> Sys V Init was simple and transparent, and it worked fine for anybody i knew working with linux
Sys V init only works "fine" for you if your needs are simplistic. If you have not dealt with dozens of badly written init scripts that turns restarting a typical server process into a matter of trying "restart" followed by a "killall", possibly rm'ing pid files, and a "start", then you have not dealt with Sys V init much.
If you have not dealt with essential system processes dying and not getting restarted, and having to implement monitoring and restart logic to deal with problems that would not have occurred in the first place without a process monitor, you have not been exposed to a lot of Sys V init problems.
If you have not dealt with process managers outside of pid 1 being killed.
If you have not dealt with problems retaining log output from early boot.
And so on.
Systemd solves a lot of real problems that maintainers of bigger systems are likely to have run into. I will agree that it solves a lot of real problems in contentious ways, including things I don't agree with (I, for example, can not agree with the arguments for binary logs - I love the filtering functionality that journald brings, but they would all be possible while retaining a text based format for the main log files)
> If his blog post was mine, and i would have re-read it before posting it, i would strongly wonder if i have not done something wrong, striking so many people the wrong way; SO MUCH SO, people want to hire a hit-man.
I agree with you about this, to a point. If you get some criticism, it's fair to assume that it may be their problem. If you become one of the most hated OSS developers in history, on the other hand, it should cause a lot of introspection.
To me it seems that there are a few separate problems:
- Poettering appears to have a very abrasive working style that wins him a lot of opponents. He may very well be a nice guy in person, but a lot of the time that appears not to come through online.
- There are some real assholes that go way to far in the way they criticise him, and he seems to use the illegitimate criticism as a way of ignoring the real issues and concerns people have with him. This is not that strange - if the outpourings of hatred towards you is not something you can easily reconcile with your own views about what you are like as a person, then it becomes easier to dismiss them all than to filter and accept some of them and dismiss others.
- Some of the technical decisions he makes are questionable and controversial, which is not uncommon, but rather than get resolved, due to the caustic environment created around him, very often it becomes impossible to deal with the actual technical issues and fronts harden.
