Wow, once again, Poe's Law rears its ugly head.

What follows is not for your benefit, but because somewhere out there on the wilds of the internet, there might still be some youngster with a clue who needs to get this:

Systemd, OOP and a number of other technologies have been touted by people who have a curious mixture of cleverness and a lack of imagination or experience (something altogether too common in the world of software development). They claim that because they have solved a problem, they are therefore entitled to use the same approach to Solve All Problems Ever. So instead of exercising a little humility and moving their work ahead in a way that's accepting of other approaches, they charge in full speed, damn the torpedoes and devil take the hindmost.

It happened with Microsoft and ActiveX. It happened with Object Oriented Programming languages - most notably with Java: there was a time when it was hard to find work programming in anything else. It happened, to a smaller degree, with design patterns. You can find numerous other examples if you search for them.

It's happening again today with systemd.

Now, parent here is implying that the conflict between The Unix Way and systemd's kitchen-sink approach is a contest between equal ideologies. In other words, each represents a single thing, one of which is old and full of faults, the other of which is new and shiny and presumably lacking in faults. The only choice we have, then, is to weigh each in the balance and choose the one that's superior.

There's a fly in that ointment, though: You see, the Unix Way is a process, not a product. It states that it is better to take a toolkit approach - that is, chain together a series of tools that do one thing and do that one thing in a well-defined, simple manner. Systemd, on the other hand, is a particular set of services. Its implementation is antithetical to the Unix Way, because although it's contrived out of dozens of smaller executables, they really only work when they're chained together. You currently can't, in other words, use journald outside of systemd (you'd have to build a completely new interface), or use systemd without journald.

The people who like systemd are willing to discard the decades of experience that brought us the awkward-but-workable Unix world, full of text files, single-purpose utilities, shims on shims on shims.... They see it as ugly and awkward and ungainly. It is all of those things. The place where they go wrong, though, is that they think they can do better in one simple stroke. They think that they're good enough to design a system *cough* that inhabits the space between kernel and userland, and that they can do it in the course of a few short years. That's admirable. I applaud their ambition.

But....

But there is no way in Hell that I would let someone with that kind of confidence get within a mile of my machines. That would be Daedalus and Icarus all over again. (Google it; I'm not your nanny.) What systemd supporters fail to understand is that The Unix Way is the way of humility. It's essentially a way of expressing our own understanding that we cannot do everything well. Therefore, we do the one thing that we can do, and we do it simply (which is not always as well as it might be, but will at least work reliably).

Empirically, systemd does things neither well enough, nor simply. For reasons that are particular to each of them, most adherents are incapable of admitting to either of those things. For example:

See how the commenter rejects out of hand the complaints that too much happens at too low a level? How there's no recognition that building a series of interlocking pieces which do not interlock with anything else except themselves, and only in a certain way can be called 'monolithic'? How the issue of binary logs, of how logging should work generally, is tossed away as so much noise?

Now, it's not that nobody has ever responded to these complaints. They have, and at length. The issue is that their answers have been rejected by a great many people as insufficient. But rather than show a little humility and learn a thing or two at the hands of those who are offering these criticisms, systemd devs and supporters instead treat dissent as antagonism, and indulge in name-calling (e.g. neckbeard) and such.

It's shameful, really.

But yes, it's happened before, and it will happen again. And those of us who are in it (init - heh) for the long haul will eventually get a modicum of sanity back once their fanaticism is ground down by reality.

You know the part where I said there are people who don't know the difference between an argument and a quarrel?

You might want to read it again.

If you can't respond substantively, why respond at all? I've offered a little insight into history so that you can draw a parallel between present and previous conflicts in the software world, and all you can do is call me names that you know are infuriating to me, and you suggest I get therapy?

Considering where the OOP-For-Everything crowd got us, and how long it took us to recover from the fact that it was the hammer for every nail for far too long, considering that we're finally emerging into a sane world where OOP has its place, as one approach among many....

... I'd say you're right about systemd:

It's being touted as The One True Way. Its detractors are ridiculed as hidebound old neckbeards[*] who don't know any way of doing things but their own. Its adherents are clever, antisocial alphas whose faith in their own intelligence is far too complete, and who don't know the difference between an argument and a quarrel.

Yep, it is OOP vs The World all over again. Dog help us all.

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[*] Seriously: I will punch the first person who uses that term in my presence.

I know where you're coming from (literally - I'm North American), but some beacons of freedom shine more brightly than others. In Fiji, a country which I visit professionally on a fairly regular basis, this story about a man hospitalised by military intelligence has raised some eyebrows.

Ever since the military take-over some years ago, there have been rumours of wholesale surveillance. Numerous people who for whatever reason objected to the post-coup regime reported being contacted by police or military on the day before a gathering (for example), and asked questions about things that they could only know about by eavesdropping on their communications. Soldiers reputedly beat up a large number of people in order to intimidate them into silence. There has indeed been video released of police torturing their prisoners. [Find it yourself; I'm not going to gratify your prurience.]

But this appears to be the first time a person has explicitly been detained tortured and imprisoned because of text messages sent complaining about the regime's leader (and lo and behold, newly-elected prime minister).

So yes, sending authorisation keys via text message is a Very Bad Idea in some places.

That's a fucking contradiction by any definition of the word (albeit a contradiction that you constructed, and that only you can see). You are clearly deficient in your capacity to conduct a conversation, so I'll just leave off here.

In parting, and just because reading comprehension seems to be a shortcoming with you: I never once alluded to manpower. I referred to the 'pain' involved in replacing it. But you needed 'manpower' in order to construct that thing which you are adamant is not a perceived contradiction, so you can have it. If you can find the place where it fits... outside of your own imagined version of what I'm arguing, that is.

HTH HAND

You're talking right past me. Are you now saying that you do NOT see any contradiction? Because 'one the one hand... on the other....', used as you used it, generally implies a perceived contradiction.

Read the analogy and you have your answer. It's not about manpower. It's about role.

You seriously see a contradiction there? That a core part of a larger system has a new dependency, meaning that one is suddenly put in the position of considering whether it's more pain to keep it than to undo the damage? That this same core part could have been written by a very small group of people who have a track record of not playing nicely with the other children?

... Because if you can't even conceive of the nature of the problem, there's no point at all in responding to the rest of your quibbles.

As a gendankenexperiment, imagine one valve of your heart deciding it wants to change its rhythm. The others can choose to remain as they were, or adopt the new rhythm. Right and wrong are only peripherally part of the decision; what matters first and foremost is not falling out of step. The other components can reason all they like, but if the recalcitrant one doesn't budge, they're stuck either accepting the ultimatum or taking radical steps. The rest of the body parts are, for all intents and purposes, just along for the ride, no matter how the decision affects them.

And that, my child, is the choice the Debian had foisted on them.

I read that a few times and I still do do a Poe's Law double take at the end.

But by 'not systemd at all' you mean, 'by one of the few core packages that cannot be removed from systemd?

Yes, because unsafe code lying available on the system has never been made part of a compromise originating from another source. Or are you okay with losing the crown jewels as long as someone else takes part of the blame?

Google can't cure your brand of refusal to come to grips with reality, chum.

Yeah, that sucks. It's really juvenile and stupidly cruel.

No, it's a case of, 'I piss on my neighbours lawn every day. Yeah, there's a little dead patch on the grass where I do it, but now he's trying to shoot me.'

The first step in remedying this situation is, 'Call the cops.' The second step in this process is 'Stop pissing on your neighbour's lawn.'

No it fucking was not. It was taken up because the pain of living with it was judged to be less than the pain of excising it. Other, equally wrong developers decided to make it a requirement, with the effect that in order to stay with init, we would have to retrofit core elements of GNOME, which would have required significant manpower.

Make no mistake: systemd integration is a textbook example of antidemocratic approaches, of how the commons can be soiled by a very small minority of the people using it. The fact that there was a closely split decision on whether to integrate systemd into Debian should have been read as a damning indictment, and at very least should have given the developers pause. But no, it got chalked up as a victory - which is exactly the kind of thinking that got this shit into our operating systems in the first place.

Any self-respecting developer would have realised that the best way to move systemd forward would be to take an incremental approach, to offer it as an optional component. Any reasonable developer would have had the fucking humility to accept that something so integral to the system cannot be made mature and robust except over the course of time. And until that time, he should perhaps quit fucking saying how sweet his shit smells.

See, this, right here, is why people lose it when they deal with Lennart.

This is not a matter of 'like' or 'do not like'. If it were, we could tell Lennart his software sucks and move on. But no, he's so fucking clever he not only has to be right, he has to foist his rightness onto systems before it's anywhere near mature.

And then.... and then, to add insult to injury, he refuses to accept that integrating core software, which in his own words claims to offer a one-stop-shop for kernel-userland interaction, without extensive use in real world conditions, might reasonably be thought a little rash. No, he has to go and accuse the entire software establishment of bias, an unwillingness to change (without even beginning to address where that inclination comes from), and ultimately, of a simple lack of ability to see and accept just how fucking right he is.

Amazingly, astonishingly to abso-fucking-lutely no one, his actions give rise to more than a little rancour. And now he has the gall to say that he was right all along, that his opponents are irrational and that it's a problem with the rest of the world.

To which I can only reply: seek help.

I kind of got that, in spite of some random wanker modding me troll for my troubles.

My point, however, is that that is not actually how the process works. That's how the process is dressed up, but in actuality, the FCC has become a political creature, and will reliably support the party that appointed the majority of commissioners. This rather important element was only barely alluded to in the article.

You've got your cart on the wrong side of your horse, young man.

It's up to the ISPs to demonstrate to the people (via government) that they're using the resources —to which they have been granted limited monopoly rights— in the public interest, and that their pursuit of profits is not leading them into anti-consumer activity such as creating artificial scarcity for extortionary purposes when negotiating with other network operators, holding their users hostage, arbitrarily throttling bandwidth to customers whom they have testified are causing network congestion when in fact no such congestion exists.

For example.

Network Neutrality is the neutral position. It's not telling ISPs how to run their network - it's telling them to stop fucking with their customers' traffic. It's telling the ISPs to stop indulging in funny business and get back to making money the old-fashioned way: by providing an actual fucking service.

But yeah, fuck big government and Ayn Rand and America Fuck Yeah and all that because... Oh, I don't know, because who the fuck cares any more? This stopped being a dialogue years ago.

This is the part that grabbed my attention. The whole piece is pretty disingenuous in the way it frames the issue. Just check out this quotation from an FCC staffer:

It's a subtle bit of work, but the author of the piece implies not only that:

a) The FCC gets to ignore most comments because its rules require arguments to be made on technical grounds (true); but also that

b) The public opinion is not just wrong, it's 'hallucinating' (false).

The paternalistic tone of the article was a little much, too. Allow me to fisk it:

Not once - not once in this article does the author admit what's central to the entire fucking issue - this is a politicised process. It's not a popular issue only because the power brokers don't want it to be. Though truth be told, they're fine with appearing to support the popular will when it coincides with whatever's politically expedient for them.