systemd: Is it wrong?

[Lennart Poettering]

On Sun, 10.07.11 15:15, Jon Masters (jonathan at jonmasters.org) wrote:

> > 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.
> 
> I get your analogy, and your point. But there's a key difference. In the
> kernel community (which is relatively much smaller), there are
> established well documented means by which people find out about things
> like BKL removal and act upon it. There is LWN, there is LKML, there is
> an expectation that those working on the kernel read these things.
> 
> There should not be, and there is not, an expectation that Linux users
> and admins in the wider world follow distribution mailing lists, wiki
> pages, and IRC obsessively. Or read blogs. That isn't how it's done.
> It's done through slow, gradual change picked up over time, unless you
> want the kind of pain that I believe is coming further down the line.

Jeez man. You see a communication issue here? If there is one, then it
is in your head.

Be honest for a minute here: we regularly blog about systemd, and the
changes it brings. It's highly technical and with lots of explanations
why we are doing things this way. The stories are usually federated via
LWN. Our documentation is really good and relatively comprehensive (as
many people will happily acknowledge I am sure). We present systemd
almost every month at a different conference. We write computer magazine
articles about it. We often give interviews about the systemd progress
and the background of it. We waste our time on mailing lists with
naysayers like you. We are very active in responding to fdo bz, rhbz,
irc, the mailing list, and try hard to get responses out for all
questions asked.

And yes, I do have the expectation that computer admins look into the
Internet from time to time or pick up a computer magazine once in a
while.

I am pretty sure there are next to zero other Linux system projects
which do as much as we do to get the message out.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.