[GTALUG] video: Benno Rice on "The Tragedy of systed"

[Christopher Browne]

On Thu, Feb 7, 2019, 6:13 PM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk at gtalug.org
wrote:

> I think that this is pretty interesting:
>
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo>
>

Interesting indeed.

It's sad, the "culture of contempt" that has grown up in this particular
place, and the speaker captures quite well the dangers and ironies.

In his culture (BSD), their risk is of...

- laughing at the foolish Linux people
- we're still using OUR init, come join us to stay in the past
- launchd is pretty cool, tho it's proprietary Apple and doesn't solve as
many problems as SystemD

Partly, SystemD suffers a cultural problem because Lennart isn't as, I
don't know, charismatic, as would have been useful.

I suspect that it's a good candidate for being written in a safer language
than C; there's a rich and troublesome "culture of contempt" there, too,
alas.

- there's a culture of "it's better because I know how to write safe C"
- also, one of concomitant contempt for C++ (some overlap there)
- another group involves the notion that Go and Rust are new and cool, and
wonderful due to being new kids on the block...

I was pleased at how he got to the description of problems being solved;
there truly are substantive problems, that matter, not addressed by
previous tools.

Personally, I see that SystemD attacks problems we need to get solved.  I
have experienced some minor problems in dealing with it, but nothing that
seems remotely worthy of the opprobrium thrown at it.

There's a social problem that sides seem not to be successfully listening
to others.

It gets illustrated nicely by the resignations of Debian team members after
SystemD integration, where (quoting wikipedia):

"All four justified their decision on the public Debian mailing list and in
personal blogs with their exposure to extraordinary stress-levels related
to ongoing disputes on systemd integration within the Debian and
open-source community that rendered regular maintenance virtually
impossible."   That's something of an attempt to fold all of their reasons
together, but I think there's still some truth to it.  Culture of contempt,
indeed.

>
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