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Comment by Shish2k | Hacker News Reader

I'm starting to wonder if this is a problem with modern culture in general -- all over the place I'm seeing less "let's try our different approaches and see who has the best end result" and more "I will rape you to death with a flaming donkey for not running your project my way". It's like nobody wants to do any work to demonstrate that their way is superior, they just want to sit back and bitch about how the other way is inferior, until the other team gives up and our overall result is nothing :-/

(See also: both sides on pretty much any political issue in the past few years)

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Both sides did lots of work to make their solution better and each side had a sizable list of legitimate advantages over the other. The ultimate decision came down to a subjective value judgement about which advantages were more important and inevitably wound up ignoring about half of those honestly held priorities (not to mention the work that went into Upstart). I don't see how it could have happened any other way.

It's sad that people resigned over it but the pain itself seems unavoidable from where I'm sitting.

> the pain itself seems unavoidable from where I'm sitting.

If there's enough time and energy in the community to be throwing death threats around, surely there is enough energy to maintain debian/systemd and debian/upstart as separate distros, both of which live happily ever after, sharing the 99.999% of code and infrastructure that they have in common? Then if one side really IS technically superior, people will naturally end up moving to that one and the other will die a gentle natural death, no personal attacks and resignations needed.

(For example, see what happened when Canonical wanted Debian to be more apple-like -- they didn't send death threats to Debian developers, they just did the work that they wanted to see done, and now both projects are a great success)

That was the Linux community of old. These days it seems it is the old hats that is required to fork if they want to maintain their tried and true ways rather than risk their systems to a massive switchover.

A better political analogy would be comparing the talking heads on propaganda TV channels vs the lobbyists and corporate donors who actually run the .gov.

There's some strife at both levels, the level of discourse is quite a bit different as is the level of publicity, and the level of actual impact.

You could be correct about modern culture and public non participant trolling culture. But there are more groups involved than just that (loud) group.

It all comes down to the fact that talk is cheap while concrete action is expensive.

"rape you to death with a flaming donkey"

Dude ...

Downvote all you want, but this expression needed a reaction !

Of course English being not my mother tongue I didn't have enough vocabulary to express my distress at the mental picture that exploded in my brain when I read those words.

I thought "dude" conveyed best my disgust, puzzlement and amazement :-)

I don't hate you though.

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