Note on 'systemd-216-9'

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2014-11-05 at 04:52 +0100, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:

> It's not about Lennart. Afaik he usually sticks to git HEAD and/or
> rawhide. There are multiple reports about systemd entering an infinite
> loop and I *thought* that this is a step in the right
> direction.

Well, looking at it practically as a user - if my system sticks in an
infinite loop on boot, and the message is 'well, this new release
doesn't make it boot properly, but it *will* time out and hard power off
after 15 minutes' - that doesn't really make me jump for joy. Has it
practically improved my situation? Not really.

To give a really personal example, I'm one of the people suffering from
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1123170 , I never have time
to investigate it properly and provide details - sorry about that. But I
guess the same way of thinking would say the timer is a 'step in the
right direction' for me because my system will eventually give up and
hard power off after 30 minutes - but does that really practically make
me feel like I'm getting a better experience? Honestly, not really. If
I'm actually sitting in front of the system I've usually lost patience
and hard rebooted after, like, five minutes. If I'm not, all the 30
minute timeout did was save me five cents of electricity.

The only case I could see where someone would really think 'hey, that
made my life better' is Lennart's case of a laptop sitting in a case or
a bag - but the thing is, the change only helps in that case *if you
happen to be using encrypted storage*! If you aren't, the boot will
complete without any user interaction needed, and the timeout will never
kick in. So it really seems like a change which doesn't provide an awful
lot of practical benefit. If boot or shutdown is failing so badly that a
15/30 minute timer would kick in, just adding a 15/30 minute timer
doesn't honestly make things seem a whole lot 'better'. Fixing whatever
bug is preventing the startup/shutdown from actually working is what
would make the experience feel better.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
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