keithpeter wrote:Food for thought: What is the median age of Debian developers? How has that statistic changed over the last 5 years? Could the recent turbulence in Debian's internal governance be a generational thing?
Even if the median age hasn't changed, I daresay this is almost certainly a generational thing, at least in part.
It is a luxury of youth to imagine that one is markedly smarter than one's predecessors. Every time I hear some young turk talk about the need to completely redo something from scratch, I cringe. Moreso when it's something crufty and old like *nix init. Because if I learned anything in the 15 years I wrote code for a living, it's that every one of those kludges, every one of those "ugly" patches, every one of those incomprehensible-seeming workarounds represents a solution to a problem that the original designers failed to anticipate.
There is a generation's worth of expertise and wisdom embedded in that crufty old code: throwing it out and starting over is like lobotomizing oneself. Because it ignores the lessons of the past, the newer, shinier gizmo has no meaningful hope of being any better than whatever it's replacing. The "best case" scenario is that shiny new bugs will replace crufty old bugs. (Although in the case of systemd, there's the
additional layer of problems inherent in any monolithic middleware design.)
(Side note: Oracle Linux
is RedHat.)
I have to say that I'm disappointed but not at all surprised by the voting results. As soon as I saw the "no GR needed" amendment offered by the current DPL, I recognized it as a subtle way of providing "political cover" for everyone who wanted to avoid the hard choice.
I'm saddened. Haven't quite figured out yet exactly what I'll do, but to my mind, "Lennax" is really no different from Windows, much less any better.
One last thought. My posting history makes it clear that I've been an active systemd hater for several years now. But keithpeter is quite right. The impotent rage, the endless name-calling, the unnecessary melodrama and empty invective that permeated every systemd thread on this board over the last month ultimately served only to weaken the folks who had (and no doubt still have) legitimate technical reasons for mistrusting systemd. (Just sayin')