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Combatting revisionist history

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dasein
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Combatting revisionist history

#1 Post by dasein »

I'm something of a historian, I can't help but be troubled by the revisionist history I see unfolding in the aftermath of the recent controversy over systemd. So, from the “you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts” department, as a kind of parting gift to this community, I'd like to do what I can to marshal what I perceive to be the pertinent facts into a single bucket.

Disclaimer: For the benefit of those who may stumble on this post without any knowledge of my feelings on the matter, it's safe to call me the original systemd hater. In fact, it was my own headlong flight from systemd that originally led me to Debian in the first place. (And depending on your POV, that may constitute Yet Another Reason to hate systemd. ;)) I make no claim nor pretense to "balance" or "fairness" regarding systemd any more than I would for, say, arsenic poisoning. My aim is to challenge and hopefully dispel certain memes that I see emerging from the systemd aftermath.

With that out of the way...

Systemd is not an init system
If someone characterizes systemd as an “init system,” you may safely assume that s/he is either utterly clueless or deliberately obfuscating the discussion. Calling systemd an init system is like calling an automobile a cup holder. Not even Lennart Poettering pretends that systemd is anything but the “Core OS” (sic).

What systemd is is an effort to re-create large portions of existing userspace (including login, job scheduling, and networking, just to name a few) inside a single process traditionally reserved for the sole purpose of starting *nix userspace. (Just in case it isn't clear, there is a huge difference between starting userspace (init) and being userspace (systemd).)

At the end of the day, how one perceives this re-creation of existing userspace strongly influences one's reaction to systemd. There are plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons to be troubled by this re-invention of the wheel; they range from the philosophical and aesthetic, to the technical and mechanical, even the purely political and brutally practical.

And that's part of the problem when folks start to “debate” systemd. Very few folks have the chops to think about, much less talk about all of these areas simultaneously. As a result, the discussion becomes fractured and disjointed, in what is literally the textbook definition of bikeshedding. Suddenly, a talking head who's never written a line of code in his/her life offers up an authoritative-sounding-but-utterly-bogus opinion on systemd's maintainability. Add in the fact that folks on both sides (including Poettering himself) act as if name-calling is a perfectly good substitute for empirical evidence, and the “debate” becomes indistinguishable from white noise.

Speaking of noise...


There was never a systemd debate
Debian came late to the systemd party. Systemd has been controversial since its inception in 2010. During the intervening four years, people have fled and even forked distros over systemd. By the time Debian's GR rolled around, anyone and everyone who was going to have a strong opinion about systemd already had it. Nobody was going to change their minds, thus there was no true “debate.”

We humans love to imagine that we are rational creatures, driven by logic and reason, capable of making reasoned, optimal decisions. Which is great except what we really are is short-sighted, pig-headed, and stupid. Psychology has a boatload of experiments that demonstrate that once you get to the choose-up-sides stage, then argument becomes dramatically less effective. (Google “confirmation bias” and “backfire effect” to learn more.)


The GR was not a mandate for systemd
I have no idea where systemd fanbois get the idea that a victory lap is appropriate.

The results of the GR vote were diluted and obfuscated by two non-resolution outcomes. Of the three technologically-relevant resolutions to the GR, one was unequivocally pro-systemd, the other two were contra-systemd, differing primarily in phrasing (essentially the difference between “must not” and “should not”).

(Aside: I confess to being a “must not” guy at heart, but I grudgingly admit that those who suggest that an absolute prohibition might prove unnecessarily inflexible or self-limiting might have a valid point. Maybe. But I don't have to like doing it. :evil:)

But here's the thing, and there is just no getting around it. Once you eliminate the ass-covering "no GR required" amendment, “systemd is a bad idea, the only real question is how bad” didn't place third.

It placed first. By a substantial margin.

Conversely, “systemd is a good idea” didn't place first.

It placed last.

If this surprises you, even a little, then by all means, go look it up. And for the love of whatever you hold Sacred, refrain from uttering a single word of GR-related drivel until you do.

(Edit: My exhortation above to refrain from drivel absent sufficient research was predictably futile. So, for the benefit of those who are unable or unwilling to do the math themselves, a pre-digested version of the analysis can be found here: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php? ... 62#p576502)


Speaking of the GR...


The GR was too necessary
As noted above, the only reason “systemd is a bad idea” wasn't the outcome of the GR vote is because of the “political cover” amendment that allowed “This conversation is superfluous” to pretend to be the correct answer (which it absolutely isn't).

In a dichotomous, up-or-down, yes-or-no vote (aka Option1 -vs- Option3), the Debian dev community is split 60/40 (or 40/60, depending on one's POV) on the issue of systemd. When a large plurality of your engineering team tells you that you're doing something fundamentally wrong, dismissing their concerns with “we don't need no steenkin' conversation” bespeaks a complacency bordering on negligence, all the moreso when when your actions have very, very large consequences. (Google “Challenger disaster” for more information.)

Which leads me to...


Debian isn't other distros
Every time I see someone spout some variation of the bandwagon fallacy, or refer to Arch as a “major” distro, I have an urge to do harm.

News flash: There is exactly one Debian, and nothing--nothing--compares to it.

NASA doesn't run Arch. Amazon and Google don't rely on Mageia.

In terms of sheer impact on both the larger LinuxSphere and the global economy, there are exactly two “major” distros: Debian and RedHat. (SUSE is a very distant third, and everything else is just noise.)

A change in Debian affects mission-critical and life-critical software across the globe, touches literally tens of thousands of organizations, and ripples through a hundred derivatives and spinoffs.

So no, it doesn't matter, not even a little, whether your desktop machine boots a few seconds faster or “seems to work ok” under systemd. The cost of downtime on a hobbyist machine is all-but-unmeasurable, whereas the cost of downtime on a scientific supercomputer is somewhere between large and catastrophic.

Speaking of costs...


Change costs, and big change costs big
There's a reason why sysadmins in large organizations are routinely among systemd's biggest detractors.

Downtime is expensive in terms of both time and money. So is re-training. So is rewriting gigabytes of artificially-obsoleted documentation. Add them all up, factor in the associated opportunity costs, multiply by a planet's worth of installs, and before you know it, the cost to the global economy associated with systemd deployment reaches into the billions (or thousands of millions, if you prefer) of dollars/euros.

And for what exactly?

Even if systemd were a demonstrably superior technology (which it isn't), adequately spec'ed (which it isn't) elegantly designed (which it isn't), well-coded (which it isn't), properly documented (which it isn't),or developed by a responsive and responsible community with a history of delivering robust and reliable software (*cough*pulseaudio*cough*), systemd would still be at best problematic, for one simple reason: it's insanely expensive to implement, particularly given the fact that it doesn't solve any actual problem.

Insofar as I'm aware, no one has ever articulated a value proposition for systemd that addresses its implementation costs, or comes remotely close to calculating a payback period. More to the point, no one has successfully articulated any value proposition for systemd that goes beyond “it's better” or “it's more modern.”

Global warming, antibiotic resistant bacteria, oilspills, and nuclear accidents are all “modern,” but that doesn't make them good. And “better” is a meaningless term until and unless one specifies a metric or quantitative criteria that can be used to measure “better” in a systematic and reliable way. Otherwise, “new and improved!” is just marketing hype.

At the end of the day, the crux of the systemd question comes down to a matter of how much Unix one wants in one's Linux. Casual users and hobbyists probably won't care. Professionals will care deeply and passionately.

Anyway...

I resigned from staff months ago during the troll-driven meltdown that masqueraded as systemd "debate" here at FDN, and I've not nuked a single piece of spam since. But the poo-bahs have not yet seen fit to explicitly revoke my Purple Hammer. So I'm doing it for them, by switching to a non-staff user account.
So, if you've ever wanted to add me to your ignore list, now's your chance: http://forums.debian.net/ucp.php?i=zebr ... Curmudgeon

Edit: I have now been de-purple-ized, so this is a better link: http://forums.debian.net/ucp.php?i=zebr ... add=dasein

So long, and thanks for all the fish...
Last edited by dasein on 2015-05-04 20:01, edited 3 times in total.

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Re: Combatting revisionist history

#2 Post by golinux »

Absolutely brilliant, Curmudgeon. I'm not here much anymore either but I'll keep an eye out for you and say hi.
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Re: Combatting revisionist history

#3 Post by oswaldkelso »

Tthere were a few points that raised my eyebrows but overall a fantastic post . Anyway Leave all the monied users, Arch users and noobs to systemd and enjoy life on the other side.
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Re: Combatting revisionist history

#4 Post by buntunub »

I don't get this post. Who is trying to revise Debians history? The Systemd fanbois certainly have no desire to revise it. They won. The Systemd haters don't want to change it. They lost, so there is not much point to them trying to do it, even if they could.

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Re: Combatting revisionist history

#5 Post by Bulkley »

Has Richard Stallman ever said anything about systemd?

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Re: Combatting revisionist history

#6 Post by RU55EL »

dasein, thank you for taking the time to write such an informative post. Especially informative for me, being new to Debian.

Thank you!

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Re: Combatting revisionist history

#7 Post by Bulkley »

RU55EL wrote:dasein, thank you for taking the time to write such an informative post. Especially informative for me, being new to Debian.

Thank you!
Yes, thank you.

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Re: Combatting revisionist history

#8 Post by robert-e »

@buntunub:
Perhaps you have not noticed that history is (often) written by the victors. Dasien is attempting to perserve what actually happened in this "systemd" saga. That you do not "get it" indicates, at least to me, that you have not watched this saga from its beginnings. And thats ok. However, having said that; it is not incumbant on you to denigerate his posting. His post is for historical reasons...that is to permit others to look back on this saga and pass their own judgements.

@dasien...while I have not always agreed with your thinkings; I do believe they come from a huge love os linux OS, and it's history.

Regards,
Bob

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Re: Combatting revisionist history

#9 Post by buntunub »

robert-e wrote:@buntunub:
Perhaps you have not noticed that history is (often) written by the victors. Dasien is attempting to perserve what actually happened in this "systemd" saga. That you do not "get it" indicates, at least to me, that you have not watched this saga from its beginnings. And thats ok. However, having said that; it is not incumbant on you to denigerate his posting. His post is for historical reasons...that is to permit others to look back on this saga and pass their own judgements.
I have been involved in trying to get Debian to reverse the Systemd decision for a long time now. As I said in so many other previous posts, those who were in a much better position within the project than I who also were not content with Systemd did not, or felt they could not do much to reverse things aside from Ian and the GR which failed. Others left or stepped down. This "saga" you speak of exists only in a marginal number of peoples minds, even amongst the Systemd haters, else the GR would not have failed. In the end, Systemd is here to stay, and will most likely be here for years and years and years to come until it is replaced by something that some people feel sucks less than it does. I am sure mountains of drama will ensue when that happens too, as is the case with any big changes to Linux.

There simply can't be any revisionist history to this story. This whole entire mess is clearly written and recorded. Debian did the whole thing out in the open for everyone to see and read. That is perhaps the only thing great about Debian anymore, is that they do not hide anything.

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Re: Combatting revisionist history

#10 Post by Curmudgeon »

Bulkley wrote:
RU55EL wrote:dasein, thank you for taking the time to write such an informative post. Especially informative for me, being new to Debian.

Thank you!
Yes, thank you.
Thanks for letting me know you found it informative.

In the "credit-where-credit-is-due" department, half the credit for any informativeness actually belongs to @mor. His sense of timing is much better than mine.
robert-e wrote:His post is for historical reasons...that is to permit others to look back on this saga and pass their own judgements.
That's it exactly.
Get off my lawn.

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Re: Combatting revisionist history

#11 Post by golinux »

Curmudgeon . . . you have a PM @dasein
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Re: Combatting revisionist history

#12 Post by Linadian »

Very informative, but I've been summing it up for ages already, systemd is a barnacle-ware toy of a spoiled bespectacled brat wannabe that should be writing his own OS/kernel instead of imposing his useless Borg cancer on others. Ubiquitous systemd implementation is a result of mob mentality, usually the mob is mental, lol. People didn't learn from his first abomination, pulseaudio, now I have the pain of removing it from most distros, needless to say, I'd like to metaphorically hoof the little jerk in the l\lu+z.

@dasein, if we've ever crossed swords, I don't remember, but I had no idea there was a human under the purple, lol. :lol:
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Re: Combatting revisionist history

#13 Post by 1of12 »

The prevalence of philosophical and emotional posting on that particular subject is why, on the whole, the posts about it on Linux fan forums are just ignored. This thread is no different - loaded with opinion, low on fact.

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Re: Combatting revisionist history

#14 Post by Ardouos »

Thank you Dasein for this post and the contributions made to this forum. I have always enjoyed reading your posts as they were always witty or/ and informative.
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Re: Combatting revisionist history

#15 Post by Hallvor »

I enjoyed reading this.

Maybe you could give this post a little more work and publish it somewhere on the web with the title: "The history of systemd." Why shouldn't the losing side write history for once? :)
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Re: Combatting revisionist history

#16 Post by n_hologram »

The English teacher in me would have loved to see this editorial laden with references for further reading, but obviously I can do the Googling myself. 10/10 post.

Up next: "Deconstructing systemd: a collection of analyses" by j_derrida_420
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Re: Combatting revisionist history

#17 Post by golinux »

FYI, you are getting some well-deserved love on the Devuan mail list. :)

https://lists.dyne.org/lurker/message/2 ... 93.en.html
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Re: Combatting revisionist history

#18 Post by emariz »

The vast majority of Debian's developers are actually packagers. I am not minimising their excellent work, but stating a fact that has been ignored in this conversation.

While we could get into a long discussion about Red Hat's motives behind the development and implementation of systemd, nowadays, giant sets of tools, like Gnome, depend on systemd, and packagers must decide whether to use these tools and adapt them into their projects, or reject them and create alternatives to supply that functionality.

I am confident that Debian's developers could create brilliant alternatives to all these tools afftected by systemd, but I am not sure that they want to invest their time and effort doing so. They are already very efficient, and very busy, at putting together thousands of pieces from thousands of sources into one successful project, Debian.

I do not know who will pay for the implementation of systemd in the years to come, nor do I know who was going to pay for the effort of Debian's developers to provide us with an alternative.

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Re: Combatting revisionist history

#19 Post by dasein »

n_hologram wrote:The English teacher in me would have loved to see this editorial laden with references for further reading..."
And the psychologist in me says, "'Incidental' learning is a good thing." :D

That is to say: I actively encourage folks to check my facts, because it is in the act of inquiry that true learning happens. But there is so much background knowledge involved that there is simply no way to anticipate all possible combinations of prerequisites. Watch:

Do we start with the notion that it's almost always demonstrably stupid (and way more expensive) to do a wholesale replacement of existing working code with new code? (Particularly when we're talking about devs who act as if "We're crossing our fingers and hoping this never happens" is an effective substitute for Defensive Programming best practices.)

Or do we start with maintainability? This one is gonna be killer, particularly given Poettering's known history of dumping half-finished code into userland and leaving it to everyone else to sort out and fix. Pop quiz: Initial development is/is not more than half of any system's true cost.

Or let's talk code complexity, but let's do it like we're in the NFL. Frame the discussion in a way that eliminates folks who think that the word data is the plural of the word opinion; if someone doesn't know a Halstead metric from a hole in the ground, then they don't get to play.

Or perhaps we start with a short course in software engineering economics? Because that's the bottom of bottom lines; it doesn't farqing matter if systemd has an orgasmatron feature if it never pays back the cost for its implementation. I want NASA spending my tax money exploring space, not rewriting system maintenance procedures because of systemd.

Indeed, if you watch the historical "debate" carefully, every time anyone raises this point in one way or another, the systemd fanbois' response seems always to consist of equal parts hand-waving and name-calling. (Something like, "Because... because better, you Luddite pedophile!") There is no facepalm adequate to the task.

(Edit: NSFW wording removed)
Last edited by dasein on 2015-03-07 17:16, edited 3 times in total.

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Re: Combatting revisionist history

#20 Post by dasein »

golinux wrote:FYI, you are getting some well-deserved love on the Devuan mail list. :)
I suspected something along those lines when I saw that it got something like 300 views in just a few hours. But thanks for sharing the love.

Speaking of love (and hate), I take notice of the fact that this account has been de-purple-ized since my OP, which pretty much eliminates the need for a "non-staff" account. "Haters gonna hate" and all that, but at least now they can ignore me if they choose. (Besides, this way I don't have to transfer all ~100 names on my existing ignore list to the other account.)

I still won't be around much, because once Jessie becomes Stable, a huge part of what I can contribute technically (not to mention large portions of what I have already contributed) becomes obsolete. And the devs' cowardly response to Ian Jackson's GR makes Debian Just Another Distro as far as I am concerned. I mean, Debian has now publicly declared that the decision to adopt a platform whose explicit goals include making it easier to insert binary blobs into a system is unworthy of even a moment's somber reflection. At that point, DFSG might as well stand for Diabetic Foot Study Group. (My sincere thanks to saulgoode/alansmithee for taking the time to educate me on this point.)

(Though I loved the one ML comment by the guy who said I was "biased," as if I hadn't admitted (even highlighted) my bias from the very start, or as if being biased in favor of empirical answers to empirical questions is something to be ashamed of. :roll:)

(Apologies for all the edits. There was one sentence I just couldn't quite get right. And I'm still not happy with it, damnit.)
Last edited by dasein on 2015-02-27 03:52, edited 7 times in total.

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