[Arm-netbook] Logging and journaling

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 3:49 PM, Julie Marchant <onpon4 at riseup.net> wrote:

> I don't personally care whether or not my system includes systemd (it
> does), but I have seen no evidence of wrongdoing by the systemd
> developers. Every single case of systemd adoption I am aware of was
> because the maintainers of a distro wanted to adopt it. And systemd is
> libre, even copylefted. There are no ethical grounds to oppose it.

 you're right... at face value.  it's complicated, and took me a long
time to work out what the problem is, and even longer to be able to
express it.

> Besides, people who hate systemd would choose Devuan rather than Debian.
> Why would you give people who ordered a computer card with Debian (i.e.
> using systemd) something they didn't ask for? Best-case scenario, no one
> cares. Worst-case scenario, you make a decision that turns out to be a
> maintenance burden for you and annoys some of your backers. Regardless
> of your opinion on the matter, this isn't a battle you should be
> fighting, at least not here.

 i have some rules, julie, which are not really negotiable.  i cannot
provide something to people which i *know* will cause them pain and
anguish.  it's simply not possible for me to do that, even if they
themselves are not able to follow the (potentially complex) logic
which led me to conclude that, by providing something to them, it
would cause them distress at some point in their future.

 the *whole project* is based on that premise.  if i start
deliberately and consciously compromising *even once* then i am
screwed and cannot be trusted publicly to ever honor my commitments to
integrity of purpose, ever again.  mistakes, yeah fine.  *deliberate*
compromises that cost me my integrity: i'm done, and the entire
project's a failure.

 so the consequences are much more severe than it seems at face value.

 you noticed that all the individual distros made a choice.  they made
those decisions freely and without consultation with other distros
because their job is to focus on *their* distro.

 and that the systemd team, working in isolation from distros and only
having links to the software package writers, also made their
technical decisions as best they can.

then, also, the package writers, working in isolation, because it's
not their job to be a distro maintainer or an init PID1 software
developer, *also* made their decisions freely and perfectly well,
without wider consultation, because that's *also* their job.

so it's important to note: there is *nothing wrong* with these
separate processes, *nobody did anything wrong*.  each team is
*perfectly* executing their localised strategy for the development and
maintenance of *their* project.

taken collectively, however, is where the problems start.  the
*ENTIRE* free software community, like a "shoal of fish", suddenly
switched direction, without warning, without thinking, and, crucially,
WITHOUT CONSULTING THE USERS.

now, if we take for example debian, we know that it has a charter.
it's a written contract that everyone understands and accepts.  the
bits that are *NOT* included - *NOT* written down - but are
"unspoken", is that the end-users place their trust in the debian
maintainers to not disrupt their lives by making decisions that would
force them to take drastic and costly action.

this UNSPOKEN and UNWRITTEN agreement is what the debian developers
very unfortunately violated by ignoring the vote on default choice of
init system which SPECIFICALLY concluded that systemd would be the
absolute worst possible choice to make.  they paid the price for that
decision with the loss of many key strategic developers, and are
beginning to make amends by incorporating several init systems into
the current debian/testing (but still leaving libsystemd0 in place).

archlinux, as a smaller community which is a running distro, fared
much better, because it is a tight-knit community where all its users
are required to keep much more up-to-date.  thus there was much less
of a problem.  as they are a little bit more technically-minded,
several of them created community-based repos that allow systemd to be
replaced entirely by sysvinit, and udev to be replaced with eudev.  it
works very well and is faster to boot on the a20.  it's also seamless
and completely non-disruptive.  the faster turnaround time on
archlinux allowed debugging and testing to be completed rapidly.

now, from a technical perspective, the *specific* technical issues
with systemd are best expressed by andrew tridgell's evaluation of
systemd, which can be found on the samba mailing lists.  the warnings
that he outlined would come true *have* come true - several times
already, in the form of the security vulnerabilities that he predicted
would occur.  remember: andrew is an extremely experienced low-level
systems programmer and reverse-engineer, who has had to deal with some
extreme attacks against samba, so he's very knowledgeable about how to
code and design software in a strategic fashion that will mitigate
against attacks.

summary: he's *deeply* unimpressed with the design and continued
escalating scope-creep of systemd, but, unlike many people who warn or
complain about it, he actually *knows* what he's talking about.

so do i... but i lack his ability to vocalise my thoughts in a
short-term timeframe, it tends to take me much longer to be able to
express things clearly (by which time often it's far too late *sigh*).

anyway, bottom line: from what i know of systemd (that includes
libsystemd0) i know the pain that it will bring people, and because of
that i cannot possibly distribute it to others.  it would be a
fundamental violation of my ethical principles to do so.  i'm *really*
not happy with the fact that i'll be supplying it to the backers who
pledged for fedora cards.  i'll have to think how to deal with that.

l.