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0 pointscycloptic5y ago0 comments

>Since they all follow common standards, any program works with any environment.... If the systemd people want to make a shiny new init with cool features, great. It's when they break compatibility with alternatives that I have a problem with it.

That is not relevant because the "common standard" in this case is the logind D-Bus API. There are no other active and viable alternatives to login management. It has two implementations, systemd-logind and elogind. You can choose either one, and only the first one requires systemd. Or if you really want you can choose to write another implementation. Or you can choose to hack GNOME and remove the logind bits and just run your display manager and shell insecurely as setuid root. Or you can revert it to some old version when consolekit was still supported. Or you can just do nothing and wait for someone else to guess what it is you want. You have options. If none of these will please you then I think you need to adjust your expectations because you can't have it all.

>The fact is that most contributions are made by RedHat employees on RedHat time, so anything that can be decided by 51% of maintainers is under RedHat's control (and I can't do anything to change that since I can't outspend RedHat).

I don't see what this has to do with anything. It's open source. If you want to collaborate, you can submit a pull request, work with the maintainers and get them to spend their paid time reviewing and merging your code. You don't need to outspend them, the code is already written and every bit of it lands on github ready for you to use it. Them getting paid more only benefits you.

>There was a decision to adopt systemd but it was very much not a consensus; there was bitter disagreement at the time (and still is).

I can't speak for other distros but looking at the actual Debian votes on systemd (not flamewars on mailing lists), your statement does not seem to reflect reality. Systemd, as well as support for alternatives like elogind, was voted in with strong consensus. https://www.debian.org/vote/2019/vote_002

>Forking by a minority is only practical if the system is made up of small components with standardised interfaces between them.

Systemd is composed of several small components, and its interfaces have become standard across many Linux distros, so this shouldn't be a problem.

>you don't have the Four Freedoms in any practical sense.

It is not reasonable to expect that every single person will have the time and expertise to contribute to any given project, or that every project will be structured in a way that lets them accept maximum contributions. I don't mean to dismiss your frustration with being unable to contribute. I get that. But you continue to have the opportunity to do so and you will for as long as these projects remain alive. The code is not going to magically disappear one day and it's up to you to find the time to actually dive in. Good luck.

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lmm5y ago

> That is not relevant because the "common standard" in this case is the logind D-Bus API. There are no other active and viable alternatives to login management. It has two implementations, systemd-logind and elogind. You can choose either one, and only the first one requires systemd.

Is there any commitment to treating those as stable interfaces, with a decent deprecation cycle around any incompatible changes? If so then that's a big improvement; there certainly didn't used to be.

> I don't see what this has to do with anything. It's open source. If you want to collaborate, you can submit a pull request, work with the maintainers and get them to spend their paid time reviewing and merging your code.

I saw patches submitted and rejected on the grounds that the project leadership had no interest in supporting non-systemd (and/or non-Linux). Even if the leadership does want to accept a patch, that can take months; in my experience it's not worth making a change if you can't run it on your own systems without upstream getting involved. So if a project is large and not cleanly factored into smaller pieces with stable interfaces between them (or at least open to being factored that way in principle), then it's just not worth trying to contribute unless you can work on it full-time.

> It is not reasonable to expect that every single person will have the time and expertise to contribute to any given project, or that every project will be structured in a way that lets them accept maximum contributions. I don't mean to dismiss your frustration with being unable to contribute. I get that. But you continue to have the opportunity to do so and you will for as long as these projects remain alive. The code is not going to magically disappear one day and it's up to you to find the time to actually dive in. Good luck.

I believe in open source not because it gives me a chance to write code but because it lets me fix bugs or change behaviour that's bothering me. It's the "RMS printer driver" situation; if something goes wrong in Linux these days I feel like I'm no better off than I would be on windows. For the moment I'm using FreeBSD (and KDE) and I can still patch stuff without my patches getting broken every other month, but as things integrate more deeply with systemd it seems like a matter of time before the programs I use go Linux-only.

bkor5y ago

> I saw patches submitted and rejected on the grounds that the project leadership had no interest in supporting non-systemd

What do you mean with project leadership. If someone submits a patch, the maintainer(s) of the git module can obviously reject it if they don't want to maintain it. Unless they're persuaded because it's better for the project as a whole.

However, you talk about "project leadership". That doesn't really exist. There's loads of maintainers. There's a GNOME foundation, which mostly handles admin stuff, sysadmin stuff, etc. There's a release team. They ensure the various maintainers make releases, plus verify stuff actually builds.

If you help out in GNOME you're just a person in a big group of people. There's not really any "leadership", just loads of people who often agree, sometimes disagree, etc.

cyclopticOP5y ago

It appears they have marked the Logind API as being stable because it is intended to be used by the display server and by the DEs. I don't have any secret information here, I just saw this chart on their website. https://systemd.io/PORTABILITY_AND_STABILITY/

About BSD and non-systemd systems: I actually think it is possible for there to be better compatibility here eventually if someone builds more shims. BSD using Mesa for example is a really good thing for everyone. However FreeBSD and Linux have both refused to budge for quite a long time on various things and cgroups seems to have been the final nail in the coffin for any kind of expectation of modern cross-platform tooling. Everything now is container this, container that. The only non-systemd init that hasn't dragged their feet on this has been OpenRC, and even they still would not make any effort to be systemd-compatible because of objections over other things. So what is the solution here? Do you see how hard it even is to get people to run something like elogind on top of another init with another cgroup implementation? I don't blame the systemd developers for not bothering with that. It is not feasible to expect them to maintain everyone else's init as well as their own.

I checked the systemd contribution graph and it seems they have a large number of smaller contributions from outside developers, so the data does not really support your assertion about it not being worth it. https://github.com/systemd/systemd/graphs/contributors

Also, just going by the data, the repos for KDE (collectively) and FreeBSD (a monorepo, like systemd) are much, much bigger, just as tightly-coupled if not moreso, and get a lot more activity than the repo for systemd. It seems strange that you would pick those projects to contribute to.

lmm5y ago

> The only non-systemd init that hasn't dragged their feet on this has been OpenRC, and even they still would not make any effort to be systemd-compatible because of objections over other things. So what is the solution here?

You either hammer out a common interface with compromises from both sides, or you implement the parts you want as progressive enhancement from a lowest-common-denominator baseline. It's not easy, it's not glamourous, but it's the right way to do it. Look at how e.g. web standards stuff happens when there's disagreement between different browser makers.

> Also, just going by the data, the repos for KDE (collectively) and FreeBSD (a monorepo, like systemd) are much, much bigger, just as tightly-coupled if not moreso, and get a lot more activity than the repo for systemd. It seems strange that you would pick those projects to contribute to.

I'd disagree with the idea that KDE is more tightly coupled; in my (limited) experience it's very cleanly factored and it's clear where the interface boundaries lie. It's a big project but if you want to fork and patch one part of it you can do that.

FreeBSD is theoretically more tightly coupled than GNU/Linux, but in practice I've found a lot less of the kind of interface churn that you see in Linux. Linux went through two or three rounds of different audio APIs where on FreeBSD you still just use OSS. I've lost count of how many times the way you do network config on Linux changed - I genuinely can't set up a network on Linux any more - whereas in FreeBSD it's all just ifconfig. Linux forced a quick migration to HAL followed by an equally quick deprecation in favour of udev; FreeBSD is still using HAL. There's just so much more commitment to stable interfaces, both in theory - a deprecation cycle for even the kernel ABI - and in practical experience. Or maybe it's just that the project doesn't have enough manpower to churn as much as Linux does, but either way the end result is that I can patch my system and expect my patch to keep working.

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0 pointscycloptic5y ago0 comments

>There was a decision to adopt systemd but it was very much not a consensus; there was bitter disagreement at the time (and still is).

>Forking by a minority is only practical if the system is made up of small components with standardised interfaces between them.

Systemd is composed of several small components, and its interfaces have become standard across many Linux distros, so this shouldn't be a problem.

>you don't have the Four Freedoms in any practical sense.

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lmm5y ago

bkor5y ago

> I saw patches submitted and rejected on the grounds that the project leadership had no interest in supporting non-systemd

If you help out in GNOME you're just a person in a big group of people. There's not really any "leadership", just loads of people who often agree, sometimes disagree, etc.

cyclopticOP5y ago

lmm5y ago

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