[Arm-netbook] systemd nonsense ad-infinitum

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Tue, Jul 4, 2017 at 9:03 PM, Elena ``of Valhalla''
<valhalla-l at trueelena.org> wrote:

> I say seemed, however, because at least in the worst cases the pattern
> of behaviour were more suggestive of a troll trying to stir up
> controversy for its own sake (or for some other reason) rather than
> somebody honestly concerned with systemd, and that surely helped muddle
> things further.

 yyeah this is the most unfortunate / fortunate aspect of what
happened.  a massive proportion of people in the software libre
community (particularly debian) knew that something felt... wrong...
but were completely ill-equipped to *both* identify it *and* express
it.

 where the primary focus was on engineering, where you *absolutely
must* be capable of expressing precisely and exactly what is wrong, a
"this doesn't feel right" feeling would *of course* be outright
rejected with "please provide evidence / proof".

 not only that but people would have felt totally uncomfortable
expressing their true views and feelings (even if they truly had a way
to express them without causing upset / offense / whatever).  "i feel
totally betrayed by your democratic majority-vote-style decision
[which e.g. forces me to spend hundreds of hours converting
live-running systems to a new distro]" is not something that can be
bug-fixed.

 so yes, the end-result, elena, would have been what you witnessed.

 why describe this as "fortunate"?  because it identifies a flaw
within the software libre community that, one might hope, everyone can
learn from.

l.