Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

https://www.change.org/petitions/lennart-poettering-stop-writing-useless-programs-systemd-journal

by mariuz • 15 years ago

55 71 15 years ago

Maxious• 15 years ago

"You seem to know a lot of stuff about me. I am not particular fond of people who turn their dislike of software I wrote into personal accusations and judging in a public forum." - Lennart Poettering Sep 21, 2008 http://lwn.net/Articles/299615/

For what it's worth, 4 years on I still struggle daily with audio and only audio on Linux. I'm not in a position to tell if it's ALSA or PulseAudio that makes nothing come out unless I plug/unplug, mute/unmute in the correct order everytime I come back from suspend/open a different app/want to use headphones. But I didn't have these problems before Fedora 8 when I was using ESD ;)

And just recently I've resorted to manually starting couchdb in a console instead of using the init scripts on fedora because after upgrading to 15 they do some bad things to file permissions. Is it the distributors fault or is it systemd? Correlation does not imply causation?

Tichy• 15 years ago

Why does nobody else create a better sound system?

toyg6• 15 years ago

Oh they do, all the time. OSS, ALSA, PulseAudio... http://xkcd.com/927/

EdiX3• 15 years ago

ALSA already is the better sound system as long as you don't need all your applications to have one extra redundant volume control or playing audio on a remote computer over the internet. However de-pulsifying a linux install correctly isn't easy.

grifaton• 15 years ago

What's the back story here?

darklajid2• 15 years ago

Stupidity, in a word (attacking a single person in this way).

If you ask for possible reasons to attack Lennart in the first place: He was the main force behind Pulseaudio (which, for various technical and political reasons was reviled for a long time) and now systemd (a C replacement for the sys-v scripts, think smf/launchd).

stephen_g• 15 years ago

The only reason people hated PulseAudio was because Ubuntu shipped it as their default sound system a year or two before it was ready. Now it's a pretty mature sound system that works well (at least with all the Linux hardware I have)...

Despite• 15 years ago

Lennart is a Fedora dev known for writing replacements for linux subsystems. For example, he started PulseAudio and systemd, a replacement for init. Recently, he's suggested a replacement for syslog where the logs aren't written as plain text.

I would guess the last one was the impetus for this petition.

sjs2• 15 years ago

I don't understand what the big deal is. If his systems aren't useful distros won't adopt them and no harm is done. If they are useful and distros adopt them then he has advanced the state of the entire Linux community.

This petition seems childish.

RexRollman2• 15 years ago

A non-plain text syslog? That sounds stupid to me. Plain text is one of the reasons I love Unix in the first place.

microtonal3• 15 years ago

Blaming Lennart (not Leonard!) is a bit counterproductive. There's a general tendency in the desktop Linux community to rewrite components every few years, rather than improving what exists.

I guess this is mainly caused by the failure of Linux as a commercial desktop. Except for heroic efforts by Red Hat, SUSE, and previously Sun, it's mostly a hobbyist affair. As a hobby, people prefer to do the fun work, not the tedious and boring maintenance, bugfixing, and polishing.

The quality of Linux as a desktop operating system is in stark contrast with Linux as a server operating system. Thanks to the enormous amount of money invested in server-related components, Linux as a server is generally very polished and reliable.

On a personal note, the effort required to maintain a stable Linux desktop made me switch to OS X in 2007, after using Linux for 13 years.

rwmj3• 15 years ago

The "Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenagers" model ... http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

hasmoo3• 15 years ago

> Except for heroic efforts by Red Hat, SUSE, and previously Sun, it's mostly a hobbyist affair.

Lennart Poettering is a Red Hat employee.

adestefan2• 15 years ago

And some argue that this is the only reason why these things actually make it into the Linux desktop ecosystem. If he wasn't a Red Hat employee would they ever make it into a distribution?

rbanffy2• 15 years ago

> the effort required to maintain a stable Linux desktop made me switch to OS X in 2007

I remember it was complicated in 2002. In 2007 it was already at the "mostly works" stage.

roel_v• 15 years ago

"Mostly" is not enough when it's not a hobby. It needs to "just work". Of course other OS'es aren't at 100% in that regard either, but at least they don't break stuff that used to work so often. I've used Linux since late 1990's into 2005-2007 or so, after that only revisiting it every now and then to see if things have improved. They have, but not enough. And the curve is only getting flatter, especially with much/most of the crowd that used Linux because it wasn't Microsoft moving to Macs over the last 5 years.

microtonal3• 15 years ago

It was even more complicated in 1994. But, throughout high school and university I had plenty of time, and fixing things was an interesting challenge.

Then real-life started (internships, thesis writing, a day job), and the few hours per day that are left, you'd rather spend with loved ones, sports, and interesting projects. And then you suddenly realize that you'd rather have "works" than "mostly works".

YMMV

silon3• 15 years ago

> On a personal note, the effort required to maintain a stable Linux desktop made me switch to OS X in 2007, after using Linux for 13 years.

To each his own. For me it's much better than Windows and GNOME attempting to copy OSX features has made it much worse. I'm not certainly not switching to OSX ever.

Angostura• 15 years ago

I think"attempting to copy" is the operative phrase there.

toyg6• 15 years ago

The failure of Linux as a commercial desktop is also (not entirely, of course) his responsibility, considering the crap he pulled with all the desktop components he messed with (PulseAudio, HAL, DBUS etc etc), so clearly it's not a causal factor for his behaviour.

microtonal3• 15 years ago

I think the 'failure' of the commercial Linux desktop can mostly be attributed to economics. Most importantly, consumers do not want to pay for a desktop operating system (even if it were proprietary). Microsoft effectively shut down the alternative market by making Windows-hardware coupling mandatory for large hardware vendors. This gives the perception (through scale and coupling) that Windows is nearly free. So, why would one spend money on an alternative operating system?

Then, there are social factors. A vocal minority of the Linux community is outright hostile towards proprietary software or even towards any form of capitalism. It is not a very attractive market to operate in - one misstep, and elaborate PR campaigns are set up.

ColdAsIce5• 15 years ago

Linux user since 1999, redhat 6.2 days I think, kernel 2.2. Messed with getting audio to work on an old ISA card, setting some ports in some config files, recompiling the kernel. I got it working, no big deal, even from several sources at the same time, with no artsD or esd, but I did try those to just for fun.

Invested same amount of time and effort, still have only horrible memories of pulseaudio. I shiver anytime I see puslea. Argh.arhgh.why,.asdhj as.

zokier2• 15 years ago

He is responsible for distributions choosing to use his software?

glaurent• 15 years ago

> On a personal note, the effort required to maintain a stable Linux desktop made me switch to OS X in 2007, after using Linux for 13 years.

I did the exact same thing (except in early 2008 - been using Linux since 1995), for the exact same reasons. A Kubuntu upgrade breaking my mouse config was the last straw.

hasmoo3• 15 years ago

Haha, "Wolfgang Draxinger" signed 28 days ago. Check out this epic battle between Draxinger and Poettering: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0

darklajid2• 15 years ago

I've to admit that the presentation as an 'epic battle' made me dismiss this at first.

But thanks a lot for that link. It was amusing _and_ interesting.

albertzeyer• 15 years ago

When I read the headline of the article, I had to think exactly about this video. :)

There were indeed good reasons for writing things like DBus, systemd, PulseAudio and others.

toyg6• 15 years ago

The way Poettering dismisses the "1970s unix mindset" is really sad. Here we have a big Linux contributor who apparently doesn't appreciate his heritage, which explains why he's constantly trying to reinvent it... and poorly, as the saying goes. I'm one of those who really didn't see the need for PulseAudio or any of the *Kit stuff, and even HAL was kind of a train wreck (all those years to make it stable and supported by desktop managers, to then throw it all away).

I'm sure he's just the most visible advocate of this approach, not the only one, but he's certainly responsible for a lot of the misery Linux desktop users like me were and are subjected to. After a decade of Linux on my desktop, I've switched back to Windows 7 in early 2011 and, to be honest, I'm quite happy I did.

hasmoo3• 15 years ago

> I've switched back to Windows 7 in early 2011 and, to be honest, I'm quite happy I did.

Yes, because Windows 7 and OS X already have all this modern non-70s-stuff that Lennart is trying to bring to Linux.

LeonidasXIV7• 15 years ago

And I am tired of the 1970 Unix mindset, don't fix what is not broken. Can we please have filesystems with a consistent encoding, like in Plan 9 or, woohoo, Windows? Or do we really need to support a mixture of Shift-JIS, EUC-JP, CP-850 or whatever else an application chooses to use?

4ad• 15 years ago

Thank you for the youtube link. Great talk.

lucian1900• 15 years ago

I think blaming someone for innovating is possibly the stupidest thing one could do.

dbus is awesome. Best bus we have.

systemd is really nice and useful, overall a better upstart. The reason it's not a patch for upstart or sysinit is that their designs preclude certain features that systemd provides.

I don't know about pulseaudio, and I'm not sold on Journal.

count2• 15 years ago

systemd doesn't appear to solve a problem, it seems to just add a layer of indirection and complication, as well as a single point of failure for ALL system startup services, rather than letting each service just handle it's own deal.

`init` already exists to kick things off properly - now init just runs systemd which then kicks things off, for no appreciable gain.

LeonidasXIV7• 15 years ago

Seriously, do you even know what you're talking about? init does not start systemd at all. systemd replaces init, in a way that I can even select whether I want to use the traditional init or systemd, on boot time, with a kernel option.

And have you seen proper systemd integration? I installed Fedora lately, and man, that boots fast. Fedora solves so many things in a sane way that Ubuntu has been struggling since years. usplash, xsplash, splashy? Fedora has FDO's plymouth. Guess what, it works. SYS V init, the stupid Arch init, ubuntus upstart? Fedora has FDO's systemd, and it's faster than any of those.

ominous_prime2• 15 years ago

> `init` already exists to kick things off properly - now init just runs systemd which then kicks things off, for no appreciable gain.

NO, systemd in an init replacement. Yes, init may get the job done, but it can be done so much better. Solaris dropped init years ago, but unfortunately licencing prevented their implementation from being ported to Linux distributions.

Upstart (by Canonical/Ubuntu) was the first major attempt in Linux, and has been running services in Ubuntu and Fedora for a few releases now. Lennart saw that upstart may not have gone far enough, and started his own implementation. Systemd may not be the panacea we want, but the it is on the right track for innovation, which we need.

lvillani2• 15 years ago

Honestly, I don't understand why move this personal attack against Lennart. From my point of view he just wrote pieces of software he deemed necessary. I would rather put the blame on distributions other than Fedora¹ for trying to integrate his stuff early and poorly (thus starting a chain-reaction which caused even more distributions to rush with integration attempts). I think he's getting a lot of flak for choices made by others.

_________

1: Fedora is known to ship with lots of experimental software/wide-scale changes. Its users expect breakage/major innovations from time to time.

ColdAsIce5• 15 years ago

He could have improved esd or jack. But no.

fmoralesc• 15 years ago

jack? That's a completely different user-case.

lvillani2• 15 years ago

Sure he could, but things like that happen all the time. Countless people start forks and new projects every day, while they could improve the existing ones (the world is full of examples).

I have this darwinian vision of the software world where it's extremely positive to experiment with new stuff. Only time will tell which things surpass the test of time.

Attacking someone publicly this way just because he doesn't contribute to your¹ favorite project is, in my opinion, a sick thing to do.

______

1: Not addressing you in particular.

zokier2• 15 years ago

Why shouldn't Poettering be allowed to write whatever programs he wishes, useless or not? I think distributions are responsible for choosing the best selection of software, and nobody should be blamed for providing new alternatives to the table.

rmc• 15 years ago

I hear a lot of people complaining about these new programmes, like PulseAudio, but as far as I'm concerend, with PulseAudio I can now have proper working sound. No more of this "Oh I have pidgin open, which wants to do sound, so Firefox with flash can't watch youtube" problems that used to happen.

zecg• 15 years ago

Quoth Dziuba: "A long time ago, the original neckbeards decided that it was a good idea to chain together small programs that each performed a specific task, and that the universal interface between them should be text. If you develop on a Unix platform and you abide by this principle, the operating system will reward you with simplicity and prosperity."

Anti Leonard Poettering petition: Stop writing useless linux programs.

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