Hallvor wrote: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?
As it turns out,
this history is being written by the winners, at least as regards the technical merits of systemd and gratuitous init coupling.
In case it isn't obvious, a deep dive into data is my idea of a fun Friday night.
The
raw tally sheet is available online, so I decided to forcibly deobfuscate the systemd vote, for the benefit of posterity. So I simply removed all of the "votes" that did not affect the technical decision, and then rank-ordered the remaining data.
At multiple levels of granularity, roughly 80% of Debian devs are split very nearly down the middle into clearly defined and recognizably entrenched positions, pro- and contra- systemd (thus reinforcing the notion that "there was never any real 'debate'").
(I'd still love to know the median ages of those two groups, and I'll bet a beer that the difference is statistically significant.)
It's also why, in retrospect, a fork was probably not only predictable, but inevitable.
Anyway, the remaining 20% think systemd is a bad idea, but think that any blanket rule might also prove to be a bad idea. (And I'll admit it again: they
might have a point.
Maybe. Depending on my mood.) Since the other two groups basically cancel each other out, this is the group whose vote would have carried the day if the self-destruct amendment hadn't been allowed.
So, here's what they actually said:
There are some exceptional cases...[h]owever...a requirement for
a non-default init system will mean the software will be unusable
for most Debian users and should normally be avoided.
(Emphasis added)
(Full text available here:
https://www.debian.org/vote/2014/vote_0 ... dmenttexta)
And that, ladies and gents, is what Debian developers
actually think of systemd in general, and gratuitous init coupling in particular, minus all the B.S.
(Anybody give a flyin' flip about the gory analytical details?)