Upstream vendors and why they can be harmful

This submission won't make any sense without a little bit of background. (The comments here at the moment are all predictably confused.)<p>Start here: <a href="http://lwn.net/Articles/520892/" rel="nofollow">http://lwn.net/Articles/520892/</a><p>Core parts of Gnome (and probably lots of other Linux-y software, I haven't been following all of it) are all moving to require systemd. Systemd certainly promises a lot of advantages, like better handling of removable devices (and more: <a href="https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530" rel="nofollow">https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530</a>), but it is also replacing the tried-and-trusted rc approach. OpenBSD leaders in particular are concerned about systemd from a security standpoint; it has a lot of code that runs as root, it is big and unwieldy and the documentation is a mess.<p>So, not only were the OpenBSD developers faced with either auditing the entire systemd code base -- and then doing it again every time there's a new release -- or attempting to re-implement it in a compatible way, now they're also staring down the very short barrel of a nasty gun in which some really big stuff is going to stop working if they don't deal with it.<p>It's a real ugly situation, and OpenBSD really doesn't have the resources to spare to deal with this kind of nonsense. I wouldn't be surprised if this mess ends up tying up a couple of their core developers at an upcoming hackathon, where they could instead be working on something more useful than having to replace a huge part of the system that was working just fine up until Linux decided to throw it out. (Obviously there are plenty of people that would argue it wasn't "working just fine", either because they have specific knowledge about it or because "otherwise we wouldn't have needed systemd". That's not sufficient justification for forcing other developers to waste tremendous amounts of effort to re-work what was already working for them.)<p>Personally, I'm not a huge fan of the switch to systemd. I <i>liked</i> rc scripts. I've cobbled together my own rc daemon scripts from time to time; I'm not sure how that will work with systemd. I'm also seeing lots of ugly and persistent problems in NetworkMangler and whatever they're using for core audio these days; I'm a little gobsmacked that, rather than fixing those problems, some people decided to replace the init system.

I agree entirely with the sentiment here. If you've ever had to piece together something external to your distribution you will know the pain involved. This is amplified considerably if you pick a BSD-related operating system and for no good reason.<p>The Linux kernel itself is a remarkably stable system as far as ABI/API is concerned (Linus you rock here), but the packages gyrating around it are completely impossibly unstable and unreliable.<p>A fine example of this is trying to get an SSTP client working with NetworkManager recently. The whole NetworkManager VPN thing is an epic pile of hacks with bits of UI and bits of backend sticking out all over the place. If you're using Debian stable for example, there is no chance in hell you can get a working configuration unless you go and fix the numerous broken interfaces all over the place manually and arguing with pkg-config and literally hundreds of dependencies. How the fuck this ever even worked to start with I don't know. There are massive API changes with minor versions of packages all through NetworkManager and Gnome, which is just wrong.<p>The underlying issue is simply shitty engineering from a large body of open source projects who don't care about upstream or doing their job properly. To name and shame: The <i>entire</i> Gnome project, just about anything Ubuntu have chucked out, the <i>entire</i> KDE project post KDE2.<p>It's utterly frustrating. I wish they <i>did</i> take a more BSD approach, which is conservative engineering i.e. think about it, get it right and leave it.<p>For all the people here whinging about innovation, waah waah, ship old versions etc, I doubt you've actually had to deal with these issues or build a project on top of them. There seems to be a large detachment from reality here.<p>As an example to back my point up, one of the reasons Windows is so damn popular is that the API is <i>incredibly</i> stable and software written in the mid-90s still works fine on current versions without a recompilation or any API changes. A two week old build of NetworkManager probably will break all the VPN providers...

&#62; Either you're a modern linux with pulseaudio and pam and systemd, or you're dying. So much for the pionneer spirit of opensource, where you were free to innovate and do cool things, and more or less have interesting software able to run on your machine...<p>What a weird doublespeak paragraph. By "innovate and do cool things," the author seems to mean "ship, and rely on, old versions of software."

The Linux Desktop can't stand still to accommodate some minor platform. I understand that a move to systemd and in the future to wayland will have problematic consequences for BSD support. But the changes are made for good reasons and to bring the Linux and Free Software Desktop forward.<p>Systemd is much better for Desktop uses. The major reason is that it is fully designed to support hotplug. Which is something you have to constantly deal with on Desktop/Laptop systems. Disks are plugged in, Network connection isn't ready, and so on. It is also much faster and has a lot of other nice features. The lack of systemd support in *Ubuntu might be the reason for me to switch to another distribution for my Desktop.<p>Wayland finally allows us to get rid off all the legacy crap we have to carry around with X11. There is a reason why it is developed by the Xorg devs.<p>Pulseaudio had its reasons as well. Such as having useful support for Bluetooth- or USB-audio. Per-application audio settings and so on.<p>Of course you can argue with certain details in certain implementations. But I don't think that we can argue about the problems those solutions solve. Maybe you are happy with the setup you've been using since the 90s. But for most people the times are changing.<p>It is certainly sad that the BSDs don't have the manpower to keep up. However we can not expect the Linux Desktop to stand still because of them. The Linux Desktop itself lacks manpower and is fighting an uphill battle. Supporting minor systems will only drag it down.

The development within Linux is going much quicker than anything else can keep up. Within GNOME only very recently we got some non-Linux using contributors. Portability just for portabilities sake is not a goal anymore.<p>This is somewhat ironic, as excluding OpenBSD feels way too similar to how Linux is/was excluded in favour of Windows. But if almost all the people spend their time to make their Linux distro better, then this seems like a natural thing to occur.

Hmmm... well I certainly see the problem from 'their end' in that they find themselves 'incompatible' with external projects on which they have relied on since they are nowadays increasingly being developed with 'Linux in mind'.<p>However it's also hard to fault the obvious urge from Linux and the surrounding Linux-oriented ecosystem of making sure components integrate better so the result is a 'full system' which takes advantage of advancements made to the Linux kernel and it's surrounding core components.<p>I can't say one is right and one is wrong, I guess it's all about which side of the fence you're on.

When OpenBSD was pissed off by proprietary HSRP protocol designed by Cisco, they decided to implement their own protocol (not compatible with HSRP) and use the same IP protocol number 114 without IANA approval. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Address_Redundancy_Protocol" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Address_Redundancy_Proto...</a> This created a serious mess for system administrators and gives a good example of how to handle compatibility and standards related issues ;)

Note that some of these things are grumbled about within the Linux community too - there's plenty of complaining about pulseaudio, and systemd is very unlikely to ever be universally used by Linux distributions.

Starting from small things, it would also be great to stop using #!/bin/bash in scripts for no apparent reason (hint: "it's my default shell" is not a good reason.)

I would love to see a group of hackers get together to create a real (i.e. not a weak ARM device) computer and operating system, for profit<i>, but open source. It seems like people have mostly given up on this notion, as if its impossible to create a competing device. In the 70s/80s, a few people launched brands like Apple, Microsoft, and Amiga; I know things are harder now but it is far from impossible.<p></i>Why for profit? So that people have both an incentive and means to work on the product fulltime.

Wouldn't it be more appropriate to talk about LinuxDesktopism?<p>There I see part of an explanation regarding the opposite market shares between the server/HPC and desktop worlds.

I'm a 100% Linux user<p>I find systemd &#38; others are hurting Linux as much as it hurts BSDs.<p>In fact, just look at the ArchLinux forums, its FILLED with systemd issues. And most people know by now about the "disable pulseaudio, use pure alsa" trick to solve "all Linux audio issues". Heh.

The case <i>for</i> Linuxism is that Linux has the underlying tools applications require to deliver the user experience users want, and if OpenBSD (and this is from an OpenBSD list) wants to run those applications it should provide the same tools.<p>A <i>better</i> case against Linuxism is that portability encourages modularity, which is good for reasons far beyond portability. Having to do some things in a different module because they can't be done the same way on all systems encourages you to separate concerns, which leads to code that's easier to reason about and, therefore, less likely to be buggy.<p>The historical perspective is "You think this is bad, sonny, be glad you're not trying to convince people to play nice with Eunice." (Eunice was a Unix-like environment running on VAX/VMS.)