[Arm-netbook] Init Freedom

[doark at mail.com]

I'm replying very late because I needed to find the right words and they
were not coming to me, till now. Feel free to return the favour (:

On Sat, 8 Jul 2017 15:24:23 +0100
Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 7, 2017 at 11:35 PM, David Niklas <doark at mail.com> wrote:
<snip>
> > I saw some
> > of the most cordial behaviour that I have had the privilege to
> > witness on a mailing list from most of (all?) the members!  
> 
>  huh.  despite quite a lot of "venting", that's really appreciated to
> hear.

What I am about to write aught to be interpreted with respect to my
understanding of people and myself and I make no guarantee that my
understanding is correct; only that I believe it is correct.
"Venting", when not directed against a person is an expression of disgust
with a situation. A constructive use "Venting" is the writing about a
problem, whether someone actually notices or the situation improves
helps the person by expressing there thoughts and feelings on the matter
instead of keeping it bottled up inside of them.
A person "vents" because a situation would have to be important to them,
not because it necessarily is (consider gov. spying or proprietary
hardware, how many people "Vent" against those vs. say, protecting the
environment).
Typically just not contradicting a "venting" person will leave them
calmer than when they started. Therefore, I did not and do not consider
"Venting" in and of itself an evil, rather as a means to and end.

And there were times when those on the Devuan mailing list would seem to
head towards the "I hate Poettering" side, but we would all engage them
(except, maybe me because I would miss most of the discussion), to
thinking about the enemy we were fighting, which was systemd, not
Poettering, and it would work 100% of the time, at least as far as I
remember.
To be fair, I don't think anyone on the list would want to hire him or be
his best friend, but that is personal preference or disgust, not hate.

> > I really believe that they
> > will meet with success in their toiling. Not to justify by pointing to
> > lesser examples, but contrast it with the behaviour of Mr. Pottering.
> > Insta-bug-close. Taking every available short cut. No Portability to
> > clang/bsd/etc.  
> 
>  *cringes*... i see you noticed his behaviour.
<snip>

I only wish I understood why.
If you read Mr. Poettering's blog on systemd[1], he points out several
technical merits. One of the biggest arguments against portability is made
by telling people that daemons can't be trusted to stop and must,
therefore be tracked by the init system so that they don't misbehave.
He then goes on with how to write a daemon that utilizes systemd more
effectively, thus daemons which were behaving under other init's stop
working properly and function only on systemd unless they are written
and tested on both systemd and not systemd init systems, thus doubling
the work that needs to be done by the developers.
Why must systemd do what it does the way it does?
That is to say, if systemd must have unusual access to the kernel why
not use a modular design so that BSD support could be implemented?
Or even add a switch to the kernel to tell it to track a certain process
so that it does not misbehave. That would work for both systemd and not
systemd inits.
The same could be done for socket activation. Have the daemon itself tell
the kernel that it wants the socket to be opened with the expectation that
another process will attach later.

The incompatibility with clang seems to be mostly an attempt at not
wanting to do memory management, why not use rust?

Or sh ......    (:


Sincerely,
David


[1] http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html