I'd be very interested to see a qualified crypto expert on the "sealing" that journald uses. This is one of two indicators of a troubling level of arrogance from the developers. The crypto method used by journald to verify messages haven't been tampered with is called Forward Secure Sealing [0]. It's based on an invention of the brother of Lennart - the lead developer, and for a long time after first release even the whitepaper describing it in detail was "coming soon" The code he finally produced is [1] - but rather light on documentation. I'm still unaware of any proper analysis of this, and using your brothers own crypto methods and ignoring all the questions this has raised does not come across well - and appears to seriously violate the "don't roll your own crypto system" rule.

The second indicator is the attitude to bugs, of which [2] is a good example - several of the developers appear to be extremely defensive towards any suggestion of defects in their software, and simply close bugs blaming the users, other software, anything else.

I'd be hopeful that RedHat manage to reign this behavior in, but that didn't seem to work for Ulrich Drepper when he was employed by RedHat to work on glibc, and I'm not sure if it's going to work here.

That said - I'm not in the "systemd is awful" camp - I do think there's a whole bunch of things it does really well, and that a lot of the hate is really quite reactionary - but the thing that frustrates me is that between the haters and the supporters, there are important questions that are getting lost in the noise.

[0]: http://lwn.net/Articles/512895/ [1]: https://github.com/mezcalero/fsprg [2]: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76935

Optional, but enabled by default. Most distros seem to ship with defaults and only customize flags related to library paths and FHS details (besides whatever patching they may apply). The fact that it's even there is distressing enough, really.

No one is saying udev pulls in systemd as a dependency. Where is that said?