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Lennart Poettering on Systemd's Tumultuous Ascendancy in the Linux Community (thenewstack.io)
4 points by benballjr on Jan 27, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 11 comments



Ugh, of all the references they could find for Torvalds being "enthusiastic" about systemd.

Oh and Poettering should be reminded that printers can show up as files under /dev (never mind that a basic printer is pretty much a teletype, aka tty, without the keyboard).

Damn it, you could do sound by cat pcm to /dev/dsp even.

Every response he gives in this article solidifies him as a architecture astronaut.


I messaged the author about finding an example of the attributed enthusiasm or removing it entirely, since I'm not sure I believe it. Though others have pointed out that not aggressively attacking it is almost endorsement from Linus...


He, like many others, can't find anything technically wrong with systemd. But he has mentioned that he is less than happy about the people involved.



Upvoted because I think it's worth reading to get where his mind is at, not because I agree with him.


Same here.

I'm actually OK with the possibility of getting away from "everything is a file". Although I still think that's a good starting point and should probably be the default case for most things.

Where I am not a fan of systemd is the extent to which it violates the single responsibility idea. That is, it does too many different things, and it's basically a monolith. Make it easy to substitute alternative implementations of logging and the like, and I wouldn't necessarily object to it.


> I'm actually OK with the possibility of getting away from "everything is a file".

I actually much prefer going all the way with everything-is-a-file; when Poettering tried to claim that his printer is not a file, I really wonder if a) he's even heard of Plan 9 b) he knows about PostScript.

Where I'm not a fan of systemd is that it's all written in C, instead of a higher-level, safer language, and that we're getting to a point where systemd-terminal, systemd-browser and systemd-nano aren't a joke but mandatory.


That seems to be an ongoing flaw of his, and others around him. No real interest in the history of UNIX. Where it came from and why it is the way it is.

All he sees is a nice pile of drivers to bootstrap whatever computing project he wants to get done, and thats it.


I am unaware that systemd-terminal ever was a joke. It was there for a time, called systemd-consoled, and then quietly pulled in July 2015. Lennart Poettering failed to respond when asked about it.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9722163

* https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post...

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8595907


I think i spotted it quipped in various places around the time of a certain gif being released, but quieted down once people heard about consoled...


i just want audio on linux not to suck llama




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