I'll run systemd only after you pry openrc[1] from my cold, dead hands.
FAR too much of the project makes exactly the wrong design choices. The worst of these flaws is the binding of previously-independent components discussed near the end of this article.
This bundling Is not even necessary! The features that systemd gets right - an interesting daemon management tool, and providing a useful default start/stop mechanism ("4 lines of config instead of re-writing the same generic shell script") - can obviously be independent features.
This mess should be limited to merely bad design in a particular software niche(s)., but now we're seeing the "my way or nothing" attitude spill over into existing user-level software. (e.g., Gnome[2] I would probably already be using part of it was properly modular. Instead, the bundle is growing even more monolithic and incompatible.
When a similar "forced upgrade/incompatibility" happened to OpenGL (with ES dropping the traditional fixed-function pipeline, JWZ had a very good summary[3] of the the problem, from a "having to maintain old software" prespective:
Let's say you have a well-specified system that is in wide use (a language, a
library API, whatever) and because of changes in some substrate (operating
systems, hardware, whatever) you find that you need to add a new way of doing
things to it.
The way you do this is, you add new features to the specification and you
clearly document the version in which those features become supported.
If there are old features that you would like to discourage the use of, then
you mark them as obsolete -- but you do not remove them because thou shalt not
break working code.
If you don't agree with that, then please, get out of the software industry
right now. Find another line of work. Please.
Your users have code that works. Maybe the new APIs would serve them better.
Maybe things would be so much more efficient if they updated their code to use
the new API. Or maybe it doesn't matter to them and they just want working code
to continue to be working code. At least until such a time as they need the new
features, or new efficiency. Remember the First Rule of Optimization: DON'T.
sigh - one of the big reasons behind my I left the world of Microsoft and Windows behind ~15 year ago was to be free of this kind of forced change...
1: Not giving up my .xinitrc/.Xresources or E16 theme, either. In all cases (along with openrc/sysvinit), they have over a decade's worth of bugfixes and tweaks. Any replacement would have to be very good to be worth the time/effort involved in switching.
2: to be fair, Gnome has been merging thing that shouldn't be merged all the way back to the beginning of the project, and is as much at fault here as systemd itself.
I think Gnome has been taking that approach going back years in part because of the opposite criticism: many people attack Linux UI as being a hodge-podge with no coherent design, comparing it unfavorably to a unified UI system like OSX's, which has a coherent and integrated take on windowing/libraries/widgets/etc. One of Gnome's goals was to fix that. They might unsuccessful at doing so, but attempting a unified/integrated UI was/is a core project goal, so I'm not surprised that they'd have no shyness about integrating components that Unix has traditionally kept separate. The tiling window manager scene (which I prefer myself) is perhaps the polar opposite (some wms don't even integrate the status bar into the wm), but isn't really targeting Gnome's target audience either.
FAR too much of the project makes exactly the wrong design choices. The worst of these flaws is the binding of previously-independent components discussed near the end of this article.
This bundling Is not even necessary! The features that systemd gets right - an interesting daemon management tool, and providing a useful default start/stop mechanism ("4 lines of config instead of re-writing the same generic shell script") - can obviously be independent features.
This mess should be limited to merely bad design in a particular software niche(s)., but now we're seeing the "my way or nothing" attitude spill over into existing user-level software. (e.g., Gnome[2] I would probably already be using part of it was properly modular. Instead, the bundle is growing even more monolithic and incompatible.
When a similar "forced upgrade/incompatibility" happened to OpenGL (with ES dropping the traditional fixed-function pipeline, JWZ had a very good summary[3] of the the problem, from a "having to maintain old software" prespective:
sigh - one of the big reasons behind my I left the world of Microsoft and Windows behind ~15 year ago was to be free of this kind of forced change...1: Not giving up my .xinitrc/.Xresources or E16 theme, either. In all cases (along with openrc/sysvinit), they have over a decade's worth of bugfixes and tweaks. Any replacement would have to be very good to be worth the time/effort involved in switching.
2: to be fair, Gnome has been merging thing that shouldn't be merged all the way back to the beginning of the project, and is as much at fault here as systemd itself.
3: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/06/i-have-ported-xscreensaver-t...