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Comment by lupusreal | Hacker News Reader

He's controversial because numerous times his ego has so severely clouded his judgemental that he refuses to see egregious bugs in his programs for what they are. Just one example: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/6237#issuecomment-...

The "people hate him because he makes new stuff" narrative is just more ego-protecting cope. Many developers of other new systems are widely respected and appreciated because their stuff works and they stay humble. Wireguard and Pipewire devs don't get hate poured on them in HN discussions because their shit works, solves problems people have, and because they know how to deal with people.

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Or in Linus Torvalds' words[1]:

It does become a problem when you have a system service developer who thinks the universe revolves around him, and nobody else matters, and people sending him bug-reports are annoyances that should be ignored rather than acknowledged and fixed. At that point, it's a problem.

[1]: https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/4/2/580

But even then, system service developers don't try to 'own the whole world' so to speak and so they do need to play nicely with others. Mr. Poopering philosophy is the minute a dependencies maintainer becomes a thorn in his side - he absorbs that project into systemd. The distribution packagers follow like starving dogs on a hunt

> Mr. Poopering

This is childish and petty, I suggest you delete your account.

You can't delete your HN account.

Interesting! IANAL, but I think this should be basic functionality, ever since the recent-ish European and Californian privacy regulations. Although I think a quick e-mail to hn@ycombinator.com would suffice.

Would it really? Asking cause genuinely curious, literally the only online forum I can't remove my past public information from is HN.

Even if you delete your account, it wouldn't really matter that much. Whole HN is probably crawled and archived on a daily basis due to a simplistic API

No thanks!

This is about Kay Sievers, not Lennart Poettering.

Same difference

> Just one example: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/6237#issuecomment-...

1. He gave a clear reason why it is how it is 2. He realizes it is/might be frustrating 3. even `adduser` will not allow it by default 4. The issue that it still runs the unit even with config errors has been addressed: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/bb28e68477a3a39796... (~2 weeks after the issue was opened)

> 3. even `adduser` will not allow it by default

5. useradd does allow it (as noted in a comment). 6. Local users, and the utilities that create them, are not the only source, there things like LDAP and AD.

7. POSIX allows it:

* https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/6237#issuecomment-...

His reason, although clear, is also plainly wrong. Such usernames although bizarre may be encountered by SystemD so it shouldn't break when it sees them. Computer programs, particularly important ones, should be conservative in what they emit and liberal with what they accept and that means not breaking when they encounter weird but technically permissible usernames. His response should have been "Golly, that's a weird username, I didn't think that was possible" and then fix the bug.

There is a certain personality type that likes to reimagine that their original thinking was not flawed, even when presented with a detail that they did not incorporate into their original thinking. If the detail had been in their awareness from the start, they would have arrived at a different position, but they are bound to a strict sense of linearity for reasons inexplicable to me except for ego protection.

Disclaimer: I know nothing about the particular bug. Postel's Law has its tradeoffs, and its fuzzy lines are a nice place for security issues to arise.

For sure, there are limits. In this particular case, maybe we say that SystemD shouldn't support weird usernames beginning with numbers, but the other half of the law should still apply. The conservative emission would be logging an error message, not running that unit file as root.

Alternatively, if, like he says in the comments of that bug, he really means that SystemD shouldn't support systems that allow such usernames, then he should ensure SystemD won't run on such systems.

Silently doing the wrong thing is not a good thing, especially when "doing the wrong thing" is running stuff as root that wasn't supposed to run as root.

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