Re:Systemd, ten years later: a historical and technical retr...
by lmm on Tuesday May 05, 2020 @01:33AM
(#23076830)
> I'm making a humble request, please do not bring this attitude in open source projects. Really I mean it. It's not helpful and it only makes people angry.
I respect your position but I disagree. Projects shying away from criticism in the name of inclusiveness has gone hand in hand with a drop in quality, not just in terms of unwise rewrites but in terms of plain old bad/buggy code - which should not be surprising.
> You are also misinterpreting the behavior of Mr. Torvalds and confusing things.
My point is that Torvalds - historically - used language on the level of "incompetent vandals" freely where appropriate. In a serious software project people are, and should be, willing to state those kind of views very clearly and directly.
> The kernel developers have actually been some of the most adamant about rewriting major parts of the kernel and breaking internal APIs over and over again (not syscalls)
They have; at the same time they've been adamant about the need to avoid regressions, both in terms of maintaining external interfaces and in not ripping things out before a replacement offers feature parity and there's a reasonable migration plan in place. The bottom line is that they caused nowhere near the level of user-facing breakage that the systemd/gnome folks have, and that speaks to higher standards and better judgement.
I respect your position but I disagree. Projects shying away from criticism in the name of inclusiveness has gone hand in hand with a drop in quality, not just in terms of unwise rewrites but in terms of plain old bad/buggy code - which should not be surprising.
> You are also misinterpreting the behavior of Mr. Torvalds and confusing things.
My point is that Torvalds - historically - used language on the level of "incompetent vandals" freely where appropriate. In a serious software project people are, and should be, willing to state those kind of views very clearly and directly.
> The kernel developers have actually been some of the most adamant about rewriting major parts of the kernel and breaking internal APIs over and over again (not syscalls)
They have; at the same time they've been adamant about the need to avoid regressions, both in terms of maintaining external interfaces and in not ripping things out before a replacement offers feature parity and there's a reasonable migration plan in place. The bottom line is that they caused nowhere near the level of user-facing breakage that the systemd/gnome folks have, and that speaks to higher standards and better judgement.