> however, they're not uncommon in any large community when dealing with highly controversial topics
Come on. We're talking about init systems here, not the Palestine/Israel conflict. It should be possible to have a level-headed discussion without insults and death threats. Saying "Poettering is a prominent, controversial person, therefore it's OK" isn't right.
Small correction: we are not talking about init systems. We are talking about the change from a "distributed" userspace to a "centralized" one. It's an highly political debate while also being technical.
Tempers are gonna flare.
Go to your local town hall and threaten to kill the mayor because you don't like his opinions/work. Try to explain all your neighbors that that was okay, because "Tempers are gonna flare".
This is, by the way, an offense you can end in jail for, for good reasons.
>Go to your local town hall and threaten to kill the mayor because you don't like his opinions/work.
Have you ever lived in a small town? This is what we call Tuesday evening at the local bar. Until they start buying bullets people threatening to kill you are to murder as people telling threatening to fuck you are to rape.
People talk about killing or maiming politicians all the time and don't end up in jail. It's only when the threats are credible that there's a problem (In Poettering's case, having a bitcoin fund for a hitman certainly constitutes this).
All the BSD's have a "centralized" userspace, I wonder why they haven't recieved any flak and death threats.
This is what systemd essentially is, an attempt to have a standardised minimal base OS beyond the Linux kernel (again like the BSD's), I don't see how it's 'highly political', if anything it's practical, which in turn is why it has been widely accepted by distros and software which makes use of it's features, like DE's.
No, what BSD's have is the analogue of what in Linux land are called "coreutils".
The rest is usually code from external sources mantained inside the tree for consistency.
BSDs come as a system, Linux is a kernel. BSDs are more like Linux distributions, but every (base) part is part of the project. You get the whole thing from one team, vs. a (more or less) curated list of independent (GNU) projects.
I really don't think that these approaches are the same.
I don't see any relevancy for the whole reference to BSD communities either, though.
That's semantics. Linux may "just" be a kernel, but almost all distributions come with the same set of "curated" GNU utilities. With BSD, the only real difference is that the kernel and userland teams have significantly more overlap.
"We're talking about init systems here, not the Palestine/Israel conflict."
To provide some background, that's actually a pretty good analogy, not to trivialize the middle east but to point out that forcing the adoption of one specific piece of software using an embrace extend extinguish business model is a traditional Microsoft tactic, and a lot of people in the linux community still see MS as their greatest enemy, fight to the death, etc.
The style of how systemd is being shoved down our unwilling throats is well optimized to generate the largest possible community firestorm at every step. Why someone would intentionally choose that rollout strategy, knowing the likely results, is a mystery. That social decision probably doesn't result in him getting added to many Christmas card lists (understatement).
Also, at this time systemd comes with daemons or utilities for logging, network time, DNS, DHCP, network management, and is poised to act as the intermediary between dbus and kdbus, as well as provide user space virtual terminals.
I am likely forgetting something here, but systemd is way more than a "mere" init replacement at this time.
There are always extremes like that, even when dealing with the most innocent topics you could imagine. People can even react similarly with death threats over a change in cartoon TV show that they didn't like. In any sufficiently large community you will find some small percentage of such people, it's nothing exclusive to init systems or even tech as a whole.
And it's absolutely not "Poettering is a prominent, controversial person, therefore it's OK"! It's never OK. It's rather "Poettering is a prominent, controversial person, so he should be at least prepared for that and not act like he's surprised".
Come on. We're talking about init systems here, not the Palestine/Israel conflict. It should be possible to have a level-headed discussion without insults and death threats. Saying "Poettering is a prominent, controversial person, therefore it's OK" isn't right.