Systemd BirthDate Merge: Conflicts of Interest | Hacker News Reader

Systemd BirthDate Merge: Conflicts of Interest

tboteproject.com

23 pointsnpongratz23 comments

It was a long time coming, but it now happened. SystemD managed to do something that might give people pause over convenience factor. I am saying might, because while I am now actively planning ( until now I treated it as ideologically impure aspect of linux, but sufficiently useful to offset that discomfort ). DOB merge ( and how it was done ) changes that calculus by a wide margin. It is not even about DOB now. It is the full blown slippery slope with MS doing round 2 of EEE.

The mailing list doesn't seem to make it out into such a controversial issue. It's an optional field that doesn't require a real birthday.

The issue isn’t the field but how the governance system for critical software is non-existant.

It also has to be considered in light of the fact that Lennart builds a company for "cryptographically verifiable integrity on Linux".

Because someone added a new user field? Does that need governance?

When your software is the core piece of tech in almost all mainline Linux distros, yes it does require governance. However you may like someone being an authoritarian regardless of the “it’s only a user field no big deal” view and the next thing they change without governance for everyone you will be fine with also, even if you disagree. Again it’s not about the field.

If this is the “straw that broke the camel’s back” as they say… it seems it is more about the field than anything else. It’s a strange hill to die on… there are much larger changes happening on a daily basis… or is this like a bike shedding effect, where it’s such a small trivial and pointless change that it is worth fighting over? Something everyone can understand.

I dunno. The only reason I’m even on the mailing list was to report a bug several years ago…

I think it’s about raising visibility of an issue. What type of code change the issue is tied to is irrelevant. However it helps that the code change has some already existing political momentum.

What other arguments are we going to try and whittle the governance issue down to “its just the code change who cares!”?

I don't see the problem with the systemd DOB merger, the DOB will have to be stored somewhere and systemd already has a place where user information is securely stored so they added a new field to the user database.

The alternative is not that no DOB will be stored is that it will end up stored in 20 different locations on the filesystem.

From the wayback machine, I could not get into the link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260403141132/https://tboteproj...

Mirror here: https://isoc-sig.freifunk.net/systemd/systemd%20birthDate%20...

(confirmed still up at the time of writing this post.)

The site this is on seems to be a bit questionable [1].

[1] https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1064706/ba8e449d224f5067/

Why doesn’t someone fork systemd and start reworking/taking out all the icky parts as well as destroying Poettering’s control over it?

Debian’s forced accepting of Systemd is finally rearing it’s ugly head.

I am glad I switched to Devuan earlier this year.

I think.. because good inits already exist and systemD is an abomination unto god. Heavens know I was fully expecting agent integration soon...

I agree but all the proponents of it have said “it’s so convenient who cares”. That obviously states there are some features that bring value. I’m hard pressed to believe you need ALL of systemd architected how it is for those claims to hold.

There is value in not having to think about stuff too much. As my buddy sometimes says: 'I work support all the time, I don't want to do it at home as well.' Hard to argue with that. Heavens know I have less time for random exploration and related troubleshooting. But.. at certain point, that convenience is nulled by.. bad ideas.

I honestly didn't decide which path ( well, distro really )I am choosing, but I know it will not contain systemd if I can help it.

I’m not sure your point. Does an init system actually require a huge team and budget behind it? Especially when one guy is already forcing decisions on everyone?

I think the answer is: it kinda depends on one's needs and each one of us will have to answer what it depends on. Honestly, one of the beauty and curse of linux ecosystem. One could argue there are already small and contained init systems that don't require huge team or crazy budgets ( certainly by comparison ).

>Why doesn’t someone fork systemd

Why don't you? It's open source. No one is stopping you. Your ideas on how init systems should work are obviously superior, so you'll easily win over a majority of developers, right?

I don’t care about majority developers. Just that Poettering’s will not be forced upon me. I just may fork or look at helping establish a better suite of tools in the future.

Also I never said my ideas were superior. Maybe go for a walk instead of getting upset someone thinks Systemd needs to die.

I think most distros are waiting to see if upstream can rethink this first and evaluate what makes sense. Forking something like systemd is no easy task. Perhaps this just starts out as a patch removing the DOB changes. But in reality, distros don't want to face possible legal ramifications either. It's all a bit messy, and time will tell (I suspect for the better, but who knows).

The "DiRUG reform" link leads nowhere and I can't find that particular site neither on bmj.de nor the Wayback Machine. Is that an hallucinated artifact?

This just reads like a LLM trying to come up with a conspiracy theory around systemd.

It somehow got hyper-fixated on "three" for no particular reason and seems like it decided to harpen down that fact without explaining anything around it?

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