[mythtv-users] Systemd and insanity (was: Who's running Myth on Arch)

Jay Ashworth jra at baylink.com
Mon Nov 25 17:07:03 UTC 2013


----- Original Message -----
> From: "Stephen P. Villano" <stephen.p.villano at gmail.com>

> > And that, right there, is my problem with it. It appears to have a
> > stupidly high Bus Factor; if Lennart gets hit by a truck, *no one*
> > knows how their machines boot. And since that's my stock in trade
> > commercially, it makes me really really nervous.

> So, only one person in the whole wide world knows how to implement or
> even how systemd works?

Well, I didn't quite say that.  But, really, what percentage of people who
use Linux and who are *not* profssional system administrators take the time
to understand the fiddling details of how the boot sequence actually works?

End users, I mean.  Surely the release configuation managers on the distros
have to understand it at least a little, as do developers of packages that
need to be started at boot.  I was hoping it was obvious that I considered
those couple dozen people still to be a pretty small universe vs the number
of installed Linux systems out there.

> One person ported systemd to each Linux distro that is using it, with
> no other developer knowing how that was done?

It's not completely impossible that that's the case, no; one or two people.

> Sorry, rather sounds like the old argument about sendmail.cf.
> Remember, there were three people who fully comprehended sendmail.cf.
> One was dead, two were insane...

And had been driven that way by having to read sendmail.cf.

:-)

But that rather makes my point, Stephen: complexity is bad; unjustified
complexity more so.  I have yet to see a supportable strategic argument
that the ends justified the means here, since the means include about 40
unpaid hours of my time to learn systemd as well as I've learned sysVinit
in the last decade or two.

Especially since, as several people have suggested, the best approach to
doing so seems to be UTSL.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Make Election Day a federal holiday: http://wh.gov/lBm94  100k sigs by 12/14

Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
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Ashworth & Associates     http://baylink.pitas.com         2000 Land Rover DII
St Petersburg FL USA               #natog                      +1 727 647 1274


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