Hacker News Reader

Comment by exDM69 | Hacker News Reader

I'm very grateful that Lennart Poettering wrote this post. I don't necessarily use the software he writes (my next distro will be systemd based) but I'm still happy that he writes it. It has advanced the state of Linux distributions (due to PulseAudio, lots of ALSA driver bugs were found and fixed, systemd has prompted improvements to other init/acpid/udev/automount/etc software too) regardless whether you use the software he wrote or not.

But the amount of flak he receives is unacceptable. The tone which people talk about him and even to him is despicable.

I'm glad he spoke up and hopefully people will realize that open source contributors are people too. If you have a technical reason to disagree, taking it personal is not constructive.

View on HN

I don't advocate bullying nor would I dare to justify such personal attacks. But the abusive content aside, he does deserve constructive criticism because, frankly, his contributions towards open source have brought far more problems than any of the solutions he looked to replace.

I could write a lengthy blog post about the unnecessary problems that PulseAudio and systemd have thrown up over the years (problems I'd never had an issue with in all the years of running Linux and other UNIX-like platforms), but those topics are done to death now. However my point is I think Lennart's been so carelessly cavalier in rolling out his code, and so unapologetic about the shitstorm he started that he's gotten a lot of peoples back up. Obviously this doesn't warrant the kind of bullying that he discussed in his post; however although he doesn't deserve such attacks, he has largely brought them on himself.

Maybe instead of fighting against the community as he tries to impose his own imperial vision of Linux, maybe if he worked with the community then the aggressive dickheads might leave him alone (or at least he'd receive more supporters from friendly folk - of who massively outnumber the aforementioned dickheads).

But just to be clear, as much as I think he might draw negative attention to himself, I think that any kind of personal abuse, let alone of the quantity that Lennart's been subject to, is absolutely disgusting and undeserved. Period.

> I could write a lengthy blog post about the unnecessary problems that PulseAudio and systemd have thrown up over the years (problems I'd never had an issue with in all the years of running Linux and other UNIX-like platforms), but those topics are done to death now

I haven't been keeping up with the linux side of things, could someone give some links to descriptions of this?

I agree with most of your post. His attitude toward keyscript users is less than inspiring. But I still try - yesterday I spent 4 hours tweaking my VM builds against debian sid; by the end I had found a way to segfault systemctl, filed a bug, and still have absolutely no debugging info that explains why docker.service doesn't start at boot on its default network.target.

But the elephant in the room is that distros have adopted systemd and pulseaudio en masse. There must be buy-in for a reason. This outpouring of faux outrage is being leveled at an individual, what of the distro vendors?

> distros have adopted systemd and pulseaudio en masse. There must be buy-in for a reason

There is, and this reason is not always on the merits of the software.

I would like to add NetworkManager to the list of software that (used to) pain my existence. The case for including this were pretty much the same as PulseAudio, that other entities already had settled on it, in this case Gnome.

So the fact that some of the developers were important members of the Gnome community sort of gave their creation a direct path into Red Hat and Ubuntu, who based their desktops on Gnome.

Had they not been, the software would have had a much harder time getting included, and based on merits alone it would not have happened. That rubbed a lot of people the wrong way at the time, for some very good reasons.

"based on merits alone it would not have happened"

Which adds salt to the wound, or irony, of his claim of meritocracy in the second line of his post "Where contributions are valued only by their technical quality". Uh, no, that's definitely not why we're being forced into systemd.

"There must be buy-in for a reason."

Never forget chronology. The ideas and architecture in systemd are nothing new, in fact they're kind of obsolete. What has changed politically / strategically such that this specific instance can be rammed down everyones unwilling throats?

Lets run a thought experiment about if this hatred is a result of technical actions and behaviors or back room politics. Lets try... the upstart init system. A direct competitor. How many people have threatened to kill the authors of upstart? Oh, none you say? What a complete non-surprise.

This is the key weakness of his post. Hatred of authors of badly architected software is very rare in open source. Hatred of back room political dealings and extensive "embrace extend extinguish" product tying, well the feeling of hatred is completely unsurprising given that behavior being the opposite of the meritocracy straw dog he tries to tear down, but some claimed behavior does sound over the top (hire a hitman? really? a bit ridiculous if true). He could have made a decent post about misbehavior and over-reaction in politics and it would have been a correct and good post, but he can't admit in public the corrupt way an unwanted systemd is being shoved down our unwilling throats, so we end up with ridiculous "I am a technical guy" LOL yeah as if anyone believes the reported social problems are due to that.

You are spot on. As you said, Upstart probably never received death threats. I also agree the post could hae been a decent post because there are definitely some problems in some communities but he couldn't even resist gunning at Linus and Gentoo to make a point (or was that to discredit "resistance" ?)

There must be buy-in for a reason.

My impression, at least with systemd, is:

1) systemd put in a whole bunch of work to be backward compatible. They make migration easier, at the cost of some complexity within the codebase. It supports some compatibility with init shell scripts and has inetd compatibility.

If you want to take a dim view of it, it's a little bit like Microsoft's "embrace and extend". systemd has "good" properties for adoption. They do seem to engineer aggressively for adoption, rather than just trying to make the best technical solution. Pottering does have a good understanding of these politics, which makes people angry.

2) Features. Other systems are more "modular", but don't cover as much ground. There are some supervision toolkits like daemontools and runit, but they are meant more for servers. These systems leave it up to end users to do more work. systemd you can kind of drop in and it mostly works, until you have to debug it.

Again, this is sort of like Microsoft. You can stuff in features to satisfy all the different camps, even if the combination of those features results in a poor architecture.

3) Genuinely good ideas/features. I guess this is why Pottering is so controversial. There is a bunch of crap thrown in with some good ideas. Socket activation is genuinely a good feature. It's not new -- Apple's launchd and I believe Sun's SMF use it too. But yeah I think we should give credit to the good ideas for some of the adoption.

There's no doubt they put in a lot of effort to systemd. The only thing that compared is Upstart. It does seem that people paid to work on open source by companies like Red Hat and Canonical are the ones who really influence the direction Linux is going on.

People had issues with Upstart too, though not to this level. So really the high adoption of systemd is not that much of a surprise, given that there were few realistic alternatives.

"Engineering for adoption", as you said, is necessary for something attempting to replace something as key as the init system and other core components.

With software like this, whatever the replacement, if it doesn't have adequate backwards compatibility, it will never see any significant adoption. Switching over wholesale at once is simply too difficult.

>There must be buy-in for a reason

Yes, and that reason is that redhat has their hands in other software too, and added systemd dependencies to it whether people like it or not. So distros face the decision of "adopt systemd or your distro won't be able to run gnome".

>This outpouring of faux outrage

It is not faux outrage, it is real outrage. I find it odd how people can dismiss even someone like Linus' complaints as "faux outrage".

The outrage is obviously very real, otherwise we would not have this discussion; perhaps "poorly substantiated outrage" would be more fitting.

> However my point is I think Lennart's been so carelessly cavalier in rolling out his code, and so unapologetic about the shitstorm he started that he's gotten a lot of peoples back up. Obviously this doesn't warrant the kind of bullying that he discussed in his post; however although he doesn't deserve such attacks, he has largely brought them on himself.

That is the "look what she's wearing" argument. The victim is newer responsible for receiving such violent abuse as Pottering has.

I said about 5 times in my post that he doesn't deserve those kind of attacks, as I wanted to make it perfectly clear that I wasn't stating that he was responsible for it; yet you still drew that conclusion from my post?

My point was that if Lennart worked with the community instead of against it then he would have had a more positive experience from the nice guys (who outnumber the dickheads). Or to use your "look what she's wearing" argument, you don't dress like a hooker for a date with a price. But that doesn't mean that a woman cannot wear what she wants and nor that she deserves sexual / physical abuse for her choice in outfits. But that if she wants to change the monarchy then she needs to play along with them and their silly dress codes. It's best to change a system by working with and inside the system.

In other words, the nice people in the open source community would be more vocal in support for Lennart and his vision if Lennart worked nicely with the community. Dickheads will always be around (which sucks), but at least their voices would be drowned out by the millions of Lennart supporters.

> "date with a price"

Freudian slip? ;)

hahaha that's my funniest typo to date.

I meant "prince", but I expect everyone had worked that out already :)

No, this is the "you tried to gun me down last week - let me show you the weapon I've bought just for you!" argument: What goes around, comes around.

OK, so how does that justify his attack on the Linux kernel community in particular? Were Linus or his lieutenants involved in any credible threats against Lennart? Sure, somebody who is incapable of recognizing hyperbole might interpret some of Linus's more immoderate emails as condoning or encouraging such things, but overall Lennart's post seems like using one group's excesses as an excuse to attack another.

> his contributions towards open source have brought far more problems than any of the solutions he looked to replace.

If this were true, nobody would have adopted his work. If most of the major distros have switched to pulseaudio and systemd, it's because the people who actually know about this stuff have looked at his work and found it excellent.

So you're assuming that I don't know about this stuff? And that the members of Debian who voted against systemd doesn't know their stuff? Or even that Linus Torvalds (who's often complained about how bugs in systemd get pushed back as bugs in the Linux kernel) doesn't know his stuff either?

While it's true that systemd does have it's supporters; equally not everybody "who actually knows about this stuff" likes systemd either.

> Or even that Linus Torvalds (who's often complained about how bugs in systemd get pushed back as bugs in the Linux kernel) doesn't know his stuff either?

When did that happen?

There was one udev bug regarding firmware loading where during the discussion it turned out that it's the right thing to do that in the Kernel to begin with.

How this is related to the greater systemd is beyond me.

The occasion that springs to mind wasn't an altercation between Lennart and Linus specifically. But it was about systemd: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTY1MzA

(there's probably better write ups on this argument, Phoronix was just the first link that came up when Googling for the /proc/cmdline Linus systemd rant)

That is interesting... so basically the systemd developers wanted to turn the generic parameter kernel command line parameter "debug" into something that could be easily used by admins to find out why their system won't boot (whether the problem is in the kernel or in userspace), and got flamed to a crisp by kernel developers who want to keep using "debug" to debug their kernel code because they've always done it that way, and couldn't care less about helping actual end users.

You have things backwards. It was the systemd developers that didn't want the debug command line to be used against systemd. They were the ones who filed the patch to prevent the debug command line from reaching user space (/proc/cmdline) and it was the kernel developers (well, Linus specifically) who refused to patch and demanded that systemd cleaned up their debugging output so that 1) it didn't crash Linux (which it was doing previously), and 2) the output was more useful to end users for debugging.

Yeah, that was an odd fix. Then /proc/cmdline doesn't reflect what the actual kernel command line was, thereby making debugging more opaque. The sane option, which the kernel developers suggested, was that systemd namespace pre-boot options it takes from the kernel command line, just like every kernel subsystem already does.

The kernel devs are mad that flipping a kernel debug switch (on the kernel command-line, after all!), causes a userspace program to change its behavior, to the point that "the system becomes undebuggable on a dracut/systemd system" (kernel dev's words; apparently systemd spews a bunch of debug info into dmesg.)

If you're going to say it's the kernel's fault, it's ultimately because they ever exposed the kernel cmdline to userspace, as something like this was inevitable.

> got flamed to a crisp by kernel developers who want to keep using "debug" to debug their kernel code because they've always done it that way

If their reports can be believed, they literally can't get work done (if it involves turning on debug in the kernel of a systemd installation), so it's far from some petty turf war or irrational hatred for change. Even if they should change, you seem to take it for granted, that they should have to change their kernel workflow, based on what something in userspace does -- why?

The kernel command line has the "quiet" option, which has for many years been used by user-space to display a fancy graphical progress bar instead of 100s of lines of text; "debug" is just the inverse of that.

There was also some bug in systemd that caused it to log an excessive amount of assertion failures into some kernel buffer, which was in fact a really bad bug and was probably the reason for the whole flame-fest; naturally this bug has been fixed.

But think about it: is it likely that the whole distracting turf war over the "debug" flag helped in getting the actual bug fixed as fast as it could have been?

The reason why I would prefer to have systemd respect the "debug" flag, even if it means that kernel developers have to learn a new workflow, is that there are a lot more system administrators than kernel developers out there, and (on average) the kernel hackers have lots more expertise than the admins.

So if a system has problems booting there should be a simple, short, generic parameter to get some verbose logging enabled, that can be used to track down the problem whether it's in the kernel or in user space, which you can't know beforehand of course.

The kernel developers may be understandably unhappy about the change, but once they get over their initial reaction using a different parameter for kernel-only debugging is really quite trivial at their level of competence.

By this logic, there are a lot more servers than there are desktop Linux users, and more than likely a lot more system administrators than desktop Linux users (I believe I'm in the minority as I'm a system admin, who uses Linux daily on all his computers, desktops, laptops, and servers), so the things systemd does that are intended to make the desktop linux experience better, like faster boot (which was never strictly a problem on servers, except in the time it usually takes a server BIOS to get to the grub prompt, which systemd can't address), "better" hot-plugging of devices, socket activation (which already had a solution and is something you don't want on a server for the example use-case of mysql), the FSS logging that journald does (because sysadmins have already sufficiently solved that at scale) so systemd shouldn't be encroaching on server linux use. And there are a lot more system administrators out there than desktop environment developers, and (on average) have more system administration experience than the desktop environment developers.

This also assumes that sysadmins don't use the kernel debug flag, and only kernel developers do. I've had to use it on the rare occasion, and I've been glad that messages from the kernel are easily selectable via a specific kernel command line option as distinct from userspace messages.

> The reason why I would prefer to have systemd respect the "debug" flag, even if it means that kernel developers have to learn a new workflow

Again, you have things backwards. It was the systemd developers that DIDN'T want "to respect the debug flag". The systemd developers tried to prevent the debug flag from getting past the kernel. It was the kernel developers that forced the systemd developers "to respect the debug flag"

All the credit that you're attributing to the systemd developers was actually down to Linus Torvalds drawing a line in the sand.

systemd solves real problems that you may or may not have (or you think you don't have but affects you anyway, like systemd-logind solved various problems related to authetication and session that the old ConsoleKit had).

Linus Torvalds said in a recent interview that he don't like or dislike systemd, he even uses it and likes what the people of systemd is trying to do (but not necessary likes the way they're doing it), so yeah, even a person like Torvalds understand that we need what systemd folks are doing. Just that maybe this is not the best way to do it, but all folks just assume that systemd is bad and should be avoid at all costs.

http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/65402-tor...

> If most of the major distros have switched to pulseaudio and systemd, it's because the people who actually know about this stuff have looked at his work and found it excellent.

Here's a theory. This is pure conjecture on my part—I'm not close to the systemd project or the various distros—so please take it with a grain of salt.

Programmers prefer to do less work. Simple tools get the job done and are easy to understand, but often require more effort to use effectively. Using a hand saw, it is hard work to cut a solid piece of wood, but the only servicing it needs is to sharpen the blade. On the other hand, with a chainsaw it is much easier to cut through wood, but there are many more things that you need to care about to keep it running smoothly. When put this way, the hand saw seems superior in its simplicity, but remember that it's not immediately obvious that chainsaws can be difficult to start, or that the chains get stuck sometimes. Standing in the hardware store, the chainsaw might seem like the way to go, but one might regret not choosing the simpler option when complications arise later.

It seems to me (conjecture, remember) that systemd offers a lot to the distros. It gives them hooks to manage difficult things and, after all, the systemd people are doing all the work. That explains why the distro maintainers might choose it, but my worry is that the convenience comes at a cost.

The thing is, he is a bully too. I also don't advocate the hate speech and threats he has received; no one deserves that. But his contributions to the world of GNU/Linux have been a net negative in my opinion. I get less benefit and more headache out of systemd, so I don't use a distro that has it. It's the same with PulseAudio; I think it's a good idea in concept but it was simply a bad implementation. He needs to hear that, but without the vitriol that accompanies it from certain people.

Will he ever listen even to good constructive criticism? Probably not; his personality seems to be egocentric and elitist, and as I said he can be quite the bully himself. But I'd imagine he would at least read constructive criticism, rather than dismiss it outright as he would (and should) dismiss hate filled criticism.

Hello!

Bully or not, please be friendlier. I will start and hope you're following.

I've seen a few interviews with Mr. Pöttering and I admire his cleverness and his ambitious fight for a better GNU/Linux. I am not a fan of his person, nor his speech, but this is not the time, nor place to call him an egocentric elitist. There is a reason for everything, I too would become such a person to protect myself from the everyday threatening and hatred. Things like that break a person!! Keep this in mind, we as Engineers are especially very susceptible and sensible to attacks, because we have sharpened and trained our minds to try to find a meaning behind every action.

Remember Aaron Schwartz! He couldn't bear the weight on his shoulders anymore. He was not a soldier, he was not a criminal, he was like you and me a person that deserves to be respected. Souls break apart and suicide isn't rare among our people. You shall keep this in mind, when you speak up without a filter.

Whenever I've been complaining about something about Linux, I was told to improve it, or shut up. That was a culture that I thought as very unfriendly, but it was nonetheless logical. I could pass that along to you, but you have an opinion about Systemd and Pulseaudio that I simply cannot fathom as authentic or fact based.

ALSA did not allow controlling the volume of different applications. Period. PulseAudio made it happen!! Yes it's not perfect, but it's opensource and maybe it'll be as good as the software you want to use on your own computer.

With Systemd systems are starting up much much faster than tweaks to other init systems can provide. You're comparing Apples to Oranges, when you say, but if you disable everything then and only then my favorite init system is faster than systemd. Not everything in systemd is smart or good, but it fixes a problem that people have neglected for too many years. Systemd changed that!

Let's not discuss what is better or not, you have to be a Software-Architect and not an untrained Software-Developer to discuss such things in detail without being a hypocrite, desinformative or misleading. My impression was that even though the ideas of Mr. Pöttering were brilliant, his Software-Architecture skills are his Achilles heel. That's what he needs more training in.

Thank you for taking the time reading this.

>but you have an opinion about Systemd and Pulseaudio that I simply cannot fathom as authentic or fact based.

You criticize people for being unfriendly and then say you "simply cannot fathom" that their opinions are authentic?

How long have you been using Linux? PulseAudio was almost universally major pain point for many years until other people came along and fixed Poettering's work up enough to make it marginally better than ALSA. If you "simply cannot fathom" that the poster's opinions are authentic, you have been living under a rock.

I thought engineering and "science" was supposed to be a place for objectivity and fact-based reasoning, not pathos and let's-not-hurt-each-other's-feelings-with-criticism.

> PulseAudio was almost universally major pain point for many years

The operative word here is was.

ALSA had a lot of problems for my use case, Pulseaudio just works. Most of this is probably more due to other contributors and just generally distributions getting their act together, but the world we live in today is undoubtedly better than it was before Pulseaudio.

What about the counterfactual where Pulseaudio was never started?

It is often said that the best way to get a correct answer to a question on the internet is not to ask the question, but to post a wrong answer. It seems to me that what Poettering is doing is the exact same thing applied to open source software, and I for one am grateful for it.

> It is often said that the best way to get a correct answer to a question on the internet is not to ask the question, but to post a wrong answer. It seems to me that what Poettering is doing is the exact same thing applied to open source software, and I for one am grateful for it.

That's an interesting way to look at it, and I think you're right. He's coming up with what he sees as a solution to something that, while it isn't broken, isn't great either (in the case of systemd, other init systems work but they all have shortcomings), only this time I think it backfired. Now the "wrong answer" as you put it, is being implemented by the major distros except Slackware and Gentoo, and I fear that it's gotten to the point that it can only be fixed by being surgically removed and replaced with something else, which may end up being even worse.

My personal solution is to stick with non-systemd distros, for others it's grimace and bear it, and for many it's not a problem in the first place.

> What about the counterfactual where Pulseaudio was never started?

Everyone would then be using JACK, and the world would be a better place for it.

Which Jack? Jack1 or Jack2? [1]

My experience with JACK seems very similar to everyone else's early experience with PulseAudio, really buggy, lots of audio pops (small buffers) or latency (big buffers).

One of my most technically adept friends has spent a long time trying to setup a basic debian install with JACK working reliably (done) only it's very fragile, upgrades to random packages broke it so often we now do our audio work without a general purpose computer in the hotpath.

[1] http://trac.jackaudio.org/wiki/Q_differenc_jack1_jack2

I personally like jack2 better.

If your friend is using Debian, may I suggest the kxstudio repos [1]? They make JACK (1 or 2) easy as pie to deal with. I personally use Arch nowadays, and breakage after upgrading hasn't been a concern for quite some time.

1. http://kxstudio.sourceforge.net

First, calling someone egocentric and elitist is not an attack, it's an observation, and in this case, an apt one. He has said so about himself in the past. My intent isn't to attack him, it's to describe him.

Second, he is not Aaron Schwartz, who the community rallied around and the government bullied to death. In this case, the government isn't even involved, it's various groups of people reacting differently to Pottering, some in ways that I find disgusting, others in ways that I line up with (not happy with him or his work, but not attacking him for it), and still others like you with blind praise and faith bordering on religion.

"You're comparing Apples to Oranges, when you say, but if you disable everything then and only then my favorite init system is faster than systemd."

I never said that, please don't attempt to put words in my mouth to bolster your argument, because it makes you look quite the fool.

"Let's not discuss what is better or not, you have to be a Software-Architect and not an untrained Software-Developer to discuss such things in detail without being a hypocrite, desinformative or misleading."

You're making an assumption about me while knowing nothing about me, and at the same time calling me a hypocrite? Please, you're shooting yourself in the foot with this one.

There is simply nothing defensible in your entire argument, as far as I can see. You make assumptions, call me names including "hypocrite", telling me how to think ("You shall keep this in mind, when you speak up without a filter")? Sounds to me like you're just as much a bully as Pottering. It renders your entire argument invalid; you may as well be calling yourself out.

> "Second, he is not Aaron Schwartz, who the community rallied around"

That's not how I remember it going down on HN. Not while he was still alive anyway.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5056279

I didn't specify the HN community, I meant the hacker community at large.

yeah, systemd and friends (biosdevname, etc) changed eth0 into ens1295683290163-082.

tcpdumps are so much more fun.

EFF lennart, he is a scourge and a scum!

Many people would find the argument against systemd and the like stronger if you did not include personal attacks on Poettering.

Postel said it best. http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1122

be liberal in what you accept, and generous in what you send.

Did you deliberately misquote Postel?

From your link: "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send".

"But the amount of flak he receives is unacceptable"

So, did he never question why is that? Other comments explain this better, but he's creating more problems than solving them.

" If you have a technical reason to disagree"

Not all reasons are technical, but a lot of it has to do with shortsightedness. People don't care how PulseAudio does things, but they care that it works (at least as good and reliably as ALSA), and is it here that it's failed.

Same thing for systemd, based on average reliability of what LP writes we're going to have uptimes of days...

Several other projects took flak (KDE 4.0 comes to mind) but they addressed the criticism

Unix always ruled because it sucked simply. Now with lennart crapperings rubbish, unix can now suck the same way big fat stupid commercial bloated OSen suck.

Simple elegance vs bloat and complexity. Welcome to Lennarts world.

Do you even know who Pottering is? He deserves all this hate.

But the amount of flak he receives is unacceptable. The tone which people talk about him and even to him is despicable.

Sorry, but have you by any chance seen how he treats people? Respect is a two way street.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com