I have been trying my best not to comment on systemd one way or another for a while. For the most part because I don’t want to have a trollfest on my blog, because moderating it is something I hate and I’m sure would be needed. On the other hand it seems like people start to bring me in the conversation now from time to time.

What I would like to point out at this point is that both extreme sides of the vision are, in my opinion, behaving childishly and being totally unprofessional. Whether it is name-calling of the people or the software, death threats, insults, satirical websites, labelling of 300 people for a handful of them, etc.

I don’t think I have been as happy to have a job that allows me not to care about open source as much as I did before as in the past few weeks as things keep escalating and escalating. You guys are the worst. And again I refer to both supporters and detractors, devs of systemd, devs of eudev, Debian devs and Gentoo devs, and so on so forth.

And the reason why I say this is because you both want to bring this to extremes that I think are totally uncalled for. I don’t see the world in black and white and I think I said that before. Gray is nuanced and interesting, and needs skills to navigate, so I understand it’s easier to just take a stand and never revise your opinion, but the easy way is not what I care about.

Myself, I decided to migrate my non-server systems to systemd a few months ago. It works fine. I’ve considered migrating my servers, and I decided for the moment to wait. The reason is technical for the most part: I don’t think I trust the stability promises for the moment and I don’t reboot servers that often anyway.

There are good things to the systemd design. And I’m sure that very few people will really miss sysvinit as is. Most people, especially in Gentoo, have not been using sysvinit properly, but rather through OpenRC, which shares more spirit with systemd than sysv, either by coincidence or because they are just the right approach to things (declarativeness to begin with).

At the same time, I don’t like Lennart’s approach on this to begin with, and I don’t think it’s uncalled for to criticize the product based on the person in this case, as the two are tightly coupled. I don’t like moderating people away from a discussion, because it just ends up making the discussion even more confrontational on the next forum you stumble across them — this is why I never blacklisted Ciaran and friends from my blog even after a group of them started pasting my face on pictures of nazi soldiers from WW2. Yes I agree that Gentoo has a good chunk of toxic supporters, I wish we got rid of them a long while ago.

At the same time, if somebody were to try to categorize me the same way as the people who decided to fork udev without even thinking of what they were doing, I would want to point out that I was reproaching them from day one for their absolutely insane (and inane) starting announcement and first few commits. And I have not been using it ever, since for the moment they seem to have made good on the promise of not making it impossible to run udev without systemd.

I don’t agree with the complete direction right now, and especially with the one-size-fit-all approach (on either side!) that tries to reduce the “software biodiversity”. At the same time there are a few designs that would be difficult for me to attack given that they were ideas of mine as well, at some point. Such as the runtime binary approach to hardware IDs (that Greg disagreed with at the time and then was implemented by systemd/udev), or the usage of tmpfs ACLs to allow users at the console to access devices — which was essentially my original proposal to get rid of pam_console (that played with owners instead, making it messy when having more than one user at console), when consolekit and its groups-fiddling was introduced (groups can be used for setgid, not a good idea).

So why am I posting this? Mostly to tell everybody out there that if you plan on using me for either side point to be brought home, you can forget about it. I’ll probably get pissed off enough to try to prove the exact opposite, and then back again.

Neither of you is perfectly right. You both make mistake. And you both are unprofessional. Try to grow up.

Edit: I mistyped eudev in the original article and it read euscan. Sorry Corentin, was thinking one thing and typing another.