On Mon, Jul 3, 2017 at 10:24 AM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
there's a misconception that software that does its job actually needs "development". good stable software that does a job and does it well (the unix philosophy) often simply needs "maintenance" only - keeping up-to-date with dependency changes, tool changes, 64-bit ports and architecture ports and so on. the problem is: maintenance is a really boring job. so after a few years, people... stop doing it. at that point the software is often considered "abandonware".
Right, and notably also security fixes.
But my point is I don't think it's useful to demonize the systemd developers for writing their own version of software for which the alternatives are no longer maintained. (Or even software which still has actively maintained alternatives, honestly!) systemd-resolved is just another caching resolver, systemd-logind is just another session manager, etc.
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. (Granted in most cases it's the distro maintainer's choice, as it is for all the other default software in their distro.)