systemd: Is it wrong?

[Matthew Garrett]

On Sun, Jul 10, 2011 at 05:46:18AM -0400, Jon Masters wrote:

> I disagree. It doesn't suck. It's the way UNIX and Linux have done this
> for dozens of years, and it's the way countless sysadmins know and love.
> "Sucks" might be true from the point of view of "hey look at this great
> thing I just designed", but it's very much not true from the point of
> view of the sysadmin working on the weekend who's just thinking "gee,
> what the heck is going on, why won't this just work how it has done for
> the past twenty years?". In other words "suck" depends on viewpoint.

The big kernel lock doesn't suck. It's the way SMP UNIX did things for 
dozens of years, and it's the way countless kernel hackers know and 
love. "Sucks" might be true from the point of view of "hey look at this 
great fine-grained locking I just designed", but it's very much not true 
from the poit of the driver author working on the weekend who's just 
thinking "gee, what the heck is going on, why won't this just work how 
it has done for the past twenty years?". In other words "suck" depends 
on viewpoint.

Improvement means change, and change will inevitably upset some people 
who would prefer to do things in exactly the same way that they always 
have done. If we assert that all viewpoints are equally valid then every 
single thing we've done in Fedora sucks. In this case there are sound 
technical arguments against configuration by command line argument or 
environment variable (just like there are against the BKL), and while we 
should obviously attempt to make any transition as painless as possible 
for administrators, that doesn't serve as a counter to those technical 
arguments. They suck. Unarguably.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org