[Arm-netbook] severe systemd bugs (two of them)

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Mon, Jul 3, 2017 at 3:38 PM, Jonathan Frederickson
<silverskullpsu at gmail.com> wrote:
> People have always done this, it's just that the systemd folks are
> writing their own versions of lots of different services. And that's
> okay! You're free to use them, or not, as you choose.

 ... actually... we (the users) are in no way "free".  constraints
such as time, effort, money and risk (which are usually offset by
collaborative effort) all come into play and take precedence over
whether the *source code* happens to be libre.

> (Granted in most
> cases it's the distro maintainer's choice, as it is for all the other
> default software in their distro.)

 ... exactly.  this is what particularly pisses me off about how
systemd has been deployed: all possible alternatives across 98% of
distros - particularly the major ones - have ripped up and burned
pretty much all and any possibility of **CONVENIENT** choice.

 for example, until i discovered that angband.pl actively maintains
systemd-less debian packages for xorg, udev, pulseaudio and several
critical pre-systemd packages (including consolekit), i was forced to
make an extremely risky *MANUAL* removal of systemd.  that included
REMOVING udev entirely and MANUALLY maintaining entries in /dev (!)  i
also had to add a hundred entries into /etc/modules - some of which i
could not determine so had to actually not have access to critical
hardware for a considerable amount of time.

 you *really* want to tell me that i am quotes free quotes to make
such unbelievably risky decisions, on a live-running mission-critical
system that has no regular backups?

 this one example underscores that "freedom"  - having access to the
source - is no longer the only factor, meaning that we are heavily and
critically deependent on decisions made by distro maintainers.

 unfortunataly, many people who committed to a particular distro, and
implicitly trusted the distro maintainers, have been betrayed.  the
choice (or expectation)?  f*** off and find yourself another distro.
except that too is a betrayal of trust: the amount of effor it takes
to convert a live-running mission-critical system over to a completely
new distro?  that people would even consider suggesting that users
should convert live-running systems is... words fail me.

l.