup! These guys know more than me and if I'm wrong they're not afraid to demonstrate exactly why and how!" ... experience? Unfortunately, a lot of them are a**h***s! Why? Because they're at the top of their class and they know it. Nobody can prove them wrong, and if somehow someone does, they simply don't know how to react, as it's an experience they very rarely have. Even on things they know is simply opinion, they're so used to having absolutely zero peers around that can actually challenge them on it, that they simply don't know /how/ to take a real, honest challenge when it comes. Which BTW is one of the things I find so amazing about Linus Torvalds. I doubt many would argue that he's at the 99 percentile point, yet somehow he's a real person, still approachable, and unlike most folks at his level, actually able to deal with people! At the other end are people like Hans Reiser. He was and is a filesystem genius, and reiser4 was years before its time, yet never got into the kernel despite years of trying, because he was absolutely horrible at interpersonal relations and nobody anywhere near his level could work with him, because he simply didn't know how to be wrong. Unfortunately learning that was literally a fatal experience for his wife. =:^( Take it from someone who is in many areas 90 percentile plus, but who counts that experience sitting at the feet of /real/ masters as perhaps the single most fortunate and critical experience in his live, because he learned how to be wrong, that's NOT an easy lesson to learn, but it's an *EXTREMELY* critical lesson to learn! Think about that the next time you see something like that kernel command-line debug thing go down. Poettering and Sievers are extremely bright men, genius, top of their class. And Poettering in particular is a gifted speaker as well (researching systemd I watched a number of videos of presentations he has done on the subject, he really IS an impressive and gifted speaker!). But, they don't take being wrong well at all, and they have a sense of entitlement due to their sense of ultimate rightness. Never-the-less, however one might dislike and distrust the personality behind them, both systemd and reiserfs (and later reiser4) were/are top of their class for their time, unique and ahead of their time in many ways. There's no arguing that. I didn't and don't like Hans Reiser, but I used his filesystem (reiser3), and still use it on my spinning rust drives altho I've switched to the still not fully mature btrfs on my newer ssds. Unlike Reiser, I don't know so much about Poettering and Sievers personal lives and I surely hope they don't end up where Reiser did for similar reasons. But similar to Reiser, I use their software, systemd, now. And there's no arguing the fact, it's /good/, even if not exactly stable, because they continue to "gray goo" anything in their path, and haven't yet taken the time necessary to truly stabilize the thing. While I never used it, from what I have read, PulseAudio was much the same way as long as Poettering was involved -- it never truly stabilized until he lost interest and left. Unfortunately I think that's likely to be the case with systemd as well; it won't really stabilize until Poettering loses interest and moves on to something else. And for people who depend on stable, I really doubt I'll be able to recommend it (if you can avoid the gray goo, I really don't know if that will remain possible if he doesn't lose interest in another couple years) until then. But it /is/ good, good enough it's taking the Linux world by storm, gray goo and all. If systemd could just be left alone to stabilize for a year or so, I think it'd be good, /incredibly/ good, and a lot of hold outs, like I was until recently, would find little reason not to switch, once it was allowed to stabilize. But when that's likely to happen (presumably after Poettering moves on), I really haven't the foggiest. Meanwhile I'm leading edge enough (I'm running git kde4 and kernel, after all), and (fortunately) good enough at troubleshooting Linux boot issues when I have to, that I decided it was time, for me anyway. So as you can see, while I've succumbed now, I really do still have mixed feelings on it all. But meanwhile, try applying the "do they actually know how to be wrong" theory the next time you see something happening elsewhere, too. It's surprising just how much of the FLOSS-world feuding it explains!... Tho this is one area I'd be I'd be /very/ happy if I /was/ wrong about, and suddenly all these definite top-of-their-field coders started getting along with each other! Well, we can hope, anyway (and while we're at hoping, hope the lesson in being wrong isn't data eating code teaching them how to be wrong, or security code either, as seems to have been the recent case with openssl!). -- Duncan - No HTML messages please, as they are filtered as spam. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
