systemd bashing (man it feels good)

[Denys Vlasenko]

On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 11:13 AM, Laurent Bercot
<ska-dietlibc at skarnet.org> wrote:
>  Lennart's quest for change disregards not only the current
> conventions (which is not a bad thing to do per se), but also the most
> basic software design principles as well as the core of the Unix
> philosophy. This guy should apply at Microsoft, they'd love him there.
>
>> It goes farther than that. Some things don't merely live
>> in tools which systemd requires (e.g. dbus). A lot of crap is
>> _in systemd_!
>> (...)
>> What the hell *TCP wrappers* or *udev* have to do with
>> *init binary*?????
>
>  Amen, brother, amen.
>  But I'm afraid you and I will be preaching to the choir here.
>  It's not the busybox mailing-list that we need to convince,
> it's the major Linux distributions. I have no idea how a piece
> of software that I wouldn't give a D to as an undergraduate
> student project

You are too harsh. It is not deserving a D for a student work.

However, yes, "it's above D" is far too low a bar to aim for.

>  I'm not good at advocacy

Apparently there is no other way but to learn how to do that.

> But someone who is, and who has a tiny bit of sense of what
> good engineering is, should definitely step up and expose the
> systemd fraud, and I'm all willing, as I'm sure you are, to provide
> the detailed technical arguments.

systemd is not a fraud.

It does not help in discussions if you throw around inaccurate
disparaging comments about things you criticize.
It's important to be correct.

"Fraud" is an act of deliberate misleading for personal gain.
A piece of software, however badly designed or buggy,
can't be a "fraud".

There are more difficulties. What exactly is "good engineering"?
I bet finding a consensus on that one won't be easy.
So, while you and me feel that systemd isn't well engineered,
there will be people (its authors, for one) who honestly believe
it is.

If you will talk to people about it, you need to carefully,
with well-thought-out arguments, explain *why exactly*
it is badly engineered.

-- 
vda