systemd (Was Re: tmpfs for strategic directories)

[Roberto Ragusa]

Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Sat, 29.05.10 19:48, Roberto Ragusa (mail at robertoragusa.it) wrote:
>> Well, I really do not want to flame anyone, but please consider that
>> the guy proposing the change already gave us pulseaudio, which promised the
>> "it will do anything you do now, just easier" feature too.
> 
> Ah, turning this into something personal. Love you too.

This is not a personal attack and I want to explain.
You will agree with me that pulseaudio caused a lot of complaints.
(we do not discuss if motivated or unmotivated, here)
That bad reputation unavoidably leads to weaker trust in your
promised guarantees.

The most painful parts of PA were mainly the underestimation of both
"peculiar" use cases and impact of issues in related software (e.g. bugged
alsa drivers). It is only natural to be worried about the same things
(like lack of customizability) for this new init system.

You *are* in a worse position than someone else when proposing
a revolution in some critical part of the system. That's no personal
offense.
On the positive side you are now well aware of the risks you
face, so you will probably play it better than someone else.

I hope your new init system will be a great success and help you
clean your name from the PA mess. I honestly hope so.

>> We then discovered that some _trivial_ things where lost:
>> - having multiple independent sound cards
>> - having control of the mixer
>> - having sound with no user logged in
>> ... should I also mention latency, CPU usage, stability,...?
> 
> You seem to have no idea what you are talking about. But anyway, let's
> not turn this into a discussion about PA. Don't need another one of those.

I've been personally been burned by these issues, to the point of
going 90% of the way of removing PA from the system (I'm currently
running the unrecommended system-wide instance, I manually restart it
in some cases, I use often pasuspender and for some things I know
I have to turn if off completely).

But I'm still on F10 and I read that pulseaudio has become better.
Maybe I will be positively surprised when upgrading to F13.

>> Linux must NOT be Windows.
>> Linux must NOT be OS X.
> 
> Well I for one think we can learn a lot from the competition. Open your
> eyes. There's a lot of good stuff in those other OS worlds, particularly
> in the designs of MacOS X. There's still so much they do better than we
> do. 

With "must NOT" I do not mean "we have to be far", I mean "we are not
obligated to be near".

In recent times some stupid (IMHO) ideas have been adopted in Linux
just to copy what others do. Just as examples: the control of desktop
widgets in KDE4 (functional GUI elements modified by a mouse-over???),
the fast-user-switching approach (the Unix way is to have
multiple X servers).

In conclusion, your innovation is certainly welcome in the Linux world,
but disadvantages have to be properly weighted against advantages.
If you only list advantages, people is rightly suspicious.
You are trying to clarify things: I see you are replying to almost
everyone on this thread and that effort has to be appreciated.
You even replied to my mail, which you took for a personal attack
(which, as I said as first sentence in this and the previous mail,
was not).

-- 
   Roberto Ragusa    mail at robertoragusa.it