Plenty of the "separate" components share core code at compile time. If they were truly separate they could be downloaded piecemeal and compiled independently.
This applies not just to your comment here but to a ton of comments that pop up on HN all the time. Why not in Go? Why not in Rust? Why not in React and node and electron and why don't you use my library that's still in alpha? It's not OOP. You're not using tabs. MIT is too permissive. GPL is too restrictive. And obviously, this should be a set of tiny separate libraries, how dare you work on free software with different ideas than mine.
I once found a project called Razor-qt. It was a desktop environment that included a bunch of interdependant binaries all under the same repo. I didn't like that very much. I joined it, worked on it, ended up leading the project and merging it with LXDE into LXQt. When came the time for the reorganization, I did push to create tiny components that "could be downloaded piecemeal and compiled independently". And we did end up going that route.
You know what I didn't do? I didn't go on HN and complain about a project I didn't know the internals of at the time.
But hey, maybe you know better. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"Forced" is not a term that applies to systemd. People say "forced" because their distro adopted it - guess why their distro adopted it? Because they researched it and found it was good. That is the common theme.
Nobody forced you. If you're an arch linux user, for example, one of the distros that switched the earliest, you'd have been more than welcome to discuss counter-points to systemd on the mailing list.
Of course, most of those that attempted doing so were ridiculed out because in free software, or at least on the Arch ML, there is very little tolerance for bullshit. Most (MOST, not all) of the arguments against systemd are in fact bullshit. Hell, even on HN I've seen people crap on systemd because "it's lennartware".
PS: To be clear, there is plenty wrong with systemd. It's far from perfect, it's still very young and I'm not particularly fond of its "all in one" tendencies myself. But most people in this thread have clearly zero ground to comment on its internals, yet many do.
1) You write "Most (MOST, not all) of the arguments against systemd are in fact bullshit".
2) And yet you (wrongly) write "there is plenty wrong with systemd"
To be in line with your 1) statement you should write 'it is only small things with systemd which are wrong. Because everything - MOST = small, and not 'plenty'.
Yet you dont do, and you write 'plenty'. Why? Because you know, the moment you write 'there is only a small amount of things wrong with systemd' you will be easily challenged.
So, from logic perspective, you're wrong and you contradict yourself.
Of course, you could also tone the hostility down before reading my post. Maybe that'd have helped you catch the fact that a flaw in systemd does not necessarily equal an argument against systemd, and vice versa.
6 years on Hacker News and this is what you've learned?
Try to discuss the essence, and don't wrongly accuse people who disagrees with you with 'hostility' plus your ad hominem. Still, take a rest and have a great 2017, I value your contributions to open source.
Yeah I do though. Consider that maybe you don't see why your post was extremely hostile.
I have very little patience for comments that refuse to do any charitable interpretation and instead end up being "but your post is wrong if taken literally!".
I have even less patience when such a poorly chosen tactic is applied incorrectly.
I've given you the benefit of the doubt and did reply to you (you've again disregarded it). I'll repeat it for clarity: a flaw in x does not necessarily equal an argument against x, and vice versa. Furthermore, "Everything - most = small" is a mathematically nonsensical statement.
Ad for my "6 years" comment, that was not an ad hominem, it was an observation. If you were a fresh account, I would have dismissed your comment as a troll. If you were a fairly new account, I would have thought that maybe you're not used to discussing things on an online social platform. But you have been here, communicating with others for six years; so when you write with such a confrontational tone, you get a confrontational tone back.
Both sides of this are wrong. The people complaining about "monolithic" are groping in the dark for ideas such as low coupling. The people saying "but count the binaries!" are not addressing the questions of fully documented interfaces between said binaries, composability, and interoperability.
The "uselessd guy" explained this quite well, as have many other people. Can you please advance to not dancing this same old dance every time?
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12879771
I recently wanted to use the "systemd-journal-gatewayd" component in Ubuntu 16.04, which ships with systemd v229. Yet, the feature I needed was only available in v231.
Although I'm only interested in a newer version of "systemd-journal-gatewayd" there is no way to upgrade just this one component, it seems.
If it were a separate component, it would have a bunch of ifdefs covering several versions of systemd, possibly with some features disabled if older version doesn't support it. However, that somewhat increases code complexity for developers and systemd devs refuse to do that.
That is the point of 'monolithic' criticism - despite being many binaries, you can't easily just build single one and make that work.