The reasoning was hammering it down to everybody's throats by Redhat. It is easier to adapt to proposed solution (even inferior) where there are some guarantees of support and traction, than to reinvent everything and be left as sole maintainers.

It doesn't relate in any way to the quality of the solution.

You are giving far too little credit and good faith to the distribution maintainers who spent the better part of a year carefully evaluating the available options. I watched those discussions take place, and contributed to many of them. They included detailed evaluations of the service management capabilities, verbosity, transparency, debuggability, maintainability, tooling, backward compatibility, any numerous other factors.

That you do not like the outcome does not mean the process was inherently flawed or incomplete.

I certainly do not blame distribution maintainers. I blame Redhat, with their not-so-subtle hints of "we might not have any resources to support anything that comes from us for non-systemd systems". Which at some point extended to GNOME and other vital sine qua nons.

> not-so-subtle hints of "we might not have any resources to support anything that comes from us for non-systemd systems".

That honestly doesn't seem unreasonable to me. If you build a tool to make things easier to maintain, you lose much of the benefit of that if you still have to support other alternatives where you have to do everything manually. (For instance, maintaining a 100-line init script in addition to a 10-line unit file.) Asking people who care about that to do the work to maintain it seems perfectly reasonable.

> Which at some point extended to GNOME and other vital sine qua nons.

There are far more people complaining about the lack of alternatives, and far fewer people willing to actually write and maintain alternatives. It doesn't help that many of the people complaining take the attitude of "you don't really need that anyway".

AFAIR the gnome people were desperately looking for someone who'd maintain console kit and the systemd people stepped up and provided a working alternative, so gnome switched. After the switch, systemd basically was a hard dependency for every system using a recent gnome version. If the time spent complaining about systemd were spent towards supporting alternatives, things might look different today. It doesn't require coding an alternative, but organizing support, funding a patreon etc. would go a long way.

It's also worth noting that you can still, today, run systemd-logind (and several other systemd components) with the compatibility layer of systemd-shim on top of another init system. But even that doesn't have enough people willing to maintain it.

People who are unhappy with systemd are usually so for reasons other than compatibility.

I really don't understand Redhat's position here.

RHEL5 came with one init system. RHEL6 came with another. RHEL7 comes along with yet another init system replacement.

Each of which has required software vendors who build software to run on those platforms to do non-trivial porting work. I know it's annoying the software vendors no end.

I've heard from so many end users that they can't upgrade to RHEL7 (or derivatives) because the software they need to support doesn't work with systemd yet. Stuff that makes them frustrated with both RedHat and the software vendor. Annoying your customers hardly seems the sanest business practices.

Luckily with Debian being on board, and thus Ubuntu, at least there's some incentive for vendors to work at it.

They should be frustrated with the vendor if an upgrade is being held up by the trivial Upstart to systemd conversion for a dozen lines of code. Supporting both init systems combined is an order of magnitude less work than SysV init, and it allows you to rip out a good bit of darmonization code which tends to have details less portable across Unix variants.

It's far more likely that the real cause is one of the many major dependency updates (6 to 7 is like a half decade jump) and the systemd mention is either an excuse or axe-grinding.

There seems to be an effort to rewrite history to "well, everyone adopted it, so it must be good, right?" That is very much not the way it happened. Go read the discussions on the Debian lists, for instance - RHEL was indeed throwing its weight around.

Add to that the games they're playing with interfaces, and at some point, it starts smelling like a miniature, farcical version of Microsoft in the 90s.

I don't even know what planet you're living on. In particular, Russ Allbery of the Debian technical committee gave some of the most detailed evaluation of systemd vs alternatives that I've seen from anyone from a user and maintainer POV. (He noticeably said, beforehand, he didn't think it would be a huge deal at first, but it turned out it was a big difference.) Many people did not like their decision, but suggesting that the Debian committee in particular didn't take the issue seriously and were strong-armed by Red Hat -- makes me think you have no idea what you're talking about, honestly.

I'd like to read this part about RHEL throwing their weight around on the Debian lists. Given your implication is that Debian was clearly "forced" to adopting it, I imagine the relevant evidence shouldn't be hard to find.

(Alternatively, you could actually ask other Debian maintainers yourself, like Josh, in this thread how it went. But you already did that and it didn't seem his narrative aligned with yours, so...)

Everyone seems very focussed upon Debian in this thread, even though the thread started out discussing all distributions.

It might be worth everyone's while remembering that Debian is not the be-all and end-all here, even though it did have a massive hoo-hah. The processes in other distributions were markedly different.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11834348

* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/debian-systemd-packaging-hoo-hah.html

The first link doesn't seem to support redhat strongarming.

Arch rc maintainer decided to drop rc for systemd.

The linked evil-poettering intermezzo seems to be irrelevant and strawman-ish too.

I participated in almost all of Debian discussions. I don't see how you can claim what you claim, at all. Care to explain? E.g. RHEL was throwing its weight around?

The process at Debian started years later than any other distribution. It involved various votes, at least a year of discussion, etc.

Then in 2017 someone ignores history and summarizes this into "RHEL was throwing its weight around"... ?!?

One question: did the ability (or easiness) to stay compatible with Gnome 3 influence the decision? How about the great udev scare? Also, we all remember that 4:4 vote, and all the drama later.

Your first sentence is directly contradicted by the second and certainly doesn't fit the history of the distributions. Debian, et al. have a long history of not following Red Hat when they see value – e.g. think of the patches which Debian developers maintain to make configuration easier and safer compared to Red Hat — and reason why they couldn't have done the same here other than that the people who actually do the work didn't think it was worthwhile.

It's simply disingenuous to describe Red Hat contributing a lot of engineering time for free as “hammering it down to everybody's throats”, any more than Linux was hammered down our throats over Hurd. I don't think systemd is perfect but I think anyone's standing to complain about open source software is bounded by your willingness to commit to supporting alternatives.

(And, lest you think I'm some sort of die-hard Red Hat fanboy I should note that I started using Debian in the Bo/Hamm era and have never found a compelling value to using RH)

On the contrary, I mostly use Fedora. Systemd won, it is sad, but I accepted it. However, I want to outline that the reasons for its proliferation were less than objective merit.

I'm not sure this really makes sense. It sounds like RedHat didn't hammer it down throats, but instead created a solution that had some guarantees of support and traction which distro maintainers then decided was better than the current alternatives. No one was holding a gun to distro maintainer's heads tell them that they needed to move away from the existing solutions or else, or at least I haven't seen any evidence of that.

So if they weren't forced into it and RedHat did indeed provide some guarantees, it does actually suggest what the parent says.

Even if what you say is true and systemd is the inferior system and everybody only picked it because Redhat promised to support it, that's fine with me. Support is indeed a major feature. Anything that is not supported is lacking a feature. I'll take the good-enough-but-supported version of a thing over the perfect-but-left-out-in-the-cold version any time of the day for anything that I'd put close to production.